I hope I can explain without a picture.

My associates are big on using sumproduct to gleen specific information say
by line = location and column = category.

Sumproduct is use like this:
"SUMPRODUCT((DATA!$A$3:$A$6288=$B1317)*(DATA!$B$3: $B$6288=N$2)*(DATA!$C$3:$C$6288))".

This is great except you have no flexiblility to build a new report that
could be complicted. Also the data comes out for multiple periods, same
category in different colums which requires me to cut and paste to meet the
above criteria.

Is there a different function that may work better?