Noob needs help with Excel Spreadsheet!

[Hybrid93Hatch]

I have a spreadsheet for my monthly bills. I am very new to Excel and Spreadsheets so I need some help.

Is there any way I can get the sum of all one month's bills to get a total (with the date being present in the cell)? I know it can be done with just the number in each cell, but I would like to keep the date there as well so I know when I made the payment. If I can not get the sum with the date present I guess I can remove the date. Need the formula either way, thanks!

Here is a picture of the spreadsheet:



If anyone has a nice template to work off of that you'd like to share, post it up.

Thanks for any help!!

[taejinah]

Apparently I'm Microsoft Excel Certified according to the class I just finished. Lol.

Anyway, which of those cells do you mean? I suppose it might be the =SUM() function?

[Hybrid93Hatch]

Originally Posted by hondadriver

You will probably need to do vba to do that....

If I were you, I would just make like January a merged cell, and don't merge the columns underneath so the date/payment are separate.

I don't know what a vba is.

Is there something I can "click on" to break the cell below each month into 2 cells? That would be perfect, just hope I don't have to manually resize the cells

Originally Posted by taejinah

Apparently I'm Microsoft Excel Certified according to the class I just finished. Lol.

Anyway, which of those cells do you mean? I suppose it might be the =SUM() function?

I'm just trying to add the colums so the figure automatically is placed in the purple column that says "Total" That's all for now, thanks!

[Elmacho]

To the left of the white line above the cells, there should be a button (fx) click on that, click on the sum text. A window will pop up. You can now click and drag on the spreadsheet, it looks like cells B2-B12. Once you have done that, hit OK and you should see the sum of the cells. However, it looks like your cells contain a mixture of numbers and text. I think you may have to have only numbers.

[taejinah]

I think you'll most likely have to break up the cells. Start a new sheet 1 column being dedicated to the dates and its corresponding column as the dollar amounts. Then use the =SUM() function and click and drag/highlight the column of amounts and that will give you a total.

[Janizary]

You cannot sum mixed text and numeric cells. If you are trying to sum on the cells that have the mixed date and currency, you have to first separate those into two cells. You can do this by inserting a column (and separating the data), or you can parse the cells with one of the 'functions' accessible under the 'fx' menu.

If you do not know excel, I would stick to creating new columns. If you wish to maintain the centering of each month, you can center the month heading across the two columns containing the date and currency cells. If you wished further separation a bit of boarder formatting will do the trick.

If, on the other hand, you are just trying to sum the misc. cells that have numbers in them, a simple "=A2+B3+C4" type formula will work. You can also sum on columns that contain both text and currency, excel will disregard the text cells and only sum the numerics (at least in the most recent version). Again, mixed cells, or numerics that are formatted as text will not sum.

[Hybrid93Hatch]

Thanks for all the help guys! This is way to confusion for me so I just copy / paste the table and now will use the table up top for the date and the 2nd table for the dollar amount paid. They both fit on the sheet with no problem.

At least I now know how to use the sum for the cells

[John2009]

The others made good suggetions. There's a ready made template on this site that looks like it will do what you want:

http://singleparents.about.com/od/bu...tspreadsht.htm

This is a link from About.com so it is probably safe from viruses.

Good Luck