COUNTIF and Nested SUMIF question HELP

[Speedring]

Hi all

I am new to this forum. I am having a complex problem with a large spreadsheet that manages several items on my job-sites.

1) It includes a budget the feeds to drop down boxes on each daily page
2) Equipment list that feed to drop down boxes on Monday tab.
3) All other days feed off of Monday for their function (would like to in the future make them independent but probably really need to use a database for this if it gets more complicated)
3) Actually it does a lot of other stuff to complicated to explain. We are using it right now to manage a few mechanics work at our yard so the data that is in here is not typically how it is used but for the purpose of figuring out this formula the data should be sufficient

The problem I am having is that on the Monday tab, column F, I am trying to use a formula to look at the equipment asset numbers in column E and determine if there is more than one instance of that piece of equipment. If so I would like to return an "*" in column F for the first instance of that equipment number only. In the Equipment Summary tab it looks at the asterisk and sums the hours for all instances of that piece of equipment and puts it on one line of the equipment time sheet.

This works well if I manually add or delete the "*" for pieces of equipment but I am trying to automate this.

So if I have all different pieces of equipment (no Duplicates) then all cells in column F have an asterisk. If I list one of those pieces again then I clear the cell in Column F or the *, this triggers the SUMIF formula in the Equipment Summary sheet to add the hours of the two instances of that piece of equipment and only reports the time on one column.

This spreadsheet is either a work of art or mass stupidity but I had fun getting it to this point

Can some one guide me in the right direction?