I believe in frugal living and paying yourself first. One of the simple ways to achieve this is by using a budget. You know how much money you get. Once you can track (or estimate) how much you are spending, it is easy to see how much you are paying your future self and what wiggle room you have. So in the spirit of making you awesome in life, not just Excel, let me share a simple but elegant household budget spreadsheet. Click here to download free budget template.
Here is a screenshot of the budget.
How does it work?
Simple really.
- Start by entering your income and itemized spending. You can select various frequencies (for example public transport – $16 per week, dining out $70 per month etc.)
- As you type data, category level summaries are shown on top along with a data bar to show relative expenditure of each category.
- The BALANCE row on the left turns RED if you spend more than you make.
- The graph on left helps you see the big picture and optimize your spending / savings.
How is it built?
There are three components in the budget spreadsheet:
1. Calculation of monthly totals by category:
- There is a frequency mapping table in the “Settings” tab to help calculate monthly totals from various amounts at different frequencies.
- Using SUMPRODUCT and SUMIFS, we can calculate total amount per category by month, like below.
Say you have amounts in G7:G26 and frequencies in H7:H26. To calculate total amount by month,
=IFERROR(SUMPRODUCT(G7:G26, SUMIFS(freqs[Multiplication factor],freqs[Frequency],H7:H26))/12,0)
We are fetching an array of multiplication factors from freqs table (shown aside) using SUMIFS. We then multiply that with amounts in G7:G26 thru SUMPRODUCT and finally divide this with 12 to get monthly value. If there is an error (typos / no data etc.) we show 0.
Read up more about SUMIFS and SUMPRODUCT formulas.
2. Quick visualization of category level spending
As you enter values, you can see a quick total (arrived thru the formulas explained above) and a data bar. This data bar is made with Conditional Formatting. The databar cells have a reference to totals calculated in cells above. We just set up databar on all cells in one go (so Excel can relatively size them based on values). Use CTRL+Click to multi-select the cells.
3. Spending by category graph – Treemap (Excel 2016)
In the settings page, we can harvest all category level spending in one column and then feed that to any chart in Excel. I have used Treemaps because they work well with data like this. But if you want, you can use column / bar / donut / pie charts too. In fact, I have created another version of the spreadsheet with column charts so that you can use it in earlier versions of Excel.
Read more about Excel treemaps and sunburst charts | Another example of treemap – customer service dashboard
Do you use Excel to track and manage money?
I do. I have used spreadsheets to track money soon after I started my first job 15 years ago. I have built several workbooks to track budgets, vacation plans, retirement scenarios, self-employment cash flows and house purchases. From time to time I have shared those techniques here on Chandoo.org too. Check out below templates and tutorials.
- Grow your money mustache using Excel
- 7 more expense trackers for you
- Sharing trip expenses using Excel
- Retirement calculator using Excel
What about you? Do you use spreadsheets to track and manage your finances? Please share your thoughts and examples in the comments section.
23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.