Data Entry Spawns a Pop-Up (Help)

[Tarsnipe]

I'm building a workbook to help with the family budget. I want to track daily expenses on a monthly calendar but need help with figuring out how to accomplish a way to enter and categorize my expenses.

This is what I wnat to do:

When an expense is entered in a cell, I want the data entry to spawn a pop-up that contains my expense categories (mortgage, insurance, energy, etc). Once the proper category is chosen, the pop-up closes and that amount is tabulated on a seperate worksheet. For example:

On the 3rd I paid a $100 phone bill. In my workbook, I want to enter 100 in a cell for the 3rd, receive a pop-up with my budget categories, choose "phone", have the pop-up close, and report the expense in the right column in a different worksheet.

Thanks for any help figuring out how to make this happen.

 

[tactps]

Welcome. The easy was to use Data Validation directly into the sheet that contains the data.

e.g.
In cell A2 put the date
In cell B2 put the amount
In cell C2, choose the category from a drop-down list.

Choose "Validation" from the "Data" menu.
Choose "List" from the "allow" drop-down.
Attach the range containing the categories you want to use.

 

[Tarsnipe]

Thanks for the reply tactps! WRT the second part of my question, if I want to sum my expenses on a seperate worksheet, how do I tabulate them by category? In other words, can I have the workbook sum the values based on the category chosen in the drop-down?

 

[tactps]

You can do a few things:
1. Pivot table (from Data Menu). Excel help on this is pretty good, and the advantage is that it will add and delete categories depending on what data you include.
2. You can use a "sumif" or "sumproduct" formula, e.g.
=sumif(range_containing_data,criteria_to_match,range_containing_$)
e.g.
=sumif(c:c,"phones",b:b).

If you choose option 2, decide what you want, post some data to the board, and I'm sure that someone here (or me) will give you a hand.