Making your first chart from the budget
Okay sooo. New module, and this one's kind of fun. We've spent this whole course building sheets that answer questions. Now we're gonna make one of those answers visible.
Charts. People get intimidated by charts for no reason. You click a button, honestly, that's most of it. The hard part isn't the clicking, it's picking the right thing to chart in the first place.
Here's the thing about charts
A chart should make one point. One. If you look at it and go "wait, what am I supposed to be seeing here," it failed. It doesn't matter how many colors are in it or whether you added a second axis you found in a menu somewhere.
I tell people this a lot: if your chart needs a paragraph to explain it, it's not a chart anymore, it's a puzzle. And nobody wants a puzzle when they open their budget. They want to glance at it and know something in two seconds.
So today we're making the most boring, obvious chart possible. Spending by category. That's it. That's the whole ambition.
Step one: get your categories and totals in one clean spot
Go to your budget sheet, the one with your five categories on it (Housing, Food, Transportation, whatever you named yours). You need two columns sitting next to each other with nothing weird in between: category names in one column, this month's total in the column right next to it.
If your totals are scattered around the sheet, pull them together. I usually do this off to the side, like columns H and I, just clean numbers, no formulas doing anything fancy in that spot, just the finished totals.
Why bother copying them over instead of charting straight from wherever they already live? Because charts get confused by messy ranges, and honestly so do I sometimes. A clean little block is just easier for both of us.
Step two: select it and hit the chart button
Highlight your two columns, category names and totals together. In Google Sheets that's Insert, then Chart. In Excel it's the Insert tab, then you'll see chart types sitting right there. I'm demoing in Sheets today, so if you're in Excel and it looks different, don't panic, the buttons are just in a different spot, the idea's the same.
It'll probably guess a chart type for you. Sometimes it guesses a pie chart. Not gonna lie, I don't love pie charts, they're hard to read once you've got more than three slices. Change it to a bar chart if it doesn't pick one on its own. Bars are just easier on the eyes for this kind of thing.
Step three: look at it and ask "does this say one thing"
Once it's up, step back from your screen for a second. Does it obviously show which category you spend the most on? Good, that's the point. That's the sheet working, even if it feels too simple to be worth the effort.
If you're squinting or the bars all look about the same height and you can't tell what's going on, something upstream is off, usually a totals formula pointing at the wrong range. Which, side note, is an easy mistake to make and an easy one to miss.
Casey found this out the hard way, sort of. I was trying to teach him how to sort a table a while back and he clicked the button that sorts one column without touching the rest, and it scrambled the whole thing in about one second. Took me ten seconds to fix. He still brings it up like I did something wrong 😂. But it's the same idea here: one thing shifts and now nothing lines up with what it's supposed to line up with. Always double check your chart is pulling from the range you actually meant.
A word on getting attached to the result
I built a whole chart once showing our grocery spending by month, spent basically a full Saturday on it, felt really proud of myself. Showed Casey. He looked at it and said "okay so we spend a lot in December." That's it. That's all he had.
And at first that stung a little, ngl. But that IS the chart working. It wasn't supposed to reveal some hidden secret. It was supposed to make an obvious thing impossible to ignore. Sometimes obvious is the whole win.
A caution, small one
If you're charting numbers that are still connected to live formulas elsewhere, don't delete or move those source cells later without checking your chart first. Charts can go blank or break in weird ways if the thing they're pointing to disappears. Not dangerous, just annoying, and it happens to me more than I'd like to admit.
Before next time
Make one bar chart from your budget categories, just spending totals, nothing fancy. Look at it for ten seconds and see if it tells you something you already sort of knew. If it does, you did it right.
- C