How To Build a Habit Tracker In Mac Numbers

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to build a Habit Tracker in Numbers on your Mac.

Let me show you some basic Number skills while learning how to build a simple habit tracker in Numbers. I'm going to start off here in Numbers and I'm just going to choose the blank template just to get a plain ordinary table here. We'll call this table the Habit Tracker and the idea is that we want to be able to track different habits like exercising every day. You can check them off and then see your progress. Each of the rows kind of represents like a record in a database. 

This first field of the database will be the Date. We'll start with whatever day it is you're going to start the habit tracking. Now the idea is we want to fill out all the dates automatically. We don't always want to have to type the date here. So this second one will have a formula in it. With it selected I'll just type the equals key which will allow me to enter a formula. I'm just going to click the cell above it, like that, to insert a reference to that cell. Then I'm going to add 1 to it. Since it is a date it is going to assume adding one means adding one day. When I press Return you can see that the next day is there. I'm going to select this cell and then look for that little yellow dot there and drag that down all the way to the last cell. So now it is just adding one day and I have a handy way to add new days. If I were to expand the table it automatically fills in the formula like that. If I were to select the last cell and press Return it adds a new row and automatically fills in the same formula there, adding one, so adding the new day. 

Now the next few columns are going to be our Habits. So we just want to exercise. Make sure we drink plenty of water, whatever our goal is there. Read a little bit. Sometime to relax, meditate or whatever it is. So we've got four here. You can have a lot more. Now to indicate that we have done it we want to have a checkbox. I'm going to select that first cell here and go all the way down and select the last cell by holding the Shift Key to select all of them. Then I'm going to go to Format Cell and change the format here to Checkbox. So now we have a bunch of different checkboxes. If I click one it will put a check there indicating that for that day we did the task. The checkboxes will automatically fill-in as we add new rows. So now we have already something that it pretty useful. We can simply use this to track everything. When you've completed a day it is pretty obvious that you've done it. Maybe if you've skipped something on another day then you can pretty easily see that you've missed that. 

But it would be nice to be able to track that goal. Have a column here that gives you a star or something if you've done it all. We can put a simple formula here. I'll use equals there again and we can check to see if these are all True. Checkboxes are Boolean values, true or false. So we can use the AND function and I can enter in each one of these separated by commas, like that. Then it will check to see if they are all true and give me a True. If one of them is False it will give us a false for it.

But I can actually do this a little easier by giving it an array by dragging these like that. It says B2 -E2. It is going to look for everything in that array and it will give me a true if it is True. If just one of them is false, or more are false, it is going to give me a False. I can now have this copied. Double click on the F here at the top of the column and paste, and I get True and False. That's hard to see and it is also hard to do calculations on. Sometimes Numbers treats trues and false like ones and zeroes. But other times it doesn't. So we're just going to use ones and zeroes here. I'm going to change this function right here by putting an IF around this AND here. The condition it is going to check for is the same thing we had before. The True or False value returned by the AND. But if it is true we want a 1 and if it is false we want a 0. Now we get the1 instead of the true. I'm going to  copy that and paste it throughout. So we get ones and zeroes depending upon if you've reached your goal. 

But we want to do better than that. The ones and zeroes are going to be useful for calculations but what we want to do is go to Format, Cell and change the data format from automatic to a Custom Format. The Custom Format we're going to call the Goal Star format. We will use number as the type and the format here says Display That Number. We're going to say instead of displaying that number to Display Nothing. No matter what it is, it's a 1, it's a 0, it's a 22, it's going to be Nothing. But we're going to add a rule and say IF the number is equal to exactly one then, well, don't display the number there either. Instead display something like that. Now we see we get that word whenever we have a 1 and blank if it is 0. We can select this and Edit Custom Format like that and make it a little bit better. Instead of that I'm going to use Control Command Space to bring up the Emoji & Special Character viewer. Search for some stars. I'm going to use this star right here. Now I get a Star there instead of the 1 or the word. So anytime I complete a set I get a star. The value is the result of this formula which is a 1 or a 0. So Numbers thinks of it as one or zero. We see it as a Star or a blank. So now we've got a goal like that. We can easily see which days we've reached our goal. 

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Chances are the next thing you want to do is set this up  so it breaks it into months. So you've got June here. You've got July. How can we break this into months. It turns out it's extremely easy to do that. Select column A like this. Look for the little context menu here. Click on that and simply say Add Category for Date. When I do that it is all going to be messed up here. It is going to add a category for every single date. But if we click on Organize here, we'll see Categories, make sure that is selected, and we'll see Show Groups for Date by Year, Month, Day. Change that to Year, Month. Now all the dates for a month are grouped together. Here are all the June dates. Here are all the July dates. I can stretch this out and go into August and September and you can see it groups them together. I can even click on the little triangle here to the left and Close Out a month. So once I'm done with June I don't have to look at it anymore. 

What will be nice is to be able to see how well we're doing with our goal in a given month. Category lets us do that pretty easily. I go over here to this cell. I can have this cell here in a category row for June 2025. Display something like a sum, for instance, or the maximum value. One of the things I can have it display is Average. I'm going to select Average here and I need to change the format. The format is set to automatic. It's going to pick up that goal star format there. We just want to change that to percentage. It gives us a Percentage. I'll set the decimals to zero decimals. So we get 19% here. Three out of however how many days we have listed for June gives us 19%. How does it figure that out? Well, remember these are ones or zeroes. If these were all zeroes the average would be 0. 0%. If these were all 1's the average would be 1 or 100%. If half of them were 1's and half of them were 0's it would add them all up, divide by their total and get .5 which is 50%. So it turns out the average of all these 1's and 0's is actually the percentage of how many are complete. We can click here and Hide Label Row and just see a nice percentage there. We can actually do that for the rest of these. I can select this first one here and say Show Me the Average. This one, average, and do that for all of them, like that. Then I can select all of them there, Shift Click to select them all, and go to Format, Cell, Percentage set to 1 or 0 decimal places. Then I could go to Format Text and let's also take with a Bold in here. So these aren't bolded but this one is because we want to pay a little more attention there. 

So now we've got 25% of the time we have Exercised but 19% of the time we've hit all of our goals. We can make this look a little bit better by selecting all of these rows here. Shift Click to select these rows. Then I can shrink them all down to something useful like 50 points, like that. We can shrink this one down to make but maybe not quite as much, like that, and we have a nice table here. We can decide whether of not we want to have the entire month available to us when we start the month or go day-by-day. So if it was September 5th right now and then it went to September 6th I can increase that and the percentage would be based on how many of these are marked off. So, if I had done it for all six days it would say 100% so far. A 100% in September. But you may want to go and actually expand this to be exactly the number of days in September right at the beginning of the month. That way you're kind of like building up to 100% as you go through the month. It's up to you how you do it. It is easy to kind of change your mind. 

Now another thing you may want to do is have a streak tracker. A Streak Tracker is pretty easy. Let's start with the second cell down here. I'm going to do equals and I'm going to do a formula that's going to say, IF and I'm going to look at this cell to the left, is equal to 1, in other words we've reached our goal for that day, then take the number from the previous day's streak and 1 to it. Otherwise zero. We didn't hit the streak. There's no streak today. So set it to 0. So, now I can put that in here. I can select it and then Select All the cells and paste it in. You're going to get an error right here because it's trying to look back at this cell, which is not a number. So one of the things we can do here is we can say IFERROR comma 0, so you're putting that all around it. So now you will get a zero even if it's the first cell. For neatness I can copy and paste this throughout. So now we can see here this is a two-day streak, this is a 3-day streak, like that. I can set a Format for all of these cells as well. Just double click here. I'll do Format, Cell and I'm going to create a Custom Format and I'm going to call it Streak Number. I'm just going to have it display the number but Add A Rule that if the number is equal to 0 then display nothing. Now we get this. 1, 2, 3 but there's no streak here. We can have another streak say right here like that. Nice and neat. 

If we want to see our best streak let's go all the way to the bottom here. I'm going to reveal the Context Menu here for the last row. I'm going to Add a Footer Row. Footer Rows allows you to do calculations on all the numbers above it. But they won't count as a regular cell. So you can still add regular rows to this and this Footer Row just keeps moving down. Here I can just do Equals and say max, give me the maximum of everything in G. The largest number in that. It's going to give us a 3 here. So the largest streak is that. You also can set a really cool Custom Format for this. So, Format, Cell, create a Custom Format for number, standard number, but put some text before it. Max Streak colon space. Like that. Now you've got that at the bottom. If I were to have a better streak I could get a 4 there and you can see my maximum streak here at the bottom is 4.

There's some other cool things that we can do. For instance, if you are having the entire month up here you may want to focus on the current day. If I double click here and select all of the cells here under Date I can go to the Format, Cell, use Conditional Highlighting, Add A Rule and say if the date is today then I can make it something like, let's make it orange. You can see Today would be orange. Just easier to draw your eye towards the checkboxes for that day. 

You can also select all of these checkbox cells here. I'm going to select the first one and go down here and Shift Click to select the last one and you can set Conditional Highlighting for these as well. So under Format, Cell click Conditional Highlighting and Add A Rule and say if the cell is True then have a Fill. We can do a custom fill. Let's do a custom fill that is actually a darker green, like that. We can add another rule and say if the cell is False then do another Fill. Let's do a Custom Fill here and choose a lighter green like that. So now every time you check a box it changes like that which kind of looks like how some habit trackers do it. You can do a similar thing here for the goal. If it's a 1 have it be colored in, for instance. Even for streaks have it be a certain color if it's greater than 6. Then a better color if it's greater than 12, and all of that to show like when your streaks are getting really hot. Then as you progress you can shrink down the previous months to focus on the current month. You can add days very easily, like I showed. 

Oh! but you want charts from this! You can do charts as well. So let's do this goal column here. If I select the entire column, don't double click it to just select the cells in it, but select the entire column. I go to Chart. Choose this bar chart here. It's going to assume I want the summaries here. I'll get that 31% , 6%, and all of that. As I add new months it will automatically add to this chart. So I'll get October once I have October. I can see how well I'm doing here. If I want to go even further than that I can select these four columns, each of the Habit. Do a chart and do one of these stacked charts here. Then it is going to stack all of these up here so I can see each of those habits and how well I did with each of them stacked on top of each other. The percentage is going to represent the totals. So four Habits means 400% is perfect. But I sort of get the idea of maybe one of these habits I'm doing better and another habit I rarely do very well at. 

So there's a lot you can do very easily using charts by selecting the right thing and just creating the chart. That's how you build a Habit Tracker in Numbers and learn some Numbers skills along the way. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.