EXCEL question

[lumberjim]

think in 3D? I don't know ..... This shit is SO linear. incremental.

this is building a birdhouse when you don't know what a hammer is. or nails. I'm learning what the functions do. that's one small part of it. the art part... or elegance, as HM says, is the ways you apply these tools. maybe that part is a little 3D...if by that you mean BIG PICTURE.... but the formulas... not so much.

his solution, as I understand it presently does 3 things. first, he counts occurances of unique team numbers. so this formula:

=IF(C8="","-",C8&"_"&COUNTIF(C$8:C8,C8))

located away from where data is entered, looks at cells in the C column, where I have the team number being entered. if the cell is blank, it returns a [ - ], if it has an entry, it gives me that entry and _the count of those same entries in column C that fall between C8 and C8.... if C8 is filled with a '1', this cell will look like this: [1_1] where the first 1 is the entry in C8, and the 2nd is how many are in that column so far. the $ before the 8 is to lock that 8 when the formula is replicated into cells below. the cell beneath this one will say C$8:C9.... then next C$8:C10, etc... and if there are two 1's in the range the next 1_* will count 2 and return 1_2 .

this is done in order to give each row a unique, index-able identifier. the deals can then be sorted by team, using the first part of the 1_2 to get them onto the right sheet...and then within each sheet, sorted by the 2 part of it, in order, with no gaps. slick. that accomplishes what I'm after. Now I'm just trying to understand the WAY he went about it, and what all the little parts of the other 2 formulas do. I've got a nerd-on.