My day is made

[Moses Yoder]

I figured out the lookup function on Excel, actually got it to work. Now to figure out how much my kitchen will cost I can have a drop list for the material choice and Excel will automatically look up my price and calculate the cost of the part based simply on the size I enter and the material I choose from the drop list. I can change the cost of the material in one spot and all of my parts costs will change automatically.

[Larry Edgerton]

I'm jealous! Me and computers, we are not one.......

Larry

[Lee Schierer]

I worked that feature out a few years ago and love it for my project estimating sheets. I can select what maple, poplar or oak that I want to make a component from and get the actual cost for that wood figured into the cost. I can also get total lengths of different widths of boards I need to minimize waste and determine how much of what to buy. I still need to do some tweaking for other improvements. You'll really like the look up tables.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

Heck yeah, lookup and sumproduct are the keys to the excel kingdom!

[David Weaver]

vlookup
hlookup
solver
sumif
countif
indirect

All great

Don't forget to name ranges that you do vlookup from often, that way you don't need to travel to the page to copy a range. For example, if all of your wood prices are in a table from A1 to D45, highlight the whole range and call it "woodprices" or something and you can call the range by name instead of by the cells.

[Peter Stahl]

Any of you Excel guys have a good free Excel site that you use?

[Steve Rozmiarek]

Any of you Excel guys have a good free Excel site that you use?

You mean for function help?

[Moses Yoder]

I read "Excel for Dummies" many years ago so I know many of its available functions. I always have to study a bit in the help section to figure out how to make it work.

[Lee Schierer]

Any of you Excel guys have a good free Excel site that you use?

Open office has a free spreadsheet that is almost identical to Excel.

[Eric DeSilva]

LOOKUP can be annoying. The first issue is that it doesn't return an error if it can't find an entry--it uses the entry before the one where it would find the value if it did find the value. That means if there is some minor misspelling or data variation, you might end up with a value that isn't what you intended. So I find myself using it with an IF all too often. Since I often use it across an entire range, I also have issues where there is a problem if the cell I'm looking up is smaller than the first value in the lookup range, forcing another IF. Like this:

=IF(A2>= Sheet2!$A:$1, IF(A2=LOOKUP(A2, Sheet2!$A:$A, Sheet2!A$:A$), LOOKUP(A2, Sheet2!$A:$A, Sheet2!$B:$B), "ERROR"), "ERROR")

instead of just:

=LOOKUP(A2, Sheet2!$A:$A, Sheet2!$B:$B)

Where A2 is the cell you are looking up, Sheet2!$A:$A is the list where the cell value is found, and Sheet2!$B:$B is the values you want returned.