Some sort of debt tracker template thingy required

aliasojo

Not sure if this should be on this board or in the Techie board so apologies in advance if anyone feels it shouldn't be here. I just thought maybe some people here might have something similar.

I use Excel spreadsheets to keep a monthly budget (one sheet per month). On this, I have what needs to get paid out on normal household spending and also a section to show how our debt is reducing. It's a bit boring though and is purely figure driven.

OH's eyes glaze over as soon as he looks at it.

We're fed up just now and are flagging a bit and we're starting to spend money we should really be sending to the debt.

So, I want some sort of display graph or chart or something that can be brightly coloured and illustrates in pictures just how our debt would fall if we stuck rigidly to our plan. ( A bit like a kids' incentive chart job but for adults. )

I want to print it out and stick it to the fridge so we can see it all the time.

Any ideas? Seen any ready made templates that might do the job?

FireWyrm

Hmmm...no ready made templates that I know of, but give. You a,ready have an excel spreadsheet, it shouldn't be hard to knock up a couple of graphs with decreasing cumulative values.....

Alternative, have a 'savings' chart like they do in hospitals when they are fund raising...you could colour in a block each time you save some money?

aliasojo

FireWyrm wrote: »

Hmmm...no ready made templates that I know of, but give. You a,ready have an excel spreadsheet, it shouldn't be hard to knock up a couple of graphs with decreasing cumulative values.....

Alternative, have a 'savings' chart like they do in hospitals when they are fund raising...you could colour in a block each time you save some money?

Shouldn't it? Why did you think I asked for ready made? :rotfl:

Guess I need an 'Excel for Dummies' book.

asparagus1968

somewhere on debt free recently, "eeby" or something was talked about,its a website that you can also have as a phone app,and its free.
it charts all your spends/saves/budget, maybe have a look at that?

though i've probably spelled it wrong!

Roland_Sausage

I found this snowball spreadsheet taht you can download from the link below to be pretty good. It uses the $ symbol, but if you ignore that the numeric values are the same.

http://www.vertex42.com/Calculators/debt-reduction-calculator.html

aliasojo

Thanks Roland but there's no pretty graphs or other pictures on that.

I want big bar charts or pie charts or something.

NorthernLas

Do you know what info you would display on the chart?
Have a go at using the chart facility in excel. In my version it is under Insert / Chart. There is a wizard so that you can choose the data to go into the chart and then the sort of chart e.g. pie chart or bar chart.
If you start with pretend data e.g. just a column of numbers, say actual paid / planned paid, then having a go is often the best way.
Don't worry too much about the data being on different worksheets (I am guessing this as you have a sheet for each month). This is something that you can do later (short term you could copy and paste your figures each month into a table and make your chart from it)

aliasojo

NorthernLas wrote: »

Do you know what info you would display on the chart?
Have a go at using the chart facility in excel. In my version it is under Insert / Chart. There is a wizard so that you can choose the data to go into the chart and then the sort of chart e.g. pie chart or bar chart.
If you start with pretend data e.g. just a column of numbers, say actual paid / planned paid, then having a go is often the best way.
Don't worry too much about the data being on different worksheets (I am guessing this as you have a sheet for each month). This is something that you can do later (short term you could copy and paste your figures each month into a table and make your chart from it)

I think I want maybe a bar chart type affair with each block being an amount per month.

So April would be a tall block with £100 owing (I wish, lol) then May would be £75 owing (so a slightly smaller block), June - £50 and so on.

I could do a forecast of how the blocks would look if £25 (for example) was paid off each month.

(We'd need quite a few blocks on the page though. :rotfl:)

At least that's what I'm thinking of just now, unless anyone has a better suggestion or idea? Has to be a pic though.

NorthernLas

Make a new worksheet and put some pretend figures in.

You need 1 column for the months, 1 for forecast paid off and 1 for actual paid off.

Then use the insert chart wizard so choose bar chart and select all of the data (click on top left and move mouse while holding left button down to get all of it).

Once you get a chart that shows what you want, then all you need to do is to figure out how to get the table showing the real data from you sheets.

aliasojo

I can't find a chart wizard.





Just done a search...they took the wizards away from Excel 2010.


http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2010/12/07/cant-find-the-chart-wizard-no-worries.aspx

Lots of unhappy people judging by the user comments at the bottom.

MusicalLawyer

If you want, you can PM me what you want on the graph, I'll make up a couple of different graphs for you and email them to you?