Help with transferring data into different tabs

Mork1821 wrote:

Wow Mathetes, your elaborate system sounds but way above my capabilities!!

Don't sell yourself short. I will admit to having a lot of Excel experience (been working with spreadsheets possibly longer than you've been alive--since the early 1980s), but one of the things I've learned is that simple usually works well. That's part of the point I was trying to make.

Learning to use tools like Pivot Table (the link I gave you should help; YouTube has a LOT of instructional videos) makes it fairly easy to hand a well designed and maintained database over to Excel and basically let it do the heavy lifting. One of the mistakes that newbies make is to make too much of it a slightly automated version of what they may have done on paper, rather than taking advantage of the power of Excel. You might find it useful, if you've not already done so, to pass through a good bookstore (or Amazon) and look for a beginner's book on Excel, one that deals with things like budget/expense tracking.

One of the best ways to learn to take advantage of Excel's abilities is -- believe it or not --to play with it in designing an application that you care about. Let's say, oh, how about family budget? Seriously. Working on something that will be helpful to you gives the motivation. You need to give yourself permission, though, to play; by which I mean be free to experiment, make mistakes, work through some trial and error. You might find it easier to being by just tracking expenses.

And for that all you need is a simple and ongoing list of transactions...and, this is important in terms of ease of doing it, you should find it possible to download from your bank(s) and credit card company(ies) their data on your transactions. They may be -- will be -- inconsistent in terms of sequence of columns, but they'll all have the data you need to build a very functional database of all financial transactions. And they did most of the work of data entry (you'll need to add budget categories and subcategories). 

I've attached a small spreadsheet this time that shows the headers in my database. And I note again, I download the data from several bank accounts, several credit cards (do a little work to make sure the columns all line up in the consolidated database) and then I add budget info to each line item. It ain't rocket science!