Forum Discussion
Microsoft's Monthly College Budget Template Excel 2013 - how it works ?
arjunrr I understand Excel, and still fully agree with you that this template is very (I'd say "overly") complicated. It suffers from the same syndrome that too many of the Excel templates suffer from (IMHO) and that is that it's too cute. Whoever developed it was aiming for sizzle rather than substance. It may indeed have substance, but it's obscured by unnecessary features such as the "slider" (a drop down selector for the month would be equally effective, but less jazzy, so jazzy it is, functional it's not).
And unless I missed it, I didn't see how you would enter income and expenses in an itemized way; looked more like you had to track the raw data somewhere else.
Frankly, if I were you, I'd go find another template. Or create my own.
arjunrr Usually, these kind of templates are overly complicated. Personally, I find them quite useless. Nice if you want to learn some Excel tricks, but often very difficult to maintain and/or adapt to a real life situation. They often contain hidden sheets (like this one) and a massive number of named ranges and named formulae. Named ranges and named formulae are great, but this particular has 18 such and if you are not the designer, you need to spend quite some time unraveling and understanding them.
This particular template does not use Power Query or Pivot Tables/Charts (as far as I can discover), but it has some techniques I would never think of using myself. But that's irrelevant. Is this template something you would want to use yourself, are are you just learning about Excel?
Attached is a sample modeled on the income and expense tracker I use myself. It's one I created myself.
No graphs. A Pivot Table is used for summarizing income and expenses by month and by category.
Raw data is imported from the banks and credit cards; I then manually assign budget categories.
- I'm looking at it. It's a very simple and effective way to keep track of your money.
Thank you for sharing this budget sample with me.