How To Use MS Excel to Prepare Your Personal Budget

In this day and age, one of the most difficult aspects to handle is home budgeting, like how we plan what we spend and how we keep our personal savings in check. Knowing how much money we have, how much money comes in and goes out is one of the best ways that we can deal with financial problems especially in times of global hardship. To make sure that we have all our income and expenses documented easily, we need to equip ourselves with tools that do that minus the extra spending, and Microsoft Excel does just that. MS Excel is a great tool for personal budget because it already comes with the usual software pack that we install in our computers and it’s easier to set up, more user-friendly and fully customizable.

But first, how to begin. Once you’ve opened MS Excel by clicking on the icon under Microsoft Office from the Programs section, you can save the file first before you begin typing your budget.

If you’re making an account of your daily and monthly expenses, it would be good to use different books per part of the budget planner and rename the books on the file on the bottom part of the screen where you find Book 1, Book 2, Book 3 with monthly, daily, savings, or whatever you need to plan for. Then, you can arrange your data by assigning labels to the top-most row and the first column to organize your books first before typing anything. If you’re typing a lot of information in one book and you find yourself not seeing the first row or column anymore, you may want to freeze the top row or column so that you still see under what section you’ll be putting your information. To do this, you can click on the View icon on the tool bar on the top part of your screen, click on Freeze Panes and choose either Freeze Row or Column, depending on what you need. This option is particularly good for the computer because needing to open many files to check on related data may just slow down your computer and be a source of inconvenience.

The software also has a calculator feature that can compute for you and all you need is to type the “=” equal sign before you type the equation you need on a blank field and when you press enter, the answer will already appear. The convenience of the calculation is very useful that even the most extensive budget planning firm would have this in their offices to plan, model and create flow charts, etc. Plus, having a wide array of color coding schemes and customizable font face allows us to arrange our data by color or font appearance for easier management.

Now, even when the task of personal budget planning may seem daunting, having the right tools for the job will help us get things done with great ease, minimized cost and the least time consumed.