How to calculate a running total in Excel

When presented with a table of data that requires analysis, one common requirement is to calculate a running total or what some might call a cumulative sum of individual values.

One application might be a table containing the amount of money spent across a number of transactions and there is a need to provide a running total to show the total spend across the data set.

There are a couple of different methods to achieve this but the easiest way is to use the function

=sum($B$2:B2)

where column B contains the values that you wish to add in a running total.

This gif (below) is the above function being added to a table containing values. I've used the keyboard shortcut F4 to set the cell reference to absolute so that when it fills down, the second part of the cell range increments with each row.

Comments

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