It's good to be aware of the pros and cons of each method and choose the one best suited. Other solutions like pivot tables, DAX and power query are more robust and handle inserting or deleting rows of data easily but are harder to set up. Simple formulas in the worksheet are easy to set up but won't handle inserting or deleting new rows of data easily. Some offer a more robust solution when adding or removing rows from the data, other methods offer an easier implementation. We've explored options including formulas in the worksheet, pivot tables, power pivot DAX formulas, and power query.
There are many different options for calculating running totals in Excel.
With the optional sorting step above, if we add dates out of order to the source data, power query will sort by date and return the correct order by date for the running total. Right click anywhere on the table and choose Refresh to update the table. What happens with the running total when we add or remove rows from our source data? We will need to refresh the power query output table to update the running total with the changes.
