Open Office spreadsheet question (help with formulas)

Flat_Eric

Firstly, I hope this is the correct thread for this question.... (I apologise in advance if it is not)

I use Open Office and have created a spreadsheet to keep track of my income and expenditure.

I have tried to be clever and after a lot of tweaking have an Income sheet, an Expenditure sheet and (the subject of this posting) a sheet called Spending - June 2012. Lets call this Sheet B.

This is a sheet to record my day to day spends - anything from a bar of chocolate, to a birthday card/birthday gift/lunch at the pub etc. Basically miscellaneous spends that are not fixed and will vary on a month by month basis.
Each category has its own column meaning that I can easily identify/see a breakdown of exactly what money has been spent and where.

Its set up that so that it automatically adds up all spends for each category and displays the total amount (for each category individually) at the top of the page.

I have an adjacent sheet (lets call this Sheet A) which is a summary of all my misc spends (not just for June) but for the coming months. June is sorted - I have told Sheet A (summary sheet) to read the relevant box in Sheet B (June spends). This involved me telling (each) box what to do 33 times over. I don't really want to do this every month...

SO I can't make up my mind or work out how best to factor July and future months into the picture. Do I create a Sheet C for July (and is there an easy way to get Sheet A (summary spends) to read the relevant boxes for Sheet C (July spends) for the different categories (33 different ones at present) without (as I mention above) telling each box individually where it needs to look for the information.

Its also an option just to have the one sheet for all spends and just tell the sheet where to look for the info. (i.e. limit the sums to be added to certain boxes) But having faffed with this most of this afternoon, I'm not feeling the love for it anymore and think I need to sleep on it before I doctor it some more.

Any suggestions or *this is what I do* views very welcome. Thank you :beer:

happy-chappy_2

Hello

I think its to do with $ signs.

The dollar sign makes one part of the formula a constant, but allows the other part to change.

I'm sory I can be more specific, but I'm wondering if you could use this in some way so that you can just duplicate the formulas for June, using the $ but change the spreadsheet you are linking with to July?

I'm sorry thats probably in hindsight not very helpful at all!! I'll put more thought into this and get back to you.. but at least you might now be able to search around the $ sign!!

Hopefully someone who knows what they are talking about will be a long soon!!

Flat_Eric

happy-chappy wrote: »

Hello

I think its to do with $ signs.

The dollar sign makes one part of the formula a constant, but allows the other part to change.

I'm sory I can be more specific, but I'm wondering if you could use this in some way so that you can just duplicate the formulas for June, using the $ but change the spreadsheet you are linking with to July?

I'm sorry thats probably in hindsight not very helpful at all!! I'll put more thought into this and get back to you.. but at least you might now be able to search around the $ sign!!

Hopefully someone who knows what they are talking about will be a long soon!!

Thank you :T Yes I'm guessing its something to do with having the formula *just so* and although I don't know what this is at the moment, I am relishing the challenge of finding out and enjoying just faffing with it. For the moment, I'm having a look at rejigging it so its all included in one sheet and does all the sums for me. Keeping it simple for the minute but would be good to work out/understand the how to create formulas etc a bit better.