How do you add all the values within a 'category'?

Hi everyone,

I really need some help. I'm designing a worksheet that's going to get used daily by maybe a dozen people in the company, but I lack the skills to get Excel to do what I want. Here's want I want to do:

Column A contains categories (e.g. Expenses), column B contains names of items within categories (e.g. Taxes, Maintenance), and column C contains the prices of various items.

I want Excel to find and add together the costs of all items categorized as Expenses in cell D1. Ideally I want to be able to add new rows for Expenses and still have the sum of all Expenses be automatically updated in D1 without having to expand the search area.

How would you go about something like this?

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Originally Posted by darkyam

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Thanks, that worked! Though for some reason I had to change the colons into semicolons.

Certain versions of Excel use a semicolon separator and others use a comma. Don't ask me why. Gotta love Microsoft.

HI

I usually use the sumif formula. my solution would be like this:

=SUMIF(A:A,"Expenses",C:C)

Where the category is in A and the values in C.


I am new to excel as well, so i dint understand the complicated offset solution.
Is there something wrong that i am doing or both ways are possible.

regards,
Anand