I came to that conclusion myself, the "paper" trail (actually a cell
trail) is a Good Thing® so I made a matrix sheet of account numbers
and months, then linked the main sheet to each cell in the matrix
sheet so that I have a running tally on the main sheet of that months
expenses plus a summed column of the year to date expenses.

To change months you do a simple Find&Replace replacing last month's
column letter with this month's column letter. Pretty simple once I
got my head wrapped around it.

Thanks for all your help...

Jim


On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:11:46 -0800, Gord Dibben <gorddibbATshawDOTca
wrote:

Can be done.....see Don's response.

But what you are asking for is fraught with peril.

No way to trouble shoot any errors in data input.

Once the new value is added to old, the old data is gone.

Say you had 100 in a cell, then you want to add 200.

Don's code will allow that but what if you inadvertantly added 209?

How will you keep track of current and past entries?

You have no 'paper trail" to follow to see how you got the results you have.

You'll be scratching your head wondering where and when the data input was
not done correctly.

Excel sheet has many cells.

Why not use them?


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:17:43 -0800, RST Engineering
wrote:

I am making a budget spreadsheet in which I keep each month's expenses
in one column and then the annual expenses in another column.

For example, the January (month 1) expenses for line item 1001 are
$100 and therefore the annual expenses for line item 1001 are $100.

In February the 1001 expenses are $200 and therefore the annual 1001
expenses are last month's 1001 expenses ($100) plus this month's 1001
expenses ($200) which is $300.

Without keeping a separate column for each month's line item expenses,
is there a tricky way of adding a number to itself? That is, when I
enter $200 into the February spreadsheet how can I add the annual
expenses to it without keeping a separate tally sheet somewhere else?

Jim