I have a small spreadsheet, 7 columns wide. I coulmn 2 there are
various names which are repeated randomly, in colum 7 there are costs.

What I would like to do is somehow total all the costs for each name
in the spreadsheet - i.e if there are 12 names in all then have the
amount spent by each of the 12 people totalled individually.

Use the worksheet function SUMIF. For the 1st argument use the
entire range of names (precede row numbers in range with $ to
facilitate copying). For the 2nd argument, use only the name in the
row. For the 3rd argument, use the entire range of costs (precede
row numbers in range with $ to facilitate copying).

Merjet