Forum Discussion
Borrowed budget spreadsheet -- need to know how to SUMIFS by month
I'm curious: is this an "official" Microsoft template for budgets? Or did you find it somewhere else on the web? Or is it from a friend?
In any event, the formula looks more complicated than it needs to be, especially for a beginner with Excel. There's little reason for tracking expenses to be all that tricky.
SO...could I suggest you upload your actual spreadsheet so we can take a look at it--an image is actually of limited value. It is far more helpful to see how the whole workbook is constructed.
You're to be commended for trying to tackle this; no excoriation here. 🙂
mathetes Thank you for your reply. This is a spreadsheet that someone shared on the personal finance subreddit. It has some things that I will never use (like tips), but I like the way it gives me category totals. I'll upload it and you can see what you think. You are likely right that it's more complicated than I need, but I do love a good challenge.
All I've done at this point is add the Pivot Table as a demonstration of its power to summarize your Daily Expense Tracker data.
I added a column that extracts the month from the date field. (This is an easy way to do that; I know there's another way in the Pivot Table itself, but right now didn't have time to get into that.)
I'll look at that formula that you wanted help on later on. Right now, as I have said, I just wanted to demonstrate this Pivot Table's ability to produce a very helpful summary. Were you to continue using it through the whole year, you'd have to update the data source, and then just click on "Refresh" under the Data menu.
