Help With Excel Formula

Greetings,

This is my first try at asking for help on the net. I hope I do it correctly.

I have an Excel spreadsheet that has three columns. One column has numbers and two have text. I have about 15,000 entries (records).
The number column is the week of the year. It contains the WEEKNUM formula Sun-Sat (1 through 52 based on the date)
One text column contains event descriptions. One text column contains names.

What I want is a count of each description for each of the 52 weeks. (i.e. week 36 there were 120 "traffic accidents", 300 "traffic citations", 13 "assaults", 1 "armed "robbery", etc. etc.. I have been surfing and tried every formula that seems to say it will do this but nothing works.

I designed a special spreadsheet that looks at the "master" spreadsheet for the data and I had hoped would keep a running total on all descriptions for each week. I am self taught in Excel and need a no brainer. And yes, I now know excel is not a data base program.

Jim the data guy

You really should move this request into Access, it will be really easy to do at that point

S-

Jimthedataguy,

Whilst Access could easily do this there is no need to move the data to access unless you intend to start doing lots of queries or reporting on the data in another way.

A Pivot Table will do what you want- and more.

1. If you columns do not already have headers then put them in.
2. Select the entire data area (Click in the top left cell, press cntrl+shift+down arrow, keep shift pressed and right arrow
3. From the Data Menu select Pivot Tables and follow the instructions. When you are presented with the layout button click that and drag and drop your fields. Have a play with a small dataset first.

HTH,

Alan.