Help analyzing sales data

[kapricious]

As a medical equipment company, we generate sales reports based on an individual-entry-basis as orders are completed. I have monthly spreadsheets with thousands of combined entries all in the same following format below. I have tried combining them into one gigantic spreadsheet (although really think having each month in its own Book is probably key?)

Patient Name	Equipment	Prescribing Physician	Setup Date	Sales Rep
Patient One	Oxygen	Dr. Some One	12/02/16	Tom
Patient Two	Nebulizer	Dr. These Two	12/03/16	Richard
Patient Three	Ventilator	Dr. Those Three	12/04/16	Harry

What I am hoping to do is to analyze this data in some meaningful way. More specifically, I hope to examine historical trends in regards to which physicians are utilizing our company regularly, and spot those who suddenly stopped using us, etc. I have spent countless hours trying to manipulate the entries in ways that would help produce meaningful charts, but have really begun to fear that our overall formatting is prohibiting this. Even scarier is the thought of having to manually adjust each and every entry in some way to accomplish this. I have worked with Excel for years and am fairly confident with it, but would still consider myself a total novice. I understand functions conceptually although lack guidance in understanding what my entries' end results should look like in order to accomplish my goals.

Can anyone please suggest some methods to mass-manipulate my data in order to obtain meaningful, historically-based charts??? I've googled endlessly and really have not been able to find anything that applies to what I am trying to do. It seems most sales reports are generally aimed at examining how many sales you made this month, etc. I really hope to target each individual physician (and later, each geographical area - which I understand will be another animal altogether).

Lastly, I am attempting to do this at home and only have an old version of Excel 2003, although it still seems to have all of the same primary functions of the newest version... I think

I have tried to be as thorough as possible while still keeping it pithy, so if I have left out any key information, please let me know. I thank you kindly in advance for any assistance!

[Pete_UK]

It's not very clear what you are trying to achieve. You could have a summary table in another sheet which has a list of Physicians in column A, and then have month/year going across with a count of the number of items prescribed by each physician each month - is that the kind of thing you are after?

It would help if you attached a sample Excel workbook, which shows the basic layout of your data and which is anonymised so that it doesn't contain any confidential data. A sample only needs to contain a few records (no more than 100), which should show the variety of items you are likely to encounter.

To attach a workbook, click on Go Advanced (below the Edit Window) while you are composing a reply, then scroll down to and click on Manage Attachments and the Upload window will open. Click on Browse and navigate to (and double-click) the file icon that you want to attach, then click on Upload and then on Close this Window to return to the Edit window. When you have finished composing your post, click on Submit Post.

Hope this helps.

Pete