Category Tracker for Microsoft Excel
Build a pie chart visualizing your spending and income over a completely customizable date range with the Category Tracker Report for Microsoft Excel.
About the Category Tracker Report
Build a pie chart visualizing your spending and income over a completely customizable date range with the Category Tracker Report for Microsoft Excel.
See the Category Tracker for Google Sheets.
The Category Tracker Template is a powerful yet simple way to understand your spending and cash flow over a configurable time period. It’s one of the most popular Tiller Community templates.
Use this template to build a pie chart visualizing your spending and income in each of your transaction categories over a customizable date range.
The template also lists your category totals, income, expenses, transfers, and net cash flow for your selected time period.
How To Install the Worksheet
Use this template to build a pie chart visualizing your spending and income in each of your transaction categories over a customizable date range. The template also lists your category totals, income, expenses, transfers, and net cash flow for your selected time period.
Add Excel Tables to Your Workbook (if necessary)
If you have a newer version of the Excel Foundation Workbook, you can skip this step. Otherwise, you’ll need to add Excel tables to your spreadsheet that contain the contents of the Transactions, Categories and Balance History worksheets before adding the worksheet.
Before adding the worksheet, you’ll need to add Excel tables to your spreadsheet that contain the contents of the Transactions, Categories and Balance History worksheets. Set up the Excel Table:
- Select the entire used data range (including the header row)
- Click Insert/Table in the file menu
- Check the “My table has headers” checkbox
- Click “Ok” in the Create Table modal dialog
- Assign a Table Name in the little text box in the top left of the toolbar— use “Categories” in the
Categoriesworksheet, “Transactions” in theTransactionsworksheet, and use “BalanceHistory” for theBalance Historyworksheet.
Download the Category Tracker Workbook
- Download the Category Tracker v1.62 workbook.
- Follow these instructions to copy the downloaded template into your Excel workbook and to connect the formula references to your local workbook data.
At this point your new template should be functional and linked to your local workbook’s data.
How to Use the Worksheet
Most of the improvements are under the hood. Functionally, the new Category Tracker is the same to use as the old one which is documented here.
Support and Troubleshooting
This template is exclusively supported here in the Tiller Community.
One thing to verify is if using the “Links” option you can replace the link to the new workbook. That might be a safer option.
In the image below, it’s the first “links” option. This icon won’t show up if your workbook has no links.
I use the search bar to get it, but I’m sure there’s another way.
Hi,
I would love more use of Excel with Tiller solutions!
I tried to insert your v1.50 sheet into my existing Tracker, but it really didn’t work. I had better luck moving my transactions and categories to the v1.50 template. Now it is working fine.
I would really love a Tiller solution of some kind for Envelope budgeting for Excel. I’ve tried this, but I’m not proficient enough with Excel to do it. It became impossible for me because Excel has no easy equivelent to the Sheets Query function. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback @yossiea and @jemmoa7. I apologize for not getting back to you sooner, but have been working on some other things.
I like your suggestion of using the “Edit Links…” workflow. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the “Break Link” button to do the trick (it just converted my data to static values) but I was able to get the “Change Source” button to work. I updated the original instructions. Any chance you can try again and let me know if it works for you… or if you have feedback to improve the instructions?
P.S. I hear you, @jemmoa7, on the need for an Envelope Budget in Excel. That is on our roadmap but unfortunately isn’t imminent. For now, I recommend using the Savings Budget in Sheets.
I think you’re right, I just tried it again. I ended up opening up my file from OneDrive and getting the path from Info.
I am though experiencing #N/A errors. See the below screenshot (ignore my chocolate and lottery.
)
I’m not 100% sure about the formula, but based on the template, I think the first column isn’t bringing everything across.
There’s something with the named range, I can’t even edit “Categories”
also, IIRC, you can filter and return more than one column at a time in Excel.
-edit- Actually, the error is in the Group/Type columns. You are filtering on Categories, so hidden stuff still show up because no categories are named “Hidden.” You still need to filter on “Hide From Reports.”