Need to sum cells that meet specific criteria. please help.

Hi
I am building a very large and complicated database with many different tabs and forumlas.

In one tab I have several different columns but to simplify I can say I have the following:
Column A1-A1000 - a long lits of dates (the same day appears many different times)
Column B1-B1000 - A long list of categories that include many different words (they overlap: so in one cell it might have "Car Wash" and in another it has "Car Wash/Soap/Cleaning Product").
Column C1-C1000 - A long list of numbers (number of sold items on the day)

In another tab I want to run a formula in a cell that does the following:
Column A1-A1000 - scan through column A and find a specific date (i.e. all instances of 1/1/2013)
Column B1-B1000 - scan through all of the Column A returns for a specific date (1/1/13) and then find any mention of a product (i.e. just "Car Wash" which would result in a positive return for both "Car Wash" and "Car Wash/Soap/Cleaning Product").
Column C1-C1000 - then add all of the numbers in Column C which adhere to the above two crieria only.

This should give me the total number of items sold on a specific day and related to the category "Car"

Your help and advice would be greatly appreciated. This one has really got my stressed!

ben

OMG Thank you so much. That worked perfectly! I just wish I had asked sooner...

This has been great help.
But now I am trying to do the same thing but for a date range (ie. 1/1/2006-31/1/2006). How would I add a date range to the formula?