The One Where I End Up Back Where I Started

I finally realized that it made more sense to buy some spreadsheets I needed rather than teach myself the elaborate formulas that were needed to, say, put together a budget spreadsheet. I mean, I have a lot of writing left to do and that's more important.

I decided to give some budgeting spreadsheets a whirl. Okay, I had one already, but I wasn't using it, so surely there must be something better out there, right?

This, BTW, was inspired by an ad on Instagram for a financial spreadsheet. It only came in Google Sheets, though, and I wanted Microsoft Excel.

So the first spreadsheet I tried looked a lot like the one in the ad. It was very complicated. Things didn't work right in the copy I made. I think this was my fault because I deleted (and added) rows rather than typing over the data already there as the example.

It felt like too much work to start over.

The next spreadsheet was cool and I liked it--until I realized it wasn't auto-populating data from the expenses sheet to the monthly sheets. That I was expected to transfer the data manually. Say what? That meant adding up everything for an individual month and trusting I didn't miss anything.

Then I remembered the budgeting spreadsheet I already owned. It separated everything into month for me. I could use this and then transfer the data to the new spreadsheet already added for me.

Um, yeah. It eventually dawned on me that I should just use the old budget spreadsheet I already had because it worked better than anything else I tried and I couldn't remember why I wasn't using it to begin with. It has clear instructions, it's easy to use, and it has pie charts. So after shopping for spreadsheets and spending money on them, I'm using the one I already owned. Oops.