Adding columns in Excel

[dougham]

I have a simple budget spreadsheet, with columns C thru N representing months January thru to December.
each row after the headings represents an expense item.
Some items have a known amount each month, such as Internet charge, deducted from bank or credit card without intervention, others vary as the money is spent, eg Food. I load the known amounts automatically for the year at the start of the year. The other amounts spent are added as the money is spent.

I'd like column O, the next column, to be the sum spent to date for each item. Therefore if today's date is in January, the total in column O would be the amount in column C. If today's date is in March, I'd like O to show the total for the columns C, D and E.

I can't find a simple formula to do this.  I'm prepared to fix a column to show the month number, or even the rightmost column letter, such as E.

[Salmon Trout]

Well, that is 1 hour of my life I'll never get back, but I now have a feel for relative and absolute r1c1 type cell representation, the INDIRECT function, and getting the month number from today's date. You can Google these topics for lots more guidance than I can give here.

Formula in Column O

=SUM(INDIRECT("RC[-12]:RC[-" & 13-MONTH(TODAY()) & "]",FALSE))

Note my local currency is UK pounds. I hope you can see the screen grab and attachment.



[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]

[strollin]

Deleted

[Salmon Trout]

ditto

[strollin]

If what Salmon Trout posted is what the OP was asking for then I would suggest altering the design of the sheet a little.  Instead of 1 line for the various categories such as Food, Internet, Gasoline, etc...  I would use 2 or even 3 lines per category such as Food - Budget, Food - Actual and maybe even Food - Difference.  That way, you could load the budgeted amounts into the budget field at the beginning of the year and then each month enter the actual spent amount in the actual field.  The difference field could keep track of budgeted vs actual.  This design would give more information regarding how well one is adhering to the budget.  By adding the actual columns across, Column O could still be used to show a running tally of the total spent for the year for each category.