Tomahawk wrote:
Hi, Thanks for trying to get your head around this for me. Lets see if i can
explain a little better for you.

Yes you are correct in the graph, the vertical axis (y) has increasing $$ $0
- $100 for example. Then along the horizontal axis (x) I have the days of the
week 1st - 31st for example. I have set up a table (hidden) that I manually
input the specific sales total at the end of each day (the graph is linked to
this table obviously). With a large sales team this is time consuming and it
is this process I want to automate.

In a seperate spreadsheet I collate the daily sales for the team. This is
totalled in one cell to give a monthly sales total.

What I am trying to do is to have the table look at the sales total and add
that particular total on the day that it represents. So the cell allocated to
the 5th of the month will display the sales total for that day only. If at
the end of the day that value is $10 then that is the number that stays in
the cell for the rest of the month. The cell on the 6th will then display the
sales result at the end of that day only. So at the end of the sales period I
have a line graph that slowly crawls along going from $0 - $100 for example.

I have experimented with things like =if(today=22/08/08,(a1),"",) but either
doesnt work or will not retain the sales value on that particular day.

If you have a solution to this I would love to hear it. I have looked
conditional formatting but am not sure that that is the answer either.

Thanks - talk to you soon

OK here's what I think you need to do. It's just a little organization
really.

You are able to "collate the daily sales". This value needs to be
captured for every day you have data. Since I don't know what your data
entry looks like, I can't say exactly how you would go about it. One way
might be to have a list of dates in a column somewhere separate from the
data entry, and use sumif to obtain the daily total. Another way is to
use a pivot table, which can automatically get daily totals with
building a list of dates. Another way is to use subtotals, but this will
not make it easy to do the next step.

Now you have a total for every date. The next thing to do is get a
running sum. That is, start with day one and add each day's result to
the sum of the days prior. Columns C and D below offer two suggestions
for doing this. The formulae in C2 and D2 can be copied down. Note: a
pivot table can be configured to figure the running sum automatically.

A B C D
1 22/08/08 day1 total =A1 =sum($A$1:A1)
2 23/08/08 day2 total =B1+A2 =sum($A$1:A2)

Regardless of how you get the running sum, /that/ is the column you want
to base your chart values on.

Hope this helps!