Counting

[jhopkins]

I have a list of birds entered on an Excel spreadsheet. As I see each one, I want to 'tick' it ( enter a number 1 or whatever) and have a running total. All the people I have asked or Help pages I have looked at talk about the 'formula palette' and 'arguments' , 'value 1' and ' circular formulae' , none of which mean anything to me. Am I asking something that is beyond Excel or is there a comprehensible list of instructions somewhere for using the spreadsheet? Or maybe someone here can explain. Thank you.
John Hopkins

[NBVC]

If you put a 1 beside each bird in the adjacent cell, then you can just sum those cells.

So if A1:A100 contain the bird names and B1:B100 contain the 1's when bird is seen...

then in B101 or anywhere else enter formula =Sum(B1:B100)

[VBA Noob]

Take a look at countif

http://www.j-walk.com/ss/excel/tips/tip52.htm

http://www.contextures.com/xlFunctions04.html

VBA Noob

[jhopkins]

Thanks NBVC,

I tried what you said, but as soon as I highlighted a cell to enter a '1' , the =SUMB1-B10002 ( there are over 10000 birds in the list ) changed to #NAME? . What did I do wrong?

[NBVC]

the range should be enclosed in parantheses and separated with a colon

e.g. =SUM(B1:B10002)

[jhopkins]

Sorry, yes, not paying attention. I entered =SUM(B8:B10002) but when I clicked 'enter' it turned into a zero....and adding a '1' to the cells above didn't alter that total. This isn't easy , is it !!

[NBVC]

Perhaps your column B is somehow preformatted as text?

I hope you are entering just a number 1 with no apostrophes and/or quotes?

If yes, select column B and go to Data|Text to Columns and just click Finish....

does that fix it?

[jhopkins]

That doesn't help.....if I have enetered anything at all in column B, then when I go to Data, the 'text to columns' line isn't highlighted so I can't click on it. If I click 'data' then 'text to columns' when there is nothing entered in column B , I get a box with 'no data was selected to parse'.

[jhopkins]

Maybe we should start from scratch. I have a list of bird names, with no check marks ( 1's or anything else ) entered in column B. What should I do ?

[NBVC]

That doesn't help.....if I have enetered anything at all in column B, then when I go to Data, the 'text to columns' line isn't highlighted so I can't click on it. If I click 'data' then 'text to columns' when there is nothing entered in column B , I get a box with 'no data was selected to parse'.

Just enter a 1 anywhere in column B and then select the entire column by clicking on the column header (B)....then do the text-to-columns thing.

[jhopkins]

OK..progress....."text to columns "is now highlighted , so I can click on it....but when I do, I'm asked if my data is delimited or fixed width.....I don't understand what either of those mean.

[jhopkins]

Success !!! I used the COUNTIF method as suggested by VBA Noob with a "1" as the criterion and that worked fine. It would be nice if I could do it with any number or letter counting as one 'tick' to be added...but think I'll quit while I'm ahead. Thanks a lot guys.
John.