I am using a spreadsheet to track & monitor our household expenses. On one sheet have columns for date (as 22/09/2010), category, income & expense. On the second sheet, I have a column for each category of income/expense, & rows for Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.

In the second sheet I have been using SUM & IF statements to calculate where the category in the first sheet is ‘Phone’, if it is greater than 01 Mar & if it is less than 31 Mar, then add together all corresponding values in the expense column. All these calculations make the spreadsheet wrok very slowly when I change something, & I was wondering if the DSUM formula would work for this? How do I get DSUM to use a range of dates (1 – 31 Mar) as a criteria?

An example of the formula I am currently using is: {=SUM(IF(Sheet1!B1:Sheet1!B5000=A14,IF(Sheet1!A1:Sheet1!A5000>=DATE(2010,3,1),IF(Sheet1!A1:Sheet1!A5000<=DATE(2010,3,31),Sheet1!E1:Sheet1!E5000,""))))}