The Dashboard's $$Line Items$$ dump sheet only contains the unit costs for the Labor, Material, Equipment, Sub, and Other cost categories. How can I sum up the total cost for one of these cost categories in the estimate?
Normally, you would use the SUMIF function in order to conditionally sum up data based on some criteria -- we often use this approach to create dashboards that break a project's total cost into UNIFORMAT and CSI buckets. However, the $$Line Items$$ dump sheet doesn't readily contain the columns necessary to do this for the individual cost categories.
Inside of the $$Line Items$$ dump sheet, there are individual columns for Labor Cost, Material Cost, Equipment Cost, Sub Cost, and Other Cost. These are the UNIT costs for the line item. In order to get the total cost for any of those cost categories, you have to multiply the unit cost for a given category by the line item's Quantity.
In order to sum up the total cost for a given cost category, you have to use the SUMPRODUCT function. This allows you to multiply two columns together and then sum those results. For example...
Assume we have a Dashboard whose Labor Cost is Column F and Quantity is Column Y. To sum up the total Labor Cost in the estimate, I would write the function below...
=SUMPRODUCT('$$Line Items$$'!F:F, '$$Line Items$$'!Y:Y)
The formula will multiply the Labor Cost times the Quantity for each line item in the $$Line Items$$ dump sheet and then sum up those values. The end result is the Total Labor Cost for the estimate.
You can use the same approach for each cost category you want the total cost for.