Excel is, without a doubt, the most versatile productivity tool available. It can do everything from number crunching to graphs and charts as well as intricate form layouts. One of the most practical everyday uses for this functionality is keeping track of your personal finances.

If you have found a program dedicated to this functionality, such as Quicken or GnuCash, is not for you then Excel is the way to go. To get you kick started, here is a fantastic collection of Excel templates available for download. Most are completely free, but some offer extra functionality for a small fee. Everything from a checkbook register to mortgage calculations to auto mileage logs (for people who run a business) is covered.

If Excel is your thing, then be sure to take a look at this site.

Over the past month or so, I have covered several different software packages for managing your personal and/or small business finances, so today I will provide some a resource to perhaps the most popular tool of all, Excel.

On Microsoft Office Online, you can find lots of Excel Templates for managing budgets. Scrolling through the selections, everything from personal finances to event and wedding planning has a provided template. All of the templates are available for free so take a look and see if one catches your eye.

The benefit to using Excel over another financial package is you have ultimate control over how data is input, stored and calculated. Of course, this is also the biggest problem as well, but if you just need something simple then an Excel template may be the way to go.

At home I use Google Docs for everything, but at work Microsoft Office is king. One resource I just recently found out about is Microsoft Office Online.

Here you can find downloads for any Office version categorized by product (Excel, Word, Access, etc.) as well as access lots of free stuff such as:

• Clip art
• Fonts
• Templates
• Detailed how-to write ups

The site is very well put together and truly is a great resource for Office users. One thing the need to give up, however is their Office OFFline Web comic…