How many tags are we looking at? If its just a few then I would indeed use Excel formulas and make something very simple, its not elegant but you should be able to get it going in about 5 minutes.

Create a sheet like the below.....

Create another sheet like the below.....

Use compressed data function in datalink and reference the cells in sheet1 for start date end date tag name, keep a free column between each tag...in the free column we want a formula that compares the current value with the previous value and determines whether its a state change.


=IF(AND(B4="Closed",B3="Open"),"Closed",IF(AND(B4="Open",B3="Closed"),"Open",""))

Copy that all the way down and repeat it for all the other tags in the relevant columns (F, I, L etc)

Now on the sheet 1 in the Times opened and Times close cells use a count formula

Times opened: =COUNTIF(Sheet2!C3:C31,"Open")

Times closed: =COUNTIF(Sheet2!C3:C31,"Closed")

Each time you update the start and end date the datalink functions should update, in turn updating the formulas and the main page. Simples.

Of course this isn't very scalable, and if you want to do this for 1000s of tags you should probably look to write something in SDK that effectively does the above but in an array and outputs the results. This is how I would (and have) done it, but theres probably better ways...