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Heidi Heidi is offline
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Default Can't seem to find way to have easy data entry AND analysis - idea

Each day, 3-10 different foods (from a selection of 100) are fed and the
weights recorded. My spreadsheet is currently set up with the following
columns:

Date|Food1Name|Food1Amount|Food2Name|Food2Amount|F ood3Name|Food3Amount|...etc...

The way I have it set up, though, it isn't simple to get a sum of the total
amount of, for example, apples fed in a week/month/etc., because they may be
listed under "Food1" on one day, but "Food2" on another day.

I COULD have a column for each foodstuff, but that then makes data entry a
pain for users, who then have to scroll left and right to find the
(hopefully) correct column.

I've looked at pivottables, sumif, sumproduct, and vlookup-type solutions,
but none of them seem to be quite what I need or so complex that I wouldn't
be able to show others easily.

Is there a different way to approach this that would allow easy data entry
AND easy (simple) data analysis?


Thanks,
Heidi