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Introducing Money in Excel

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Hi, Office Insiders, our names are Jeremy Panwala, Carly Lincenberg and Letitia Liu and we’re Program Managers on the Modern Life Experiences (MLX) team based in San Francisco, California. We’re thrilled to introduce Money in Excel, a new smart template that will help you achieve higher financial well-being.

Money in Excel

Our small but mighty team started on this journey a little over a year ago to help people achieve higher financial well-being. Our goal is to reduce the stress and anxiety of managing money and allow you to do what’s most important in your life. The concept of Money in Excel started as an experiment. As we did more research, we quickly learned that a lot of people manage their money in Excel (pun intended), but not as efficiently as they could.

With Money in Excel, you’ll have all of your finances in one place. You’ll receive personalized insights and alerts about changes to your monthly spending, subscription prices, bank fees, and more. We aim to simplify your day-to-day money decisions to help you stay on track with your longer-term financial goals.

How it works

Seamlessly connect your financial accounts to Excel to view and manage all your finances in one place. To get started:

  1. Download the Premium Excel template.
  2. Sign in with your Personal or Family M365 credentials.
  3. Connect your financial accounts to Excel and see all your transactions in one place to understand how you are spending your money.
  4. Once you’ve added your financial accounts, navigate to the Templates tab, and customize your Money in Excel experience by adding different templates.
  5. Leverage tailored charts we’ve created for you or build your own using your favorite features in Excel.

Money in Excel template.

Scenarios to try

  • Onboard and link at least one financial account.
  • Review your financials and make sure everything looks accurate.
  • Transactions sheet: Edit merchant names and recategorize expenses.
  • Category sheet: Create some new custom categories.
  • Snapshot sheet: Review and change views from month to month.
  • Navigate to the ‘For you’ tab. What do you see?
  • Templates tab: Add the New Worth sheet.
  • Templates tab: Add the Recurring Expenses sheet.
  • Accounts tab: Connect another type of financial account.
  • Update: Pull your historical data and update your latest transactions.
  • Email: In a week’s time, check your inbox for a weekly summary email.

Availability  

Money in Excel is available on Excel for Windows, Excel for Mac, and Excel on the web for those in the US who have a Microsoft 365 subscription. To use Money in Excel, make sure you are running the following:

  • Windows 10 (version 1903 or later) or Mac OS X (version 10.9 or later).
  • Latest versions of Edge, Chrome, or Safari. Internet Explorer is not supported at this time.
  • Office for Windows Version 2003 (Build 12624.20382) or later.

We typically release features over some time to ensure that things are working smoothly. This is true for Insiders as well. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as Insiders, have had the opportunity to try them.

Feedback

As mentioned above, we are a small team, but we want to continue making this product better for those using it. The more feedback we get from all of you, the more we learn, and therefore the faster we can iterate. Good, bad, ugly, please send it our way. You can submit them by clicking Help > Feedback. Be sure to use #MoneyinExcel, so it gets sent directly to our team.

Learn what other information you should include in your feedback to ensure it’s actionable and reaches the right people. We are excited to hear from you!  Sign up for the Office Insider newsletter, and you’ll get the latest information about Insider features in your inbox once a month.