budget formula in excel?

If I understand your problem. you just need 4 columns. Columns 1 is the line item name (i.e., food). Column two is projected budget amount (how much you want to spend on that item for the current month). Column 3 is amount spent to date. Column four is amount spent versus budget (which is just column 2 minus column 3). At the bottom of each column is your monthly total (which is just the sum of the columns). The problem is that you have to update Column 3 manually. (i.e., if you spent $50 on food in week 1 and then $50 again in week two, after you spend teh second $50, you have to go back and enter $100 manually in food - column 3).

If you want to get fancy, you start a second worksheet for your spend. Column 1 is the item name (careful - this has to match the item name in column 1 in worksheet 1 exactly) and column 2 is the amount spent. Each time you spend something, you enter it at the bottom of worksheet two (item name and the amount spent on that item - you can get fancy by adding columns for when you made the purchase and where). If you do this, then instead of manually over-riding the amount spent to date in worksheet one, you use the sumif function to do the addition on a running basis. The function is =SUMIF(B2:B5, "John", C2:C5) where the first variable (B2:B5) is the range you are using for the lookup (in this case the item), the second variable (John) is the lookup variable (i.e., food or beer) and the third variable (C2:C5) is the amount spent. The easiest way to do this is name your worksheets (you can, of course, just use the default worksheet name) or just use one worksheet with your budget in the first four columns and the running spend in columns starting a few to the right. If you use separate worksheets, just include the worksheet name in the variable - =sumif(worksheet1!B2:B5, "=Food", worksheet2!C2:C5)

You can get as fancy as you want (i.e., a grand total worksheet, a worksheet for each month, etc.). I highly suggest just playing around with he sumif() function for some simple examples of what the function can do. Here's a link to an article that talks about different ways to use sumif - http://www.contextures.com/xlFunctions01.html#vide...

Yes

Why can't you spell "etc."?

D