Grocery organization frustration

[myself]

Originally Posted by PrincessPerky

That is cool, pathetically enough I don't know what to do witha zip..

but regardless If you have some time to fill me in, I would love to know how to 'freeze' a pane so you can always see the date? or whatever)

I would also like to know how to make the colors themselves change automatically?

And how can I make one row in one sheet (I need tabs, I have my checkbook in the same 'book') automatically fill in a row on another sheet, depending on what it said? (food lion, gas, ect)

I am more interested in how, than inhaving it done for me, I like to learn....

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog and help answer some questions.

ZIP files are simply compressed files. You need a program like WinZip or several others, to uncompress it and see the file or files that it contains.

You have Excel 2003 or greater (I'm not sure if it was available in 2001 or not), for the color switching to work.
How to:
Freeze a pane:

1. Select the cell. In my case it was $b$2, so that the first column always stayed visible, and the first 2 rows always stayed visible.
2. Click on the "Window" menu.
3. Click on the "Freeze Pane" sub-menu.

PS: If you have to "unfreeze" a pane, simply choose "Window", then "Unfreeze Pane".

How to make colors change automatically:

1. Select the cell (or row in my case), that you want the color change to work for.
2. Click on the "Format" menu.
3. Click on the "Conditional Formatting ..." sub-menu.
4. A dialog is displayed that shows a "Condition 1" group, along with a "Add >>", "Delete...", "OK", and "Cancel" buttons.
5. In the "Condition 1" group, it has a drop-down box that says "Cell Value Is", beside that is another drop-down box that says "between", and there are 1 or 2 edit boxes to the right of that (there is only one, if you change "between" to say anything other than "between", or "not between").
6. I set the first condition to "less than", and set the value to 0 (zero). I clicked on "Format", and chose the font color as white, and the background color (or "Patterns" in Excel), to red.
7. I clicked on "Add >>", to add a "Condition 2", and set that one to "between" and the edit fields to 0 (zero), and 150. And then clicked on "Format", and chose the font color as black, and the background to yellow.
8. I clicked on "Add >>", to add "Condition 3", and set that one to "greater than", and the edit field to 150. I then clicked on "Format", and set the font color to white, and the background to green.

As for date calculations (which my spreadsheet does at the top), I did this:

1. Selected cell $A$1, and named it "PaycheckIncrement".
2. Selected cell $C$1, and typed in the following formula (without the quotes of course: "=DATE(YEAR(B1),MONTH(B1),DAY(B1)+PaycheckIncremen t)"
3. Then I selected cell $C$1, and copied it.
4. Then I selected cells $D$1 until the end (by pressing Shift+Ctrl+RightArrow).
5. Then I pasted the formula that was copied in step 3 (by pressing Ctrl+V).
6. Then I selected cell $A$1, and set the value to 7 (for 1 week).
7. Then I selected cell $B$1, and set the value to 01/01/2007 (or whatever date I wanted to start it out on).
8. Viola, the dates are calculated for you automatically as you view the spreadsheet to the right, including leap years.

Feel free to repost this information wherever you want, as any one of these pieces can be helpful to any number of people. If you could (although it's not a requirement), I'd like to be given credit by linking it to my site http://www.creativeconncepts.com.
One of these days, I'll get around to making that site much more useful.

[myself]

Originally Posted by tinapbeana

perky: when you download the .zip file to your desktop, right click it with your mouse and there should be an option to 'extract all'...

as for the excel questions: if you can hold that thought for about an hour, i should have something helpful up on my blog..

Tina,
If you want, I posted the Excel answers in message #41 on this thread.

[PrincessPerky]

Thank you Tina for the offer You still should post it, more people than I read your blog and would like to understand.

and thanks to myself (heh, funny to post that..) Chris right?

K thank you Chris for the explination, it will take me at least an hour to see if I understand it

[PrincessPerky]

oooh I did the colors!

[PrincessPerky]

BTW for dates..I just 'pulled' the plus sign over under wherever I needed it, so long as I highlighted a range of two weeks it automatically adds another week to the next cell, if that makes anysense. if you only highlight one date it put sthe very next day in the next cell.