Anyone here good at excel?

[<G>]

I have an excel sheet that i need to organize a bit better. I have never been good at excel mainly because i hated math so damn much.

Baiscally one column has the description of what was bought and the second column next to it has the quantity ordered. What i need is all of the duplicate descriptions summed together.

For example lets say i went and bought three packs of ham. I bought two packages at once and then the third package on another date. The two instances of ham that i purchased are in seperate rows. for example

description    qty
ham             2
peas            4
carrots         1
ham             1

I need excel to merge the descriptions and qty's into one row. Does anyone know how to do this?

i need this

description    qty
ham             3
peas            4
carrots         1

[timberlandman]

I work at a community college and deal with excel all of the friggin time. I could probably figure out for you. Only problem is i won't have internet access until Tuesday being home or at work. But let me know if you still need some help by then.
If need be email me at semanc "at" macomb "dot" edu

[jon_jon]

I don't know if this would be helpful, but if you use the sort command and ask to sort the first column alphabetically, then at least you will see all the duplicates bunched together.

It would show something like

description qty
carrots 1
ham 1
ham 2
peas 4

[Lumpkin666]

Probably woulda been better to set the spreadsheet up as a pivot table first ... it's not gonna be very easy unless you can format a summary statement for each descriptor (which may be hard if there are infinite number of descriptors). Otherwise something written in VBA, or using a plugin (which there are a couple - both that I know of are not free) that deals with this sort of requirement.

Unfortunately, off hand, I don't recall any function that can do this (unless you want something along the lines of "Sum for [descriptor column] = 'ham'" and "Sum for [descriptor column] = 'peas'" .. not that I'm an excel wizard anyhow, so maybe someone who's stuck with dealing in excel will be more knowledgable on how to get around in it (first thing I'd personally do if it was my problem is connect to it with odbc and use a "real" programming language to manipulate the data and get me the results)

[gravelhead44]

G, if you highlight all data, you can use the Sort funtion in the Data menu to group all items together(select to sort by the Description field in this case). Then while you still have things highlighted use the Subtotal function in the Data menu to add subtotals to all your items(do a subtotal by the Description field). A bar will appear in the left hand side of the sheet that will let you toggle what items are displayed. That should be a lot easier than pivot tables which are a pain to deal with for simple data sorting. The Sort and Subtotal dialogs should make it pretty self explanatory.

Hope this helps,
Gravelhead44

[HypERSoniC]

sounds like a job for a vba macro

you will need to sort the entries alphabetically according to the label column (peas/cararots/etc) since im using a linear search

you will need to tweak this program, as i havnt tested it.

you will have to reaplce the A() and B() arrays with the references to the exel cells. i dont know how to do this, but it should be easy to figure out.

assuming
a is the peas/carrots/etc column, and b is the frequency column,

Option Explicit

Private Sub GuichiSort()
	'On Error Goto errHandler
	Private const MAX_ENTRIES = 6
	Dim i, j,numEntries as Integer
	numEntries = MAX_ENTRIES

	FOR i =1 TO (MAX_ENTRIES - 1)  
		IF A(i) = A(i+1)
			'shuffle the duplicate entry upwards
			B(i) = (B(i) + B(i+1)

			'clear the entry below it
			A(i+1) = vbNullString
			B(i + 1) = 0

			'shuffle the other entries upwards
			FOR j = (i + 1) TO (MAX_ENTRIES - 1)
				A(j) = A(j+1)
				B(j) = B(j+1)
			Next j
		End If
	Next i
	Exit Sub
'errHandler:
'Beep
'Resume Next
End Sub

desk checking

Input - 
(a)		(b)
"carrots"	1
"ham"		2
"ham"		1
"peas"		4
"turkey"	1
"turkey"	1
"water"		2

i = 1
i = 2			j = (2 + 1) = 3
"carrots"	1	"carrots"	1
"ham"		3	"ham"		3
""		0	"peas"		4
"peas"		4	"turkey"	1
"turkey"	1	"turkey"	1
"turkey"	1	"water"		2
"water"		2


i = 3
i = 4			j = (4 + 1) = 5
"carrots"	1	"carrots"	1
"ham"		3	"ham"		3
"peas"		4	"peas"		4
"turkey"	2	"turkey"	2
"turkey"	1	"water"		1
"water"		1	""		1


i = 5
[program terminates]

ActiveSheet.Range.Cells(x,x)

[<G>]

sorry guys, i should have mentioned this sooner. I sorted it all out now, thanks