Comments on: Help me prioritize the people I bug for money

Question: Help me prioritize the people I bug for money

ewiar — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:49:53 -0800

Excel-filter: I have a spreadsheet with a list of donations made over the past year. Unfortunately, when an individual has donated multiple times within a year there is a new row for each donation. Fortunately, that individual is assigned the same unique identifier. How do I make it so that each individual has one row with total donations for the year?

In other words, I want to go from this:

001, John Smith, $10
001, John Smith, $15
001, John Smith, $30
002, Jane Doe, $10
002, Jane Doe, $12

to this:

001, John Smith, $55
002, Jane Doe, $22

By: nathan_teske

nathan_teske — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:53:25 -0800

You want to make a Pivot Table

By: ewiar

ewiar — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:57:52 -0800

And done. Thanks nathan.

By: nomad73

nomad73 — Tue, 01 May 2007 13:45:12 -0800

If you happen to be using the Raiser's Edge and exporting the data to Excel, next time, export the summary information for gifts.

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Tue, 01 May 2007 15:40:08 -0800

Alternatively, you could use the SUMIF function, such as:

=SUMIF(A:A,A1,C:C)

(presuming your identifier is in column A, starting at 1)

I know you've got your answer, but pivot tables annoy me, so if someone else reads this....

By: imjosh

imjosh — Tue, 01 May 2007 18:09:49 -0800

Glad you got it worked out but as a DB admin, I can't stress enough moving to an access database at the least. I use Raisers Edge, which works great, well for most stuff, but it may be cost prohibitive for your org.

Good Luck

By: Ironmouth

Ironmouth — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:35:24 -0800

imjosh is right. Use a relational database for these issues. I first learned how to work with access after facing the exact same problem in a 65 page spreadsheet. After suggesting Access to the boss and then learning how to do it, I became the de facto database admin and got a 20% raise. Off of some stupid trick I saw in Access for Dummies, our organization won a nation-wide award.