Making your first chart from the budget
A new module, and this one is a pleasant one. All course long we have built sheets that answer questions. Now we are going to take one of those answers and make it something you can see.
Charts. Folks work themselves up over charts, and there is no need for it. You press a button, and truth be told, that is most of the job. The clicking is easy. The real work is deciding what is worth charting in the first place.
What a chart is really for
A chart should make one point. Just one. If you look at it and wonder what you are supposed to be seeing, it has failed you. The number of colors in it does not matter, nor does that second axis you found tucked away in some menu.
I say this often: if your chart needs a paragraph to explain it, it is not a chart any longer, it is a riddle. And nobody wants a riddle when they open their budget. They want to glance at it and know something in two seconds.
So today we will make the plainest, most obvious chart there is. Spending by category. That is all. That is the whole of our 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, or whatever you named yours). You want two columns sitting side by side with nothing odd in between: the category names in one column, this month's total in the column right beside it.
If your totals are scattered about the sheet, gather them together. I usually do this off to one side, say columns H and I, plain finished numbers, no fancy formulas working in that spot.
Why copy them over instead of charting from wherever they already sit? Because charts get muddled by messy ranges, and if I am honest, so do I now and then. A tidy little block is easier on both of us.
Step two: select it and press the chart button
Highlight your two columns, the category names and totals together. In Google Sheets that is Insert, then Chart. In Excel it is the Insert tab, and the chart types sit right there. I am showing this in Sheets today, so if you are in Excel and it looks a little different, do not fret. The buttons are simply in another spot. The idea is the same.
It will likely guess a chart type for you. Sometimes it guesses a pie chart. I will admit I am not fond of pie charts; they get hard to read once you pass three slices. Change it to a bar chart if it does not choose one on its own. Bars are gentler on the eyes for this kind of thing.
Step three: look at it and ask whether it says one thing
Once it is up, take a step back from your screen. Does it plainly show which category you spend the most on? Good. That is the point. That is the sheet doing its work, even if it feels too simple to have been worth the trouble.
If you are squinting, or the bars all stand about the same height and you cannot tell what is going on, something further back is off, usually a totals formula pointed at the wrong range. That, I will note, is an easy mistake to make and an easy one to miss.
Casey learned this the hard way, after a fashion. I was trying to teach him to sort a table a while back, and he pressed the button that sorts one column and leaves the rest be, and it scrambled the whole thing in about a second. It took me ten seconds to set right. He still brings it up as though I did him wrong. But it is the same idea here: one thing shifts, and now nothing lines up with what it ought to. Always check that your chart is pulling from the range you truly meant.
A word on getting attached to the result
I once built a whole chart showing our grocery spending by month, spent the better part of a Saturday on it, and felt quite proud of myself. I showed Casey. He looked at it and said, "so we spend a lot in December." That was it. That was all he had.
It stung a little at first, I will grant you. But that IS the chart working. It was never meant to reveal some hidden secret. It was meant to make an obvious thing impossible to ignore. Sometimes obvious is the whole victory.
A small caution
If you are charting numbers that are still tied to live formulas elsewhere, do not delete or move those source cells later without checking your chart first. Charts can go blank or break in odd ways when the thing they point to disappears. Not dangerous, only aggravating, and it happens to me more than I care to admit.
Before next time
Make one bar chart from your budget categories, just the spending totals, nothing fancy. Look at it for ten seconds and see whether it tells you something you already half knew. If it does, you have done it right.
- C