Counting how many times someone took a class (up to 5 different ones); needs to be updated

[allynj]

Hi,
New job = new Excel project, which I don't know very well. (I thought it would be better in Access but they don't want that).
They want an Excel database to keep track of people who take training courses - up to 5 courses total are being tracked for grant purposes - and update this every time a class is run. The info is exported from cvent but the people do not have id numbers or identifiers. They want to count Joe Schmo and which of the 5 classes he took, and also keep track of the municipalities the people come from. The classes are run on multiple dates throughout the year. One person recommended a pivot table to me and one person recommended vlookup. I'm stuck. I just ran out and bought the Walkenbach 2010 Formulas book so I can bring the CDROM to work and hopefully no one will notice.

(This is a temp job. The person who will be updating it after me doesn't know Excel very well either - I thought to make it easier for her I'd like to create a form for data entry - the classes generally only have 20 people in them. If she keeps importing from cvent and cutting and pasting into the spreadsheet how do I keep that from messing something up?)

I hope I am making sense. I changed data in the spreadsheet but you'll get the idea.

[MarvinP]

Hi allyn and welcome to the forum,

I'm a Pivot Table advocate for this type of problem. Look at the Pivot Experiment sheet where I've done a very quick Pivot for you.

No formulas needed, you simply drag and drop fields into the Pivot List boxes. You could do another Pivot by date or Month or ....

See the attached to see if it makes sense.

[allynj]

Oh my goodness I don't know what to say (thank you!!!). This is AWESOME.
Yes this is exactly what I was trying to do....

My confusion as a new Excel user is how to do know when to use what, say when to use what formula vs a Pivot? Does this just come from experience?

[JBeaucaire]

If the data in those workbooks are REAL people, you should best replace that with generic names before uploading to the internet.

[allynj]

If the data in those workbooks are REAL people, you should best replace that with generic names before uploading to the internet.

I changed info & names ....if it still looks too real is there a way to disable?

[JBeaucaire]

No, we trust you.