Question

In a spreadsheet i’m trying to fix up, on the final page i want it to gather totals, so far this is the structure

Month | Year | Month Start | Month End | Month Total

how this supposed to work is that the user enters the month and year then inputs the start and end rows (Month Start and End) of another page, this other page will contain records of transactions made with each transaction being a separate row, this can mean one month can have 5 transaction while another may have 50

i’m making the assumption that the user doesn’t now how to reference data from another sheet so how i want to try and implement it so that they add the row numbers to Month Start and End and Month Total will generate the formula

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eg.

Month Start = 4 

Month End = 6

Formula Generated in Month Total = "=SUM(Transactions!E4:E6)"

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if the user changes Month End to 9, the formula generated above will change the E6 part to E9, like i said above, each row in the Transactions sheet is a transaction and there can be variable number of transactions a month

what i am asking is if it is possible to references cells like this

Answer 1

You can use the OFFSET function to generate offsets from a starting point.

Assuming your layout is like this:

  A      B      C      D    E
1 Year   Month  Start  End  Total
2 2012   Jan    4      9    =sum(...) 

The total column (cell E2) could have the formula:
=SUM(OFFSET(Transactions!E1,C2-1,0,(D2-C2)+1))