Hi Fellow Excel Addict,

Greetings from snowbound Newfoundland, Canada. I know many of my newsletter readers are also 'enjoying' their first taste of winter while others are basking in beautiful warm sunshine. For the past few days we have been trudging through the snow as we prepare for the Christmas season.

Just a reminder that after next week's newsletter I will be taking a two-week Christmas break from publishing this newsletter. I will be starting up again around January 7th.

To all of you who have been sharing this newsletter, we are getting close to a milestone - 1,000 readers. Not bad for the short time I've been publishing. Thanks a million!

Have a great week.

To Your Success!
Francis Hayes (The Excel Addict)

Just move your mouse pointer to the left edge of the horizontal scroll bar until it changes to an I-beam with two arrows. Drag with your left mouse button until the scroll bar is just the size you want.

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SUMIF is one Excel's many extremely useful worksheet functions. The uses for this function are almost unlimited, so to help you understand how it works and how you can apply it, I will describe a scenario for you.

Let's assume you have a table of daily sales data with columns containing Dates (col C), Names (col D), and Sales (col E). You want to determine the total sales for a particular salesperson without disturbing the original data.

In a cell outside the table, here's what your formula might look like:
=SUMIF(D2:D32,"John Smith",E2:E32)

A function is comprised of arguments that are used to perform the calculation. SUMIF has three arguments.

In the example above, D2:D32 is the Evaluation Range, the first argument of our SUMIF function. It tells Excel which range to evaluate. The range for this argument must be only one column wide.

The second argument we need is the Criteria. This can be a constant value, a cell reference or a formula that produces a valid value.

The third argument of the SUMIF function is the Sum Range. This is the range we want to get the values from whenever our criteria matches the evaluation range. When an item in the evaluation range (D2:D32) matches the criteria "John Smith", the value of the corresponding item in the sum range (E2:E32) is added into the total.

In our little scenario, this would give us the total of all sales in our table for John Smith.

Note also that you can use the Function Wizard to guide you through the construction of your SUMIF function. Just click the equal sign in the formula bar and then click on the drop-down arrow to the left. If SUMIF is not listed, click More Functions and you'll find it in the Math & Trig category. The wizard will guide you from there.

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You probably have experienced this. You have been working with a lot of different Excel files and you click Start, Documents to open up a file you worked on a few days ago and it's shortcut isn't there. The problem is, Windows saves shortcuts for only the last 15 files recently used files. There is, however, another folder of shortcuts to recently used Office files that very few people know about. In it you'll find a much longer list of shortcuts - maybe going back for months.

You'll find it at:

• (Win98/Me) 'C:\Windows\Profiles\\Application Data\Microsoft\ Office\Recent'
• (Windows 2000/XP) C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent