We recently went on a road trip around parts of New Zealand’s north island. We have been to Taupo, Rotorua, East Cape and Napier. It took us 2 weeks, we drove more than 2,000 km and spent almost NZ $3,000 on the trip. Of course, being a data nerd, I made a plan of the trip in Excel and that helped us budget for this.
After getting back to home, I thought it would be fun to polish the planner workbook and share it with you all so you too can plan a fabulous road trip. So here we go.
Road trip budget & planner template
Click here to download the template.
How is it setup?
Simple. Any road trip style holiday has 4 main categories of expenses – Accommodation, Driving, Activities and Food. You can add one more category called “Other” to set budget for any miscellaneous expenses.
The template starts with budget for each of these 5 categories. Just specify the budget for each (except for food, which you can type in per day budget in the settings area.
Once you have the budgets in, also specify settings for calculating fuel expenses. Specify the MPG (or KMPL) and gas cost per gallon (or liter) and the template will calculate driving costs based on the number of miles (or KM) you plan to drive each day.
The last step is to enter daily details. For each day of your trip enter below details in the trip table:
- Date
- Where you plan to stay and how much it costs
- How much you plan to drive
- What activities you plan to take up and how much they cost
- Your actual food expenses (ie groceries, eating out, take away etc.)
- Any other expenses as you incur
The summary area shows how much of your budget is used up and a cute little thermometer chart for each category.
That is all. Enjoy your road trip.
Bonus: a simple way to extend the template
If you spend all the money on one credit (or debit) card, you can import the statement in to a new tab, categorize the expenses along the lines of Stay, Drive, Activities, Food or Other and then use SUMIFS to calculate actual values.
Hui’s Excel Hack
My apologies to Chandoo, but I have hacked his post
I have been using Excel 2016 and Office 365 for a while and as a Mining Engineer love to pay with Location data
I Rearranged Chandoo’s data and added a Single Activity Field instead of having multiple activity fields
I dragged the whole new table into Power Map and Voila
You can see how simple this is looking at the modified file here Dowload Modified File
Exporting the animation is a feature of Power Map, Yes I should have zoomed in on the heat map further
I hope Chandoo doesn’t remove my keys…
Like tracking things? Check out these templates
If you enjoy tracking and planning, check out these awesome templates too.
- 7 Personal finance trackers
- Grow your money mustache with this template
- Monthly planner template
- To do list template with priorities
How do you plan / track holidays?
For smaller / weekend getways, we don’t plan. We just get out and enjoy. But if we are going on a holiday / trip for more than a week, I like to plan things.
What about you? Do you plan / track your holidays? How do you do this? Please share your tips in the comments section.
17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!