All articles with 'circular formulas' Tag

In the second part of our series on project finance using Excel, Paramdeep tells us how to model “interest during construction” in real estate and construction type of projects. We take a case of hospital construction and learn how to calculate the IDC using circular references.

You can also download both blank and completed model so that you can test the skills.

Today we will learn an interesting animation technique that ONLY uses, … wait for it …, Excel Formulas. That is right, we will use simple formulas to animate values in Excel.

Intrigued? Confused? Interested?

First see a short demo of excel animation achieved using this technique.

Now read the rest of this post to learn more about this technique and download sample workbook.

Here is a little experiment to freak out excel.

Go to cell C3 and write =C3 and press Enter. Excel would throw up nasty message saying, “Microsoft did not know what to do. We have a sent a support engineer to your home, but he is stuck at the round-about near your house.”

Well, not really. But what you did when you wrote the formula =C3 in cell C3 was, you created a circular reference.

A circular reference is created when you refer to same cell either directly or indirectly.

See Mona Lisa, in circular reference style.

Learn more about Excel Circular References, how to use them, examples, how to avoid them, how to deal with them in this article.

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.

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…

Often when you use excel to track a particular item (like expenses, exercise schedules, investments) you usually enter the current date (and time). This is nothing but timestamping. Once the item is time stamped, it is much more easier to analyze it. Here is an excel formula trick to generate timestamps.