Your first moves in a spreadsheet: type a number, add a column up, make it readable. No experience needed, and nothing to install.
B7 = 1300 All four amounts added up. Change one, and the total follows on its own.
A tutorial video makes sense while you watch it. Then you open a blank spreadsheet and aren’t sure where to click. The way past that is to do the moves yourself, on a sheet that tells you when you’ve got them right.
Below is a small monthly budget with one amount missing. You fill it in, add the column up, work out the average and make the headers stand out. Then you do the same on next month’s budget, on your own.
This is Witsheet, Witsy’s in-browser spreadsheet. It works like Excel and checks each step as you go.
Cells hold one value each and are named like squares on a map: B5 is
column B, row 5. Typing into a cell and pressing Enter stores a value. Formulas start with = and work themselves out again whenever the cells
they use change, which is the whole point of a spreadsheet. Formatting, such as
bold or colours, changes how a value looks, not what it is.
With those four you can already keep a budget, a price list or a team list. The other practice pages, lookups and pivot tables included, are these same moves put together.
B2:B5 is every cell from B2 down to B5, not two cells. That’s how one short formula covers
a whole column. A range that stops a row short is the most common wrong total, because the sheet
gives no warning.
B7 = 1300 B2 through B5: every amount from the first to the last.
Without the equals sign, a formula is just text: type SUM(B2:B5) and Excel shows the
words and works nothing out.
AVERAGE adds up the numbers it finds and divides by how many there are. An empty cell isn’t a number, so it isn’t counted at all, and the average comes out higher than you’d expect.
B7 = 400 The average of three amounts, not four: an empty cell is skipped, not counted as 0. If nothing was spent, type 0, and the average drops to 300.
A cell can show 325 while it holds =AVERAGE(B2:B5). The formula bar above the grid
always shows what’s really in the cell, so when a number looks wrong, look there first.
To keep practicing in your own Excel, download the workbook: twelve months of simple spending, with a tasks sheet that goes from first totals to an average for each category. It’s the gentlest file in the collection.
Twelve months of spending across six categories in tidy long format. A gentle beginner set: totals per month with SUMIF, per-category averages, and share-of-total percentages.
72 rows · Month · Category · Amount
Free · fictional data · opens in Excel and Google Sheets
Witsy’s Excel course teaches a few hundred small skills, called Wits, the way this page teaches Excel basics: in a real spreadsheet, a step at a time. The placement test finds the ones you already have.
Take a few minute test to see how good you actually are with spreadsheets. Witsy creates a map of the Wits you should learn next.
Take the placement test Or just start learning →