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Edit Formula Button

Excel Lunch Count Spreadsheet

1. Start a new workbook in Excel. Use the following field names: Name, Mon, Tues,Wed, Thu, and Fri. (you can use the auto fill feature of Excel to fill in the weekday

names.

2. Enter your students

names in the column

under name.

3. Highlight all of the

cells under the days

of the week and nextto student names.

4. Go to DataValidation. Select Listunder

Allow. In the Source box, type H, A, C or Hot,

Alternate, Cold (or whatever options you havefor lunch.)

5. Now, when you click in one of the highlighted

cells, you will have a drop down menu.

6. Skip the row after your last students name and

type Hot, Alternate, and Cold (or whatever

choices you have for lunch.)

Hot

AlternateCold

7. Click in the cell to the right of Hot, then click on the Edit

Formula button. From the drop down list of formulas,

select COUNTIF.

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8. For the range, type in or select the range of

cells under Mon. For the example we areusing, that would be B2:B14. For the

criterion, type H or Hot depending on what

you used for data validation.

9. Click in the cell to the right of Alternate or whatever your next choice is, and follow

the same steps to create the COUNTIF formula. Do this for each lunch choice youhave.

10. Click back in the cell that has the COUNTIF formula for Hot. Bring your cursor tothe lower right corner and wait for your cursor to change to a black cross. When it

changes, click, hold and drag to fill the formula across the rest of the cells (for Tues,

Wed., etc.) Repeat this process for the other COUNTIF formulas you created. You

should have 0 showing in all of the cells that you put a formula in, since you havenot entered any data yet.

11. Enter sample data for each student for Mon. and Tues. As you enter data, thenumber of Hot, Cold, or Alternate will be calculated.

12. You may want to create a chart to help students visualize the data. Select thefollowing cells (it doesnt matter if you have data in them or not. You can still create

the chart and it will grow as you add data.)

Hot 6 8 7 10 4

Alternate 4 3 3 2 4

Cold 3 2 3 1 5

13. Click on the chart wizard button.

Select a column graph, and click Next to step through the choices. When you get tostep 4, select the location of the chart as an object in sheet 1. This puts the chart on

the same worksheet as the spreadsheet. Now, when students enter their lunch

choices, they will see the daily total show up on the chart.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

1 2 3 4 5

Hot

Alternate

Cold