Comments on: Excel: How to select a cell based on current month

Question: Excel: How to select a cell based on current month

shinynewnick — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:40:46 -0800

Excel Filter: Selecting a cell/row based on current month.

I'm putting together a payment spreadsheet for a very small business, and I'm piecing it together slowly. I'm sure there are easier/elegant solutions abound, but this is what I have so far.

In this example file:

www.buildinbranson.com/mefi/mefiExample.xls
or
(Screenshot if you can just work from that)

I have a column of dates and a column of current balance (Starting at A9 and B9). I want the Total Unit Due in cell C5 to look to the current month's balance.

I've played around with a formula to compare the current month to the month from column A*, and that works just fine. What I can't figure out is how to make it select the appropriate row.

Sorry if this isn't overly clear, I'll try to clarify as needed. (Microsoft Excel 2007)

By: junesix

junesix — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:10:43 -0800

You can use a DGET function.

In A8 and E4, type in "Month". In E5, input the following formula to generate the first day of the current month.

=DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),MONTH(TODAY()),1) .

In C5, input the following formula to retrieve the current balance in the corresponding month.

=DGET(A9:B26,"Current Balance",E4:E5)

Now if you move A9:B26 to their own sheet (Sheet2) so that they start from row 1, you can replace A9:B26 with Sheet2!A:B and then the formula will work independent of any new rows you add.

By: junesix

junesix — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:13:36 -0800

BTW after you move A9:B26 to Sheet2 starting in row 1, your Total Unit Due formula in C5 should look like this:

=DGET(Sheet2!A:B,"Current Balance",E4:E5)

What it's doing is looking in the A and B columns in Sheet2, focusing on the "Current Balance" column, and then matching it against the criteria in E4:E5 which is the first day of the current month.

By: twiggy

twiggy — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:20:26 -0800

I'm not familiar with DGET, but I tried junesix's example above so I didn't waste any time replying if the problem was already solved. I might've done something wrong, but it didn't work, so here's what I propose:

Put "Current Month" in E4, and in E5, use junesix's formula for putting today's date/month:

=DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),MONTH(TODAY()),1)

This should end up being "11/1/2007" as of the time of this posting.

Next, use the LOOKUP function in C5:

=LOOKUP(E5,A9:A25,B9:B25)

This loks for what's in cell E5 within the range of cells A9:A25... and returns whatever is to the right of that in the range of B9:B25. So, since $40 is to the right of 11/1/2007 - this returns $40.

By: shinynewnick

shinynewnick — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:32:18 -0800

Thanks so much, that worked perfectly, twiggy.

By: junesix

junesix — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:24:12 -0800

Strange, it had worked in my sheet. Not sure what happened. In any case, glad you got a working solution.