Sort by 'words' ascending then 'numbers' descending.
Assume 'words' is Col A and 'numbers' is Col B
In Col C, enter the formula...
=IF(A2=A3,B2-B3,0)
Copy down 200 rows and sum Col C.
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Hope this helps.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Gary Brown


"LiAD" wrote:

I want to get excel to look through a series of numbers and words, find the
words that match, calculate the difference between the two numbers associated
with these words and then sum all of the differences from the list, e.g.

fred 10
bill 21
ben 34
bob 21
fred 23
bill 23
fred 67

I want excel to tell me the sum of differences for fred as 57, bill as 2 and
the rest all 0.

I have about 200 lines to sort with about 100 combinations of words.

Any ideas much appreciated.

Thanks