Very close

There's a lot of data to enter, and I want as few keystrokes as possible, but the data doesn't exist yet, and will be entered multiple times into multiple renditions of the sheet by multiple people. That's why I want to try and keep some level of uniformity, but the result needs to be able to be a bunch of things.

I suppose another way to describe all this, is that I'm intending to turn excel into a compiler for my own custom programming language that will apply only to my worksheet. I realize that this means I'm not really using excel for what excel is supposed to be used for, but there are so many other things that I want the worksheet to do that only excel can do better than most anything else.

I feel like I'm still not explaining this right, so I'll address each one of your suggestions and see if that doesn't help clear up what I'm trying to do:


a) There's a setting in Excel that tells it where to move the selection after you hit <Enter> on a cell. In Excel 2010 try <Alt-F>,t to open the Excel options, then select the Advanced section and, under "Editing Options", look for "After pressing Enter, _m_ove selection", which lets you decide what direction it moves; you say yours is down, which I think is the default, but I always turn it off so the selection stays where it is. There doesn't seem to be a down-and-right option, but maybe this'll be a help. Multiple copies will be going to several different computers, so I don't want to rely on a change in settings. Regardless, this is also only one section of a much larger document (sort of a win-all kind of worksheet with a point-and-click interface using graphics and page links with over 20 sheets... 8mb so far.)

b) You can enter the data all in one column and then use Excel functions to split it up and/or move it around. A very simple solution, and one I greatly considered, but I ran into the issue that it could get difficult to review all the data by eye when entered that way. Additionally, if the end user (not myself) decides that they want to insert data in the middle somewhere, it requires a fundamental understanding of excel to copy and paste or insert rows (which none of them have, and they seem to have no ability to learn)

c) The same from another angle: You can enter the data in an external text file, then import it into Excel. That sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, but I need there to be a button in the spreadsheet itself that will automatically create and name a new text document, and then I need it to import the data when they're done typing without any other interaction (see previous comment on their alarming technical ability) ...Is there any way to do all that? Even if it doesn't make a new document, I can probably find a way to slip a pre-made text file in the same location as the excel sheet, but I would still need all those other criteria to work, regardless of the folder structure on the computer.

d) You can write a VBA program to help you look at the value of each cell and decide what column it should be in.
I'm not too familiar with VBA. But this seems more like a replacement for the formulas I was already planning to use (and a very good replacement I'm sure) rather than making this any easier for the end user.

At its core, I'm writing a worksheet for a bunch of technological cavemen, that's designed to solve all their technological problems in regards to a specific and repeating task that we want to make go as smoothly as possible... without buying special software or hiring a coder.

Thanks for the help!