Another Awesome Excel Question

I'm making a budget sheet. I need to get the number in the cell of column G but only if Column B in the same row has the word INCOME.
Any ideas how to do this?
I'm looking to grab the sum of all these cells.

There are complicated ways to do it without using an intermediate "scratch" column, but the easiest way would be to do something like:
=IF(B2="INCOME",G2,0)
put that in H2(or wherever), drag down for all rows, I would then hide the H column since you don't really need to see it, and then do something like SUM(H:H) wherever you would like to see the total.

Dude, you rock. Your title should be Excel Guru.
Do you pick up chicks with your crazy Excel skills?

Twigglish said:

Dude, you rock. Your title should be Excel Guru.
Do you pick up chicks with your crazy Excel skills?

Click to expand...

Only the admin type I would imagine...

Twigglish said:

Dude, you rock. Your title should be Excel Guru.
Do you pick up chicks with your crazy Excel skills?

Click to expand...

Haha. My wife claims I suck all the fun out of life when I use pretty graphics in excel to demonstrate why we can't actually afford to buy the crazy things she wants despite credit card companies giving us plenty of means to do it.

DaveHCYJ said:

Haha. My wife claims I suck all the fun out of life when I use pretty graphics in excel to demonstrate why we can't actually afford to buy the crazy things she wants despite credit card companies giving us plenty of means to do it.

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LOL. That sounds the opposite in my marriage. She's always telling me why I can't buy a new this or that.

I'm also trying to count the number of unique items in a column.
I'm doing this by using Advanced Filtering. Copying(unique only) the column to another column, then having a cell COUNTA the filtered list, returning the number of unique items in the original column. Problem is, this doesn't update by itself.

I think I can do this another way.
Say B is the list of items, if I use column C with code: =IF(B1=B2,1,0) and drag it downwards; then use another cell to sum column C. Then another cell to take total of col B minus col C, that will give me the unique number.
Question is, can I use something like =IF(B1=B2 OR "",1,0) to say that if it is equal OR blank?

Nevermind, solved it
I skipped the whole figuring out if the cell is blank by just subtracting one after sum of C. I'll always have a blank cell in B so it's all good.

Twigglish said:

LOL. That sounds the opposite in my marriage. She's always telling me why I can't buy a new this or that.

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Oh yeah I get plenty of that too, the difference being my justifications are usually financial while hers are along the lines of "that is too big and dumb looking".

As for finding/counting Unique values and more of just a general tip, you should check out Help. This isn't a "hey you should have searched first" criticism; I use Help in excel all the time, sometimes its crap, but alot of times you can find functions to do exactly what you're looking for without having to think.

Searching help for "unique" gives a few examples that are probably more robust than what you came up with. It looks like you're formula is only going to make sure adjacent values are unique, not All values.

I just made it a lot easier on myself. I made a small column called ITEM NO, and then I enter in a number for each unique item. Where I need the count of the items, I just COUNTA the ITEM NO column. It requires some manual work by making me type in the number, but it's simple.

This budget log is coming along nicely. Thanks for all your help Dave.