Increase Cell Value by One

[kissmypineapple]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Power PC

I am trying to streamline my agency's record keeping. We previously kept paper copies of tally sheets, and did all of the tallying and addition by hand. I moved the totals to excel, so that we can keep monthly tally sheets and YTD totals on our computers, but I'd like to do the tallying on excel, too. Is there a way to make it so a cell value is increased by one every time you click on it?

 

[Carl Witthoft]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Power PC

I am trying to streamline my agency's record keeping. We previously kept
paper copies of tally sheets, and did all of the tallying and addition by
hand. I moved the totals to excel, so that we can keep monthly tally sheets
and YTD totals on our computers, but I'd like to do the tallying on excel,
too. Is there a way to make it so a cell value is increased by one every time
you click on it?

I don't think you quite get the idea of spreadsheets. If clicking on a
cell changed its value, you'd never know what the 'right' value was.
Imagine someone else clicking on your spreadsheet just to see what the
contents of a cell were.

If you can post a simple example of just what it is you're
summing/tallying, we can show you how to adjust input parameters to get
the job done.

 

[kissmypineapple]

That was amazingly condescending, but that's really neither here nor there. There are plenty of ways to do this with Visual Basic, but I have a newer version of Excel, and it's on my Mac, and I don't know how to use Applescript. I ended up just using the older version of excel that's on our work computers, and I made buttons for each of the cells, one to increase the cell value, and one to decrease the cell value, so that we can tally electronically, and we don't waste so much paper and time. I would like to know if the language used is the same for Applescript as it is for Visual Basic, so that when we eventually upgrade the computers I don't lose the work. However, I might prefer to figure it out on my own, since asking for advice means that someone comes in tells you that you just don't "get" it.

 

[Carl Witthoft]

That was amazingly condescending, but that's really neither here nor there.
There are plenty of ways to do this with Visual Basic, but I have a newer
version of Excel, and it's on my Mac, and I don't know how to use
Applescript. I ended up just using the older version of excel that's on our
work computers, and I made buttons for each of the cells, one to increase the
cell value, and one to decrease the cell value, so that we can tally
electronically, and we don't waste so much paper and time. I would like to
know if the language used is the same for Applescript as it is for Visual
Basic, so that when we eventually upgrade the computers I don't lose the
work. However, I might prefer to figure it out on my own, since asking for
advice means that someone comes in tells you that you just don't "get" it.

Sure there are lots of fancy ways to do it, but the fact remains that
manually changing the value of some cell by one is not the best approach
in the first place. That increment must be related to something: the
day of the month? the number of outstanding invoices? etc. Define what
the count really means, and derive it using some formula which
references the variable (or database entry) of interest.

So, again, what does "tally" mean, and why does incrementing a cell
value by one matter?

 

[kissmypineapple]

What does "tally" mean? It means, I'm trying to keep a running count of something, just like I said in my first post. And why does incrementing a cell value by one matter? Because it will save time and paper, again, just like I said. I would be manually changing the value of the cell regardless, because the cell I'm wanting to increase by one is not the total. We keep track of police reports that our agency does not follow up on, and we keep monthly tally sheets. I've moved those tally sheets to our computers so that excel will keep the running total for us. There is a row for each crime, and a column for each jurisdiction, and then the totals. As we go through the police reports we receive, rather than making a tally mark on a piece of paper, we can click the button in each crime type/jurisdiction cell. Otherwise, we still manually enter the monthly total at the end of each month.

None of that information, of course, was important for answering the first question, and you assertion that my approach is a poor way to go about keeping this tally is ridiculous, considering you didn't even know why I wanted to do it that way. Responding to a person's question "why does it matter," is unhelpful at best, and disrespectful at worst.

 

[Carl Witthoft]

What does "tally" mean? It means, I'm trying to keep a running count of
something, just like I said in my first post. And why does incrementing a
cell value by one matter? Because it will save time and paper, again, just
like I said. I would be manually changing the value of the cell regardless,
because the cell I'm wanting to increase by one is not the total. We keep
track of police reports that our agency does not follow up on, and we keep
monthly tally sheets. I've moved those tally sheets to our computers so that
excel will keep the running total for us. There is a row for each crime, and
a column for each jurisdiction, and then the totals. As we go through the
police reports we receive, rather than making a tally mark on a piece of
paper, we can click the button in each crime type/jurisdiction cell.
Otherwise, we still manually enter the monthly total at the end of each
month.

None of that information, of course, was important for answering the first
question, and you assertion that my approach is a poor way to go about
keeping this tally is ridiculous, considering you didn't even know why I
wanted to do it that way. Responding to a person's question "why does it
matter," is unhelpful at best, and disrespectful at worst.

Fine. So if you want to increment the tally by one every time you add a
row to the spreadsheet, there are plenty of ways to make the tally cell
figure out (i.e. a formula) how many rows of data are in the
spreadsheet. Automation is preferable because it avoids the chance of
manual error (e.g. manually incrementing the tally cell too often or
forgetting to do so).