Sort Your Expense Data

In this extension, you will reorganize your expenses using data sorting.

Data sorting allows you to rank the costs of your expense items from most to least or list your expense categories in alphabetical order.

This makes your budget easier to read and understand.

To sort your expenses, you will rank the costs of your expense items from most to least, and put your expense categories in alphabetical order.

To begin, open your spreadsheet.

Your spreadsheet is automatically saved in Google Drive, and you can come back to it anytime.

Rank your costs from most to least by sorting the data.

First, select the range of cells that contains all four columns of your spreadsheet table including each heading.

Apply data sorting.

A box appears that allows you to customize your sorting.

Because your spreadsheet has headings, you can sort by Item, Cost, Category, or Frequency.

Next, sort your costs from most to least or least to most.

You can sort from A to Z or Z to A. A refers to the lowest number, and Z refers to the highest.

See the ranking of your costs from most to least.

Notice that the information in your other columns -- Item, Category, and Frequency -- has also been sorted to correspond to the new order of costs in the Cost column.

The spreadsheet automatically arranges all your data, so it remains consistent and all of your costs still correspond to the correct categories.

You can sort the data in any of your columns.

For example, put your categories in alphabetical order to make items easier to find.

To do this, apply data sorting to the category column instead of the cost column.

Your categories are now listed in alphabetical order.

Data sorting makes your expense data easier to interpret and helps you make good decisions about saving and spending money.

Now, it’s your turn. Rank your costs from most to least, and arrange your categories in alphabetical order.