Excel (or something else?) help please

elljay

Dear anyone who can help!

I have a table in Word that is now beginning to get out of control and difficult to find and sort things. I think really I need to do it in Excel but don't know how. It's basically a list of items received, I have columns such as country, name, date received, where filed, and contact details for the originating organisation (postal addresses, website links). I've tried setting it up in excel and while certain things work well, others don't and I only have a basic knowledge of Excel. The main problem is the date received bit. If I put more than one date in the cell it goes to the next cell below when I want it to stay in the same cell so it lines up with the country, title etc. In word I can do this, showing that that same item arrived on the 1st March, 1st April, 1st May and so on.

Does this make any sense at all and can anyone help? Maybe Excel isn't the best package, so what else?

Thanks, Liz

buglawton

When we started with Excel we got a nice big printed book, "Excel 2000" in the Fast & Easy series. This helped to get us familiar. Excel (or the Free equivalent in OpenOffice) is very powerful and well worth some learning investment. You can also stick to the simpler bits if you want.

bat999

@elljay
You've probably got the cells in the date column formatted as 'date', so it just accepts one date.
But in your case it might be better to format them as 'text', so it will accept anything - for example, a series of dates.
:cool:

judderman62

am I missing saomething here ? How can the same item arrive more than once ?

elljay

Sorry, I knew I hadn't made myself clear. Say like a magazine that arrives every month, - from the same country, the same title, the same contact details, but I need to record that it comes in Jan, Feb, March and so on. If I have a 'date received ' column, I can't put the dates it arrives without excel shooting me down to the next cell below rather than just allowing me to list all the dates in one cell. (I tried to copy part of the original word table into this to show what I mean but it doesn't come out.) For example column one (country) might have Australia, column 2 (title) might have Aussie Bulletin, column 3 (issue) might have a list such as no 1, Jun 07, no 2 July 07, no 3 Aug 07, then column 4 would have a date lined up with each issue to show it's arrived eg 30 Jun 07, 30 July 07, 29 Aug 07 and so on. Then new row underneath might have Australia, Sydney Newsletter, and issues, date received etc as before.

Hope this makes a bit more sense. thanks. Liz

bookduck

not too sure what you mean but here is my interpretation:

make a copy of the document, convert the colums back to text and if you dont use a comma in your word doc, then user that as the delimiting char. If it is used pick a character that is not used like :

save the document as text (think it can do csv)

Open up excel and inport the Text file sourting colums with your delimiting character.
This all takes approx 3 mins from start to finish.