How to Make a Budget Using Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to make a budget using Excel. Let's open up Excel. We're going to go to our start button, all programs, let's find Microsoft Office and let's open Excel. And we're going to create a simple budget here. Let's say we're going to create a column called budget items. And let's say budgeted amount. Let's say spent and D - let's say difference. This budget is going to keep track of all the items we have budgeted, the amount that we are going to allow for those budgets, budgeted items. What we've actually spent on them, and we're going to calculate the difference here in this field, this column. So let's add some items, let's say our mortgage, food, and let's say entertainment. It's just real simple for example. Let's say for a mortgage we know exactly how much that's going to be every month, so let's budget out fifteen hundred dollars for that. Now for food let's budget oh say five hundred dollars. And for entertainment let's budget four hundred and fifty dollars a month. Now let's put in there what we've actually spent on those. Mortgage probably doesn't change very often so we spent fifteen hundred dollars. Now for food let's say we went out to eat a little more than we thought we might and we spent six hundred dollars this month on food. Entertainment, we actually didn't go see that movie on the weekend so we only spent two hundred dollars. Now we're going to have Excel automatically calculate the difference between these items. Let's just click into the very first item row, we're going to create a formula. Type the equals key which beings a formula. And let's click on our budgeted amount for that row. Now let's type a minus, and then click on the spent amount for that row. So this is going to calculate the budgeted amount minus what you actually spent. Press enter and you get your answer. There was no difference between what we budgeted and what we spent for mortgage. Let's do that for the other two. Simply by right clicking inside of that cell, saying copy, and let's paste it into these other rows. And that maintains your references for your formula meaning that it will only calculate for the row that it is currently in. So we were over by a hundred dollars on food and under by two hundred and fifty dollars on entertainment. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to create a budget in Excel."