Excel 2010, Consolidating Category Axis in Pie Chart

Question

I am working on a very basic "home budget" spreadsheet, the goal of which is to quickly be able to see: A) how much money is left over after the bills are paid and B) what % of withdrawals are going to what categories of expenses.

I have a Pie Chart built off of the following data (which is formatted as a table):

category       withdrawal
-------------------------
Utilities      108.59
Auto           119.13
Loans          500.00
Credit Card    78.00
Credit Card    161.00
Credit Card    16.00
Utilities      220.51

What I am attempting to do is consolidate each of the categories into one slice of the pie that is then displayed with it's Category as the label and the percentage of the pie it takes up. What I end up with is each category, regardless of it's uniqueness, taking a slice, like so:

Am I going to have to solve this with lots of hidden cells containing functions to add specific categories together? I was hoping I could arbitrarily add categories, simply within my table of data without having to go and change formulas in a dozen other areas.

Answer 1

Enter: PivotTables and PivotCharts

You can be arbitrary with your categories, and it will just lump the same categories together and spit them out however you want (which in your case is probably a sum). You can also add a "sub category" field and then see what percentage of your utility bill goes to heating, or electricity. Or what percentage is which credit card.

Answer 2

If you define the range of your categories and values as a name in the workbook. When you insert another row into that range it will automatically add the new category and value to your chart.

This doesn't work if you try to append a new category on the end of the range, but it does if you insert a new row into the range.