Microsoft can now import banking activity into Excel

In a bid to help millions of people across the world who use Excel to track budgets and personal finances, Microsoft is launching a new Money in Excel feature.

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For Microsoft 365 subscribers, Money in Excel is a template add-in that allows them to securely connect to bank, credit card, investment, or loan accounts and import transactions and account information directly into a spreadsheet.

The Verge reports that potential users will need to be a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber in the US to get access to Money in Excel, and they can simply download the template to begin connecting bank accounts through the Plaid connector, adding that most major US financial institutions are supported, and the template will automatically import transactions from accounts into a single workbook.

Transactions are categorized to make it easy to analyze how spending  is done and there are  alerts for increases to subscription fees or bank and overdraft charges. Money in Excel also automatically generates charts for recurring expenses, or a monthly snapshot of spending that is easy to glimpse, according to The Verge.

This is not Microsoft’s first foray into personal finance products. Money in Excel follows Microsoft’s discontinued personal finance management software, Microsoft Money. Microsoft scrapped Microsoft Money more than 10 years ago, but an MSN Money app returned to the Windows Store back in 2012 as a news aggregator and for tracking stocks.