Lesson 5: Excel: Spreadsheet Basics Assignment, Video 1: "Create a Basic Checkbook Spreadsheet in Excel" In this video, we'll walk through creating a simple spreadsheet for your checkbook. Go to the Start button, find Excel, and we'll start by creating a blank workbook. In the first column, we'll have the date. The second column will be money in. The third column will be money out. Column D will be your current total. And column E could be a description. So we'll start by putting in some dates. Notice that I could grab that date and drag it down, and it will automatically fill the following dates. And we're going to say that we started with $500 in this account on the 25th. And on the 26th, we had $40 go in. On the 27th, $25 went out. On the 28th, 195 went in. And then you could add whatever you want as far as in and out. We'll give ourselves $1000 at the end there. And then we'll need to calculate what the total is going to be. So this formula, we always start with an equal sign. We'll take the number in the row before it, add what came in, and subtract what went out. So you can see the formula is =D2+B3-C3. And press Enter. So I started with 500, 40 came in, and now the total is 540. I could click on that cell, grab the handle, and drag it down, and the total gets updated for each transaction. And then in the Description column, I could put in things like cell phone bill, or payday, or refund, or something that'd describe each of those transactions.