Marking rows with "tags" and performing per-tag summation

[Vector]

Hi folks,

I have a spreadsheet where each row can fall into one OR MORE
of many different categories. I need to "tag" each row with the
appropriate category tags, and then generate totals for each tag.

So I created a Tag column and messed around with putting each tag
on its own line so that the tags were displayed in a width friendly way.
I figured I could create totals for each category tag by searching for
substrings. Which I think I got working. When I realized that what
I implemented won't work if one category tag happens to be a
substring of another. Just as an example:

=SUMIFS(Amount,Tag,"*John Doe*")
=SUMIFS(Amount,Tag,"*John Doenkel*")

I suppose I could fix this by adding a delimiter after each tag such
as ';'. However, I'm wondering if... as a noob... I'm overlooking some
better if not built-in way to apply tags to rows and generate totals for
those tags. Any suggestions?

Thanks

 

[Bob Phillips]

You could use

=SUMIFS(Amount,Tag,"*John Doe*")-SUMIFS(Amount,Tag,"*John Doenkel*")

or perhaps


=SUMIFS(Amount,Tag,"*John Doe *")