Archive for July, 2010

Jeff Weir, an alert reader of this blog points me this chart showcasing voice-over artist’s for various Simpson’s characters. I am a hard-core Simpon’s fan, so I naturally wasted quarter-hour looking at the chart. That is when I realize this chart is not only fun, it also teaches 5 valuable lessons on making better charts. Read the rest of this post to find out the five rules.

About a month ago, I got an email from Kevin. The crux of this email is,

I am working on a wedding planner based in Excel. Do you want to collaborate?

I replied to him asking for more details as I got curious about the project. Kevin sent me a work-in-progress version of his wedding planner which blew my mind. Although I have only one wedding experience and even that I hardly planned (as it is traditional for parents to take care of the wedding ceremonies in India), I found Kevin’s planner quite comprehensive, useful and easy.

So we worked on it together and I am happy to announce the Excel Wedding Planner

In the second part of our tutorial we will learn how to prepare the layout of our model to do project evaluation.

If you know basic referencing and formula framework in excel, you can write a model that calculates numbers. Good vs Bad financial model would be decided by the layout of the model.

Before we start discussing on how to build a good layout, lets see the layout that I have in mind. The layout is based on my experience of working as an investment banker and as a consultant and I find it neat.

This is a guest post by our excel ninja – Hui. Today we will learn how to format numbers and amounts in Indian currency format. Indian numbers are grouped differently than standard English numbers. English Grouping              123,456,789.01 Indian Grouping               12,34,56,789.01 Quick and easy fix to show numbers in Indian format: A custom number format of: […]

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!

Here is a quick macro tip that I stumbled on to while debugging some code yesterday (ya, ya, call me workaholic for coding on a weekend…) You can select expressions in your code and place mouse pointer on that for a second to find what value it evaluates to (of course, this works only on […]

Keeping track of your expenses is one of the fundamentals of living good life. So I asked you to prepare a personal expense tracker as part of our 10,000 RSS Subscriber Milestone contest. I have received 7 excellent entries in this contest, each capable of making expense tracking a breeze while providing good analytics of […]

This article is written by Alex Kerin from Data Driven Consulting. “When expensive dashboard software doesn’t work, do it with Excel” stated Stephen Few back in 2006. This was before the release of Tableau, and some of the other solutions now available for visualizing your data, but Excel remains a great choice for creating dashboards when you […]

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 […]

Last time I posted something on a weekend was almost a few years ago. I am making a rare exception to share a joyous news with all of you. We bought our first car yesterday. It is a Maruti Suzuki Alto (link). See the picture below: Ever since we became parents in September last year, […]

Traditional project plans use Gantt Charts to depict the plan. While gantt charts work great and provide instant picture of overall plan, they fail to communicate the uncertainty in the plan. In most real world projects, the plans always change. Most of the management energy is spent on controlling and communicating about this plan uncertainty. This is where a project plan like gantt box chart can help. This chart (as shown above) clearly shows the variance in end dates of project tasks thus giving a clear picture of uncertainty in the plan. Read more to find out how this chart can be used in project management.

Few days back we have learned how to find if 2 sets of dates overlap using Excel Formulas. For eg. we have learned that to check whether {1 July,2010 to 23 July 2010} overlaps with the date range {15 July, 2010 to 16 August 2010}, we can use a formula like, =if(or(and(x>=a,x<=b),and(a>=x,a<=y)), “Overlap”,”Do not overlap”) […]

Very Quickly, Chandoo.org is partnering with Pristine to start a free course on financial modeling using excel. If you are interested, take this short survey and tell us what topic you want to learn. Back Story One of the advantages of going to a premier MBA college is that you are bound to have good […]

This is rare folks. We have an off-topic thread!!! Since, the next football world-cup is not until next version of Excel and since, I find myself watching a lot of it these days, I thought why not fool around on a Friday with an offtopic discussion?!? So here it goes, what are your favorite teams […]