i apologize for my ignorance at this point but im still none the wiser as to solve this issue... there must be a way to do this...

would it be easier to put up an example spreadsheet to show exactly what i am trying to do? im trying to be as clear as possible.

i guess an example would be of a car registration database...
thousands of cars being processed through each day and you are logging each registration.
you then want a graph displaying the total sales of each month whilst showing the distribution of car manufacturers.

=COUNTIF(Sheet3!AG:AG,A13)
using this as a reference.... sheet3 would be the database.
then you would apply a filter of all Mercedes cars for example.
then on sheet1 i would have a cell that counts all the the cars registered in January.. another for February and so on.