Excel does it more easily! That's the only thing. It is more obvious, you can see the sigma symbol on your tool bar, you hit it, you highlight, you're done. You can cut and paste easily in excel--haven't yet figured out how to do that in access. I'm a better than average (non-expert) excel user that can get excel to calculate and keep track and compile error free (half the time when I do math, 2 + 2= 42). I've taken census research on the geographic areas relevant to my work and compiled percents of populations under various levels of poverty in various cities counties and statewide and then compared by age and by family type. The results were impressive if I do say so myself, and I cut and pasted formulas the whole way through. Then, I did all these graphs so that even an allocations panel of business people could see that there are children in need of our services in our town. I haven't taken a class to learn what I know in Excel. I've just figured that it should be there somewhere and I'll find it. (that and mso freelists, thanks guys for the Countif help, I use it all the time now). I've asked a few questions here about access and your kind patient answers haven't made a darn bit of sense! In fact, rather than manually entering over 100 records into the form that wouldn't tab the way I wanted, I exported to Excel and cut and pasted then imported back in. To do mail merges from access to word I've had to go through Excel. I'm sure there is an easier way, I just haven't found it. Word and Access don't seem to want to talk directly to each other. I never have found the little sigma button so I can figure my LYBUNTS and SYBUNTS and have a field on my contact page telling me total giving for 02 and 03 and 04 so far. Thing is, Excel wouldn't do that so great either. The one to many kind of thing. Some folks write one check a year (poor fundraising performance!) some write a few. One donor, one or many donations, how do you keep track of that without a database? You can't really. The sad thing is that the last person in my job put this information into access but used it like excel--one column for 02 giving in which there were up to 5 numbers separated by semicolons. My problem is, I haven't figured out how to effectively and efficiently keep track of that WITH a database. The other thing is that Access isn't in the Mac's Office suites. Kathie Katherine Driskell Felts, Executive Director Blooming Prairie Center Deep Roots, Bright Futures, Unlimited Horizons ************************************************************* You are receiving this mail because you subscribed to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or MicrosoftOffice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To send mail to the group, simply address it to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To Unsubscribe from this group, send an email to mso-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the quotes) in the subject line. Or, visit the group's homepage and use the dropdown menu. This will also allow you to change your email settings to digest or vacation (no mail). //www.freelists.org/webpage/mso To be able to use the files section for sharing files with the group, send a request to mso-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and you will be sent an invitation with instructions. Once you are a member of the files group, you can go here to upload/download files: http://www.smartgroups.com/vault/msofiles *************************************************************