Book Spending Freak-Out

I have been working on entering data into my Excel spreadsheet to make a book inventory listing. I am up to book number 3355!

The price I paid for the book is documented. This spreadsheet also contains homeschooling curriculum, educational games, educational or historical music, and even some educational toys.

I got curious about the total I have spent on books, so I used Excel’s sum feature. I was shocked to see this number appear:

$43,134.23

This is simply not possible! Or is it?

I did a quick sort by price and found the error. I had noted that I purchased the book “Abraham Lincoln” by Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire for $38,255.00. I can assure you, I did not pay that! I was able to fix the error by looking up the price that the homeschooling vendor charges for the book ($13.95).

If you are curious about how much we’ve spent on books (which are in the system), you can do the math.

This is imperfect data as I haven’t finished entering the information which I have noted on paper. I also have books on the shelves which I didn’t inventory.

Still, the amount I spent is actually not too bad, when compared to tuition I would have paid for my two children to attend private preschool (it would have been 4 years for one son and 3 years for the other). Also if I were to figure what a private school education would cost us if we were to opt out of the public school system, what I’ve spent is minimal.