automatic spending calculator

Hello all,

First post in these forums so please (although I did attempt to read all the rules thoroughly) let me know if I am messing something up or if this is question is better on another board, thanks.

Anyways, on to my question. I keep a detailed list of all my expenditures in Excel:mac 2011. I have the date in a left column, the type (food, gas, etc.) of expenditure in a middle column and the dollar amount in a right column. Is there a method by which I can have running sums of my different types of expenditures updated automatically as I enter new expenditures? In other words, is there some set of functions that would allow me to enter an expenditure for a certain date, of type "food" and of $10 and automatically have 10 added to some "total food expenditures" cell? I'm assuming there is, but got a little frustrated looking for one after making very little progress.

I'm fairly comfortable with programming but just switched to Excel from Numbers and so I'm relatively slow with the program.

Thanks in advance!
Noah

Thanks for the reply FDibbins.

So SUMIF seems like the answer. One last little hurdle---my categorization of the expenditure goes a little beyond just "food." I often further classify the spending (e.g. - "food (groceries)" or "food (dinner)"). The Excel help mentions I could use an asterisk to attempt to count any cell with the string "food" but so far "*food" hasn't worked for me. Any more ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Noah

Never mind, got it. Needed the asterisk on the side where the extra characters occur.

Thanks again FDibbins,
Noah