When you go on a shopping website, they have a “shopping cart”. You can click all the things you need, and the computer will total up everything you bought. If I have a list of items, I want to select certain ones and have the computer total it up for me.
Is there any program that can do this at home? I feel Access could, if I could figure it out. I have looked around, but I’ve only found programs for sale and this isn’t important enough to spend too much money on.
Thanks!
A simple shopping list can be done in Notepad … but this doesn’t seem to be what you’re asking for.
Do you want a small database of various grocery products from which you can select? Complete with prices? I don’t think that would be readily available.
You could perhaps save several grocery receipts in a row, manually input the costs of your items, and have a rough database that could be used in Access or even Excel.
If there were a commercial product out there like you are asking for – how would it account for differently-proced goods in different locales? Or sales at your local stores?
I’ve done this at work with an Access database, where I enter new items as I order them. Mine has drop down lists of items sold by a particular manufacturer. This could be modified to reflect what you buy at what store. To make it really Jetson-like, you could buy a scanner pen or wand on e-bay, hook it up as a keyboard wedge, and store the UPC code in the database. As you use goods with UPC codes, the database would keep track of what you need to buy (to replace), and spit out a shopping list on demand. The hard part of all of this is the tedious entry of product data into the database.
Vlad/Igor
Ok I don’t understand **Vlad ** that much, and I don’t think I explained myself very carefully.
I want to put in, for example: (using stuff from around my desk as an example)
Computer: $2000
KeyBoard $50
Mouse $60
Lotion: $2
Candy: $3
Paper Clips: $1
And so on and so forth.
At a later date I would like to be able to come back and say: I want one keyboard, one mouse, and some paperclips. And I want to be able to check these three items and have the computer come back and say:
Your total is $111.00
without me having to add it up. The original price list would be pages and pages long.
Is this clearer?
MSExcel.
First column (A) is item name.
Second column (B) cost per item.
Third column © is left blank for now, but will be used to indicate how many you plan to buy.
Fourth column (D) is formula “=B2*C2”
At the bottom of the speadsheet (Cell D100, for instance) sum up the values in D.
You could make each cell in column E equal to your summation cell if you wanted the running total displayed at all times. “=D100”
Yeah, that’s exactly what my database does. When I built the database, I put in the item, where I got it from and how much it cost. When I order things, I select what I want, and the individual price, plus the total price shows up. I hit a print button and get a sheet listing my items and how much they cost, along with the total. I could build a report that simply tells me the total cost, if I wanted just that information.
Vlad/Igor
To be more clear, the “=B2C2" formula above is only for the 2nd row. Of course the third row would be "=B3C3”, and so on.
This is conceptually simple in Access or Excel. The painful part is the data entry – and keeping up with the variances in prices among different suppliers/stores.
Are you looking to “catalog” anything you may happen to buy for your home (groceries, clothes/linens, electronics, auto maintenance, etc.) or are you just interested in, say, groceries alone?
If you have a palm the product “HandyShopper” is freeware, and is very well regarded.