Don't waste time on "what if's"....

Have you ever sat in your cosy little office, or claustrophobic little cubicle, and daydreamed? I'm certain you have, and no doubt it was about your holiday, your children, your boss being challenged to a duel at dawn....but have you ever dreamt of finding a way to cut down on your mundane, boredom inducing, life wasting Excel tasks? Like data entry?

Well, daydream no more, because here is a quick and easy little tip that might just make your workload that tiny bit lighter, leaving more time for daydreaming of important things. What's that? You would naturally spend that time doing more value added tasks?....ofcourse you would!!

Anyway, the reader's question was, "When inputting invoice data into a spreadsheet, and each invoice contains a number of items, is there a way I can set up my spreadsheet so that I don't have to re-enter the invoice number and date for each line item?"

There is, and this can be used for any type of data entry that requires repetition of certain cells within a group of lines.

So imagine your data spreadsheet looks like this:

If you are going to add different lines to the same invoice number 1012, then simply use the following formulas in columns A and B (I have them in different colours to make it easy to read here):

You can drag these formulas down for as many rows as you like. They will remain blank until you add in detail into column C. To make sense of the formula, you need to read each formula as saying, "If cell C5 (or whatever line you're on) is empty, then make this cell blank, otherwise copy the data from the cell above."

So if you now add detail into cell C6, the date and invoice will immediately be copied from above. Obviously, a major point to remember is to change your invoice numbers and dates for each new invoice. You can simply type over the formulas in the next line down, and start entering your product details.

Easy as pie and a time saver of note if you have to add a huge number of invoices.

To take this one step further, and make this type of invoice entry even quicker, I would create a standing table of product data, which has all your product details per product code. So it may look something like this:

If you saved it into the same workbook, it would save space. I would then create a dropdown list in your invoice entry sheet in column C, to look up the product codes. To do this, you would use Data Validation (click here for my prior blog for guidelines). You could then use VLOOKUPs to bring back all the relevant information for each product code. (read here for a comprehensive guide to VLOOKUPs).

Using all these tools, you could set up your worksheet so that you only enter your invoice number and date once, you select each product code as required, and enter the quantity. Everything else will fall into place automatically. You could almost go on that holiday, not just daydream about it.

One IMPORTANT point....if you update your product data table with price changes etc, first copy and paste value all the invoice lines you have already entered, otherwise all the previous invoice lines will pick up your new changes!

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Happy Halloween, and hope your spreadsheets don't break out in gremlins!