Sales Record Graph

Hello, longtime lurker here. Have been using this forum for awhile for little things as well as tuning up lost skills in Excel. Finally made an account as I'm stumped and have to deliver a sales graph to my boss in the next few weeks.

Objective:
Create a Graph illustrating how many of individual part number's were sold throughout a years-worth of data.

Background:
Our business operates on eBay (yes, I know...) and can generate .csv sales reports from each month. In the .csv file are 10 columns, which only 2-3 are really useful to us for what we are trying to attain. Our part number/custom label (SKU's) begin with 2 letters followed by an ' - ' and an additional 2 letters for an appropriate variation, then a (space) and the 5-digit part number. Now I use the 'Text to Columns' function to separate said characters to organize in 1 single column the 5 digit part number.

I have copied the 2 columns. One column consisting of the 'qty' of the accompanying part number sold (usually in a variation between 1-3 as most customers only buy obviously 1 of our products at a time) and the other to the right of it the specific 5-digit part number.

http://www.editgrid.com/user/spacemonster07/test1

Now I am aware there is possibly an easy solution to this but I can't remember for the life of me to carry out this simple task. As you can see there will be repeated part numbers multiple times with the same quantity or more. That is what is confusing me.

I drew a mock graph on how I am envisioning it below:

cheapgraph.jpg
Any help, advice or solution is greatly appreciated!

Originally Posted by etaf

you could create a pivot table / pivot chart
that will list the unique part numbers and count them

see attached

Wow that is extremely helpful and exactly what I'm looking for! Never used pivot tables before. How long did it take you to create that? I'm trying to figure it out as that data was only from 4 days worth of data, and I have a lot more ahead of me. I took a look at that link provided and was getting stuck on few parts as those steps are more based on other values being used, and not as simple as my 2 columns.

Originally Posted by daffodil11

Copy B1:B168. Paste it in... D1. Go to Data -> Remove duplicates.

Now you have the unique parts.

In E1:

=SUMIF($B$1:$B$168,d1,$A$1:$A$168) and copy downwards. You'll graph D1:E168.

I tried this suggestion as well with instant results! Although I value both solutions, the end result was similar between the 2. I will take some time to learn how to do those pivot tables in the future! Thanks etaf and daff! Now to avoid staying in late tonight..

Great I think I got the hang of it. Any recommendations on how I should display this chart (vertically or horizontally)? We have over 1000+ unique part numbers, but I have a feeling only around 300-500 or so will actually turn up values (sales). I dragged the chart to the right but my 27" monitor can only display it soo well..

yes that would be helpful, but is such function possible in excel?

found that it is much easier to look at in photoshop, although the file is over 16k pixels wide (22mb file), it beats scrolling in excel