Option/Radio button help needed

[rhosch]

I'm definitely not a wiz - need some advice here.

I'm trying to create a finance tracking spreadsheet that is simple enough for my wife to use. I have all the pieces in place, such that all she needs to do is enter the date of a transaction, the amount, and click an option/radio button for the expense category. The sheet tracks each category by the date she entered, and creates a report that compares monthly expenses in each category to our projected monthly budget for that category.

See attached picture to see a partial view of what the data entering sheet looks like.

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Works pretty nicely... for one transaction.

Seems like radio buttons all like to be in the same group if they are on the same worksheet. I want each row to act independently. The only way I've found around this so far is to draw a form box around each added group (such as the second row in the pic), but that is really cumbersome and ugly as sin, since I can't figure out how to make the box transparent. Don't ask me how the first row has a transparent box... the two rows even seem to have slightly different format/properties options. To be honest, I still haven't figured out what the differences are between a radio button from the forms toolbox and one from the controls toolbox.

Argh.

Simply put, I need to copy what is happening on the first row (a group of radio buttons, linked to a cell on another worksheet, along with the cells for date and amount entry) to a heck of a lot of rows below it. All doing the same thing, but each row independent of the others.

Any suggestions on how to do this in a non-kludged way?

[rhosch]

humble bump...


I've googled and read everything I could about radio buttons... couldn't find a solution. The MS excel help doesn't turn up anything useful - I've tried every key word I could think of. I've searched through a few Excel help forums and newsgroups and didn't find anything really relevant.

Anyone have any suggestions? I know this shouldn't be that tough to do, but I can't quite figure it out.

[cvolkert]

This is coming from a slightly different angle, but has worked well for me in the past. Instead of using radio buttons, could you use a drop down list with the expense options in the list? If so, I would recommend using the Data / Validation command - select List from the 'Allow' box and then reference a range that includes all of the possible options. Once complete, a drop down will display when you click into the cell. This cell can then be copied down as many times as you need.

Hope this alternative works - Chad