All articles in 'Learn Excel' Category

In the 4th and 5th part of our financial modeling series, we will learn how to model and build cashflow projections for project valuation.

We will understand the basics behind cash-flow modeling, what kind of non-cash expenses should be added back to get the free cash-flow. You can also get the blank and completed cash-flow projection worksheets to practice these techniques.

Today we have home work for you. You need to help Johnny figure out how many hours he worked on splitting atoms. He has crazy boss who is behind him for that timesheet. Now Johnny needs your help to write the correct formula so that he can tell his boss how many hours he worked and go home.

Go ahead and read rest of this post and tell your answers using comments. Go!

In todays post I review Excel Everest, an excel spreadsheet that teaches you how to use excel. In this post I am going to review the product and recommend it you.

What more, you can get it for 20% off if you use the discount code chandoo. Go ahead and read rest of the review.

In the third part of our series on Excel Financial Modeling, we teach you how to make an assumptions worksheet to keep track of various investment, working capital and operational assumptions related to project valuation in place.

You can also download the blank worksheet in which you can fill-up assumptions after reading the business case.

Here is an interesting charting problem we come across once in a while. We have a lot of small numbers and a few very large numbers. How do we effectively plot all of them in a chart?

Now, how do you go about making a chart?

Welcome back. Did you have a good weekend?

We ate fish, watched a movie, had hilarious moments watching the kids and didn’t even leave the house for anything other than to buy some fish.

Coming back to Excel, I want to share a simple productivity tip with all of you. I accidentally learned this and now I use it often to speed up when I am working on large excel files.
Jump to Any Cell / Worksheet using Name Box

If you want to quickly jump to a named range or another worksheet, here is a quick trick. Just enter that name or address in the name box (top-left corner, next to formula bar). And bingo, you are on the target cell or sheet.

Ok. This is quick and short. What is the most weird, unusual, out of the world thing you have used excel for?

I have used excel to generate and clean a list of tags for this blog, to keep track of which movies I have seen in the IMDb Top 250 list, to simulate monopoly board game, just so I can play it better than my wife etc.

What about you? Share using comments.

I don’t remember when was the last time both of us (Jo and I) were this excited. And the reason?

Nakshatra and Nishanth have started taking their first steps last week !!!

It is such a joy watching them take one step at a time. Aah, the beauty of parenting

So I asked myself, “What is a good way to celebrate this without looking like a super-excited dad?” and I got my answer in 72 milli-seconds.

I have created 10 short (<10 min) videos helping you to take baby steps in Excel world. Each video introduces you to one new functionality of Excel and shows you some nice examples.

Before jumping straight in to the videos, I want to share a short clip (30 seconds) of our kids taking their baby steps.

Last week I announced Reader Awesomeness Week to celebrate the passion, attitude and knowledge of our little community here. I got 9 interesting and beautiful entries from our readers. In this post you can see 9 tips & downloads submitted by our readers. These include a project management template, a macro to remove blanks, a technique to make Google Earth maps using Excel and several other interesting tips & tricks.

Go ahead and read them, download attached workbooks and become awesome in Excel.

As part of reader awesomeness week, today I am featuring a list that Larry sent me with 12 beautifully defined rules for making better spreadsheets. He says that spreadsheets should be easy to understand, have a clearly defined purpose and should use Excel features as much as possible. I totally agree with him.

Read the rest of this post to find the rules and download a poster containing these rules. Thanks Larry.

As part of our Reader Awesomeness Week, Francis shares with us a travel site dashboard he made for his company. Francis took just two days to prepare this awesome dashboard which uses concepts like bullet charts, sortable KPI grid, Date based filtering, dynamic charts and more. I was really moved by Francis’ gesture in sharing his work with us, so much that, I did a video review of his work. You can see it in the embedded youtube video to the left.

Read the rest of the article to know how this dashboard is made and get a copy of the file.

It is no secret that our readers are awesome. We have tons of creative, passionate & caring members in our community who just kick ass day in day out. Just look at the comments in any post and you are going to find amazing display of skill, intelligence and mastery of Excel craft. To celebrate all this, we are going to dedicate this week (August 2nd thru 6th) as Reader Awesomeness Week.

What is Reader Awesomeness Week?

Through out this week, I am going to share excel workbooks, ideas, tips & tricks that our readers have submitted to me. First 3 days (Tuesday thru Thursday) I will be posting contributions I already received thru Email.

On Friday, I will be posting all the tips, downloads submitted by you. Click here to contribute.

Darren writes one of my favorite blogs – Problogger, it is a blog about blogging. It is super helpful for people like me who write, connect, share and sell online. A week back, Darren asked his readers to participate in a fun experiment by posting 7 links on their blogs. It seemed like an interesting [...]

In this and next 5 posts, we are going to learn how to build a financial model to do project evaluation using Excel. The 6 parts of this tutorial are,

1. Introduction to Financial Modeling
2. Building a layout for Project Evaluation Model – Best practices
3. Building Inputs and Assumptions Sheet
4. Building Projections for Project Evaluation
5. Modeling the Cash Flow Statement and Projections
6. Putting it all together – Final Project Evaluation Model

What is financial modeling?

Financial modeling is creating a complete program/ structure, which helps you in coming to a decision regarding investment in a project/ company. Now this could be on a simple piece of paper or in excel. The advantage with excel is that, even if you have calculation speed and accuracy like me (this is one place where I am like Einstien!), then also you would be able to come to the right conclusion!

On Firday, we proposed a new chart for showing project plans. I chose an ugly name for it and called it Gantt Box Chart.
Essentially, a gantt box chart is what you get when a gantt chart and box plot go to a bar, get drunk and decide to make out. It shows the project [...]