Keeping track of your expenses is one of the fundamentals of living good life. So I asked you to prepare a personal expense tracker as part of our 10,000 RSS Subscriber Milestone contest. I have received 7 excellent entries in this contest, each capable of making expense tracking a breeze while providing good analytics of the expense data to understand how you spend.
Thanks everyone for participating and making this a huge learning experience for you and I. Personally I have learned several useful formula and tracker related tricks from this.
How to vote?
Each of the 7 entries start with a title including authors name. Each entry includes a small image of the tracker along with few other thumbnails. Click on the images to see them in bigger versions. You can download the source workbooks and play with the trackers yourself.
Tell me which one you liked most by posting a comment with the option number. The winner (option getting maximum votes) will get Toshiba Mini 300 Series Netbook.
That is right. A Netbook. (find out more about the exact model and specs here
Please note that these files are copyrighted to original authors and you cannot use them for commercial purposes.
I have included 3 comments against each entry based on my understanding of the tracker. Please share your opinions and reviews using the comments section of this post.
Excel Personal Expense Tracker by Bigtaff [Option 1]
My comments:
- Looks awesome
- Can handle multiple currencies
- Provides excellent analysis on various criteria (by month, monthly, annual, by person, by category etc.)
Excel Personal Expense Tracker by Cnat [Option 2]
My comments:
- Very cool frequency analysis of expenses by date
- Good use of in-cell charts to compare income with expenses
- Simple, easy to use tracker
Excel Personal Expense Tracker by Ibrahim [Option 3]
My comments:
- Separate sheets for each of the 12 months, good for yearly tracking
- Analytics by month or by expense category
- Simple Grid like structure for entering data
Excel Personal Expense Tracker by Karthik [Option 4]
My comments:
- Tracks expenses for one month at a time
- Tracks various payment modes (cash, check, card) and payment due dates
- Nice summary of expenses by account, payment status, category and week
Excel Personal Expense Tracker by Pedrowave [Option 5]
My comments:
- Simple tracker with easy input sheet
- Option to track by month or by day of month
- A simple chart shows income compared to expenses and savings
Excel Personal Expense Tracker by Romeog [Option 6]
My comments:
- Looks awesome, the expense dashboard is quite versatile with ability to view expense data for any month, any number of days etc.
- Easy to compare categories and choose which categories to include in output
- Simple data entry sheet
Excel Personal Expense Tracker by Tessaes [Option 7]
My comments:
- Clean input sheets, easy to enter the data
- Summaries by category and daily, weekly and monthly statistics
- Simple charts to understand how actual expenses differed from budgets
Please vote for the option you liked most:
Use the comments and tell me which option you liked best. Go!
Thank you
I sincerely thank Bigtaff, Cnat, Ibrahim, Karthik, Pedrowave, Romeog and Tessaes for taking time to participate in this contest and make such beautiful and delightful trackers. Thank you so much for your generosity in sharing what you know.
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good