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 “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...