I occasionally receive financial information about a company detailed by subsidiary, division or location. Frequently the format in which it is delivered displays the same date horizontally for each division, which means that you have multiple columns with the same date. I prefer to view the information rearranged so that each period only appears once.
This can be done easily be creating a lookup formula with the =INDEX() function that uses to variables to identify the relevant information. For an example please download the associated worksheet.