How to Create a Simple Budget in Excel 2003

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to create a simple budget in Excel 2003. Let's open up Excel 2003. Clicking on the start button, go to all programs. Microsoft Office, let's open Excel 2003. Now what we're going to so is begin by create some headers. Let's say in A1 we're going to say item name, that's going to be our budget item. Let's expand that a little bit. B1 is going to be budget amount. C will be amount spent. And we're going to call D difference. So let's make these bold. And we're going to put in some items. Let's say mortgage, food and gas. Now mortgage we know how much that's going to be, let's say 1500 dollars. And for food, oh let's give a budget of 600 dollars. For gas let's say 700. Now on the amount spent let's put in the amount that we spent this month. In it you would create this at the beginning of the month and kind of update it as the month goes along. The mortgage we know we're going to spend 1500 dollars. The food let's say we actually spent 450. And gas maybe we took a trip this month, let's say we spent 850. Now we're going to have Excel calculate the difference so we'll know what we're over budget in and what we're under budget in. To do so click in that first cell type an equal sign, click on your budget amount for that row type a minus and then click on the amount spent. So it's going to subtract the amount spent from your budget amount. Say enter and you get your answer. Let's copy that cell and past it into the other cells. As you can see it's been relative in that it is actually totaling the row that goes along with where we copied it. We can see what we're under budget in and what we're over budget in. It's that easy to create a budget. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to create a simple budget using Excel 2003."