These Spreadsheet Tricks Make Budgeting Fun

From the most detailed travel plans to excruciatingly detailed journals and complex to-do lists : My life motto is: You have a goal, your goal needs a spreadsheet. And when your goal is to better manage your money, a customizable spreadsheet can be your number one budgeting tool.

Both Excel and Google Sheets have budget templates to get you started with spreadsheets, but if you’re serious about keeping track of your expenses and savings, it’s helpful to learn how to use spreadsheet shortcuts quickly. Here are our favorite tricks to create a budget spreadsheet like a wizard.

Learn all hotkeys

Budgeting doesn’t have to be that tedious when you make Excel do all the work for you. Remember these basic keyboard shortcuts to make your life much easier:

• Select entire column: Shift + Space
• Select entire line: Ctrl + space
• Enable bold: Ctrl + B
• Enable Italic: Ctrl + I
• Enable underline: Ctrl + U
• Auto-selection: ALT+H+O+I. Select the data in the columns you want to customize and press ALT+H+O+I to make the column widths fit your data.

(For Mac users, use a command button instead of a control.)

Here are some lesser known but very useful tips for getting started as your budget gets more and more detailed.

• Autosum: ALT+=. AutoSum is critical to any budget spreadsheet. To use this shortcut, select an empty cell next to the data you want to add, then press ALT+= to get the sum of those cells.
• Instant Fill: CTRL+E. This automatically populates the data by column based on the patterns it finds. Start typing the template you want your data to appear in, then press CTRL+E to let Excel do the rest.
• Apply fixed costs: CTRL + Enter. Instead of typing a number in the first cell and using autocomplete, you can mark all cells where you want a fixed value, write that number, and use CTRL + Enter to enter that number into the selected cells.
• Switch formula: CTRL+~. This shortcut allows you to toggle between displaying a cell formula and a value on the active sheet—much faster than checking each individually in the formula bar. If you end up needing to remove formulas and keep only cell values, right-click and select “copy as values ​​only”.
• Automatic histogram: ALT+F1. Want to visualize your budget? Of course you do! This shortcut automatically creates and inserts a bar chart into the active worksheet using the data you select.

color code

Your budget will benefit from color coding to keep all your entries straight. Here’s how you can assign colors to different income and expense groups such as groceries, rent, bills, entertainment, and more:

• In Excel, choose Data > Data Validation and then select List under Allow. Enter the categories you want to add to your list.
• Select the cell(s) you want to add to the list, for example the cell with your rent in the list item labeled “Rent”. Click the Format tab and select Conditional Formatting > Cell Selection Rules > Advanced Rules.
• From here, make it so that whenever a cell contains a certain text (say, “Rent”), a certain color (say, red) changes. Going forward, whenever you select “Rent” from the dropdown, the cell will automatically be colored red, allowing you to more easily visualize your budget.

Format your dollars

Don’t waste your life by manually adding a dollar sign to every cell. you can mark cells as US dollars by default by going to the main menu and choosing Number > Currency .

Alternatively, once you’ve entered all your values, use Ctrl + Shift + $ to change the entire column to dollar amounts. Not only does this shortcut add a dollar sign, it formats decimal points and commas correctly. Don’t want decimals at all? Go to Number > Decrease Decimal. (This doesn’t remove the decimals, it just hides them.)

For more spreadsheet hacks, @exceldisctionary’s Instagram account is full of tips on visual aesthetics, and check out our HowToExcel recommendation for a video tutorial.