All articles in 'excel apps' Category

While I was working Denmark, there is one thing I noticed. Danes are one hell of football lovers. The football (soccer) enthusiasm is over the top when there is a match between Denmark and Sweden. A common practice in many offices is a football pool. This is how it works: When there is a match […]

Marko, who is a long time PHD reader and an excel ninja sent this via email, I work at an insurance company in Slovenia. At the beginning of each year we have a conversation with our superiors to review our work in the past year and to set new goals (main activities) that we’re gonna […]

Today we will build a mortgage payment calculator (and amortization schedule) using excel. But we will not build a boring excel sheet, we will build a mortgage calculator that is easy to play with.

A mortgage payment is a monthly installment that you pay towards a loan. Any mortgage loan will typically have, (1) loan amount, (2) duration of the loan in years, (3) interest rate per year

Given these 3 parameters, we can easily determine the monthly installment amount (this will be the same amount for all months during loan tenure)

We are going to use Excel’s form controls (more on this below) to build a mortgage payment calculator like this.

Jennie, a sweet and ambitious lady set out to do 101 things in the next 1001 days. She took the inspiration from Day Zero Project. Not stopping there, she prepared a cute little excel sheet to keep track of all these new year resolutions and sent it to me.

I think this is a swell excel template if you want to keep track of your goals or new year resolutions or just manage a list.

This is second part of 2 part series on conditionally formatting dates in excel.

Highlighting Repeat Customers using Conditional FormattingIn yesterday’s post we have learned how to conditionally format dates using excel. In this article, you will learn how to use these conditional formatting tricks to highlight repeat customers in a list of sales records.

Excel is very good for keeping track of your investments. Due to its grid nature, you can easily create a table of all the mutual fund holdings and monitor the latest NAVs (Net Asset Values) to see how your investments are doing. A while back we have posted a file on tracking mutual funds using excel. Today we are going to release an upgrade for that file.

Read the rest of this post to understand how this template works and download the free template.

Here is a 2010 new year gift to all our readers – a free 2010 calendar excel file (a little secret: just change the year in “outline” sheet from 2010 to 2011, to get the next years calendar. It works all the way up to year 9999). You can even get a Printable PDF Calendar. There are 14 different sheets in the calendar file. First one is an outline calendar for the entire year. The next 12 are monthly calendars. And the last sheet shows a mini-calendar for the year 2010.

Read the rest of this post to know more and download the calendar.

Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.

The workbook is full of lessons on conditional formatting, cell formatting, using formulas. Go ahead and download it today.

At PHD household, we believe in using money wisely. Both Mrs. PHD and I come from very modest backgrounds. Our upbringing has taught us value of money in the most effective way – by exposing us to not having any. So when we got our first job (did I tell you that both Jo and I started working in same company and sat in same floor? Oh, it was such a lovely time), we were very prudent and decided not to waste money on anything trivial (we still are, just that over last 6 years our earning capacity increased a bit and we became parents).

Anyways, I am not here to bore you about my household. But I am here to tell you fun ways to track expenses and household budgets using spreadsheets.

I have a super exciting news for all our members. During the last several weeks, I have been working on making 24 strikingly remarkable and easy to use excel templates for better project management. Finally the bundle is ready. You can get a copy of the bundle starting today.

It is the customer on the phone again, she wants to know what products we have.
How cool would it be if we can send her a spreadsheet with all the products neatly listed in a table and she can use filters to find what she likes. Alas, we end up sending a biggish PDF brochure that is both difficult to make and maintain.

Well, not any more.

Today we will learn a very useful and fun trick in Excel. We will create a product catalog using Excel that you can send to your clients or boss (and impress them).

In today’s installment of project management using excel, we will learn about project tracking tool – to-do lists. Projects are nothing but a group of people getting together and achieving an objective – like building system or constructing a bridge. While it is important to have a overall project plan and vision, it is equally important to understand how various day to day project activities are going on. This is where to do lists can help you a lot. Read on…

This post is a testament that readers of this blog are way cooler and enterprising than I am. Justin, who I must say, has some really amazing excel skills, contacted me in April with a VBA Script he made that can draw two circle venn diagrams in excel.

Over the last few days I have been using Bonavista Chart Tamer tool and I found it pretty neat. Read my review of this wonderful tool.

Learn how you can write your own twitter client using Excel. All it takes is excel, internet connection and 5 minutes of spare time.