You would be better off keeping blue-pen count, red-pen count and total in
three cells
Say these are A2,B2 and C2
Select A1:C1 and use Merge to get the date to span all three columns
Adjust cell width if needed
Now you can easily do calculations on the cells

But the data is already entered and there is lots of it?
Use Data | Text to Columns to separate the numbers in separate cell and
discard the hyphens

It sound like lots of work but the way you have the data is asking for
trouble - really!
best wishes
--
Bernard V Liengme
Microsoft Excel MVP
www.stfx.ca/people/bliengme
remove caps from email

"stefburgas" wrote in message
...
I am currently trying to add data together to get a total, once slight snag
the data is set out within different cells which are made of of individual
figures for different days.

Example

16/07/07 17/07/07 18/07/07
1 - 1 - 3 1 - 1 - 3 1 - 1 -3

So I want my totals to be 1 + 1 =3 from cell A1 through to A3 but my total
would be 3 - 3 - 9 as the first two positions represent say total blue
pens
and red pens and the last position gives me the over all number of pens we
have in stock.