Can I give text a numerical value?

I am making a scheduling spreadsheet and I would like to assign a shift that I put in (for example, "11:00 volume") a numerical value representing the amount of hours that specific shift is (ex. 8 hours) so I can have a total for the amount of hours that employee is working that week. Hopefully this makes sense. I have about 15 different shifts and all are from 2 hours to 12 hours but all have to be written on the spreadsheet with text to distinguish from eachother. Can you help?

I think what you might be looking for is a lookup table.

If somewhere else on your sheet you list all the possible text entries and then in the next column you list the hours (say this is in area Y1:z15) you could then use the following formula to assign the value. You might end up adding together several lookups.

=Vlookup(a1,y1:z15,2,0)

with a1 representing the cell where text has been input.
forumla says look up the value in cell a1, find it in range y1:z15, then look in 2nd col, and the 0 says makesure its an exact match)

Further you might use data validation to limit the text entry to those available in your list (on data menu)

R

R