Create a tally counter

**jnynewart** · 04-17-2012, 03:56 PM

Hello, my name is Johnny. I am trying to create a tally counter in Excel. For example, every time a male or a female walks into our clinic, I want to add 1 to my "male" or "female" column. I started just doing this, adding a 1 to the column and then having it sum at the bottom, but the sheet is starting to become very long and I have other much more complex sheets which is starting to get quite cumbersome. I would like to just tick or enter "1" in a cell and have it add to a total in another cell. This, however becomes a circular reference. I set iteration to "1" which will work for one cell but I have multiple cells on one sheet and it changes the values in all the cells. I have also figured out how to use a spin button but I don't want to have to go through my workbook and add spin buttons to every cell on every sheet that I have created in my workbook. Or is there an easier way to just create a tally counter? I hope this makes sense and I am asking for the right thing; I don't really know all of the terminology; I am new to this.

**Palmetto** · 04-17-2012, 08:49 PM

How many cells do you need to increment? If the goal to just maintain an incremental count (i.e. running total) of male and femal, why do you need more than two spin buttons?
Seems you could just use two buttons, one for each gender, and link each button to a cell, then reference the linked cells in your formula or use the linked cell as is as the counter total.

It will be best to upload a sample workbook (dummy data, exact structure) to help with the solution. Include a clear and concise explanation of your requirements and show examples of the desired results.

You could use VBA if the above is not feasible.

**Mallycat** · 04-18-2012, 02:41 AM

Depending on what you are trying to do, you should consider capturing a time stamp too. This will give you lots of options to analyse the data later. See the attached sample with a pivot table to analyse the data. You can select the date from the drop down, or analyse results over different days

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Edit: Note the table on sheet 1 needs at least 1 record in it for the macro to work. I would love someone to tell me how to avoid the error you get when there is nothing in the table :-)

**jnynewart** · 04-18-2012, 07:23 PM

Thank you for your responses. I am thinking that the spin button is going to be the way to go. I have attached (I hope) a sample sheet. The "1" is a just a tally. When people come into our office, we have them complete a demographic sheet and marketing survey. Then we enter the data into an Excel workbook. The workbook contains about 50 sheets with many data points within each sheet. The Gender and attached examples were just the tip of the iceberg (just simple examples of the amount of data that we are compiling). As the "1" tally marks increase through the rows, the sheet becomes longer and longer and starts to get rather cumbersome. For the ease of use for data entry people, I would like them to just be able to click somethig (for exapmle enter a "1" in cell A1 and have the total increase by one in cell A2) or enter a "1" in a cell and have the total increase by one in another cell. The problem is, I have pretty much completed creating these and it wasn't until now that I thought of just having a simple tally counter. Additionally, I have the totals going to othr sheets where graphs are created.

**Palmetto** · 04-20-2012, 09:22 PM

If you don't mind using worksheet events and specific cells to do this, then give this a try.

This code uses the double-click event to increment the totals cell.
Example: if the user double click on cell B2 (SPS, S1), then totals cell B12 is incremented by a value of one.

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This code uses the worksheet right-click event to decrease the total.

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You would need to place the code into each worksheet code module.
IS that workable for you?

**mleinweber** · 03-25-2016, 08:19 PM

I would like to know how to create a tally counter using excel. I found a thread where there is an actual excel spreadsheet, however, I can not download it. Can someone help me? thanks, Michael