Structured Reference Tables have been around for a while, but have become a lot more powerful in recent versions of Excel. They can be extremely useful when using Excel for the purpose of data analysis and modelling but I’m always surprised by the number of people coming along on my training courses who’ve never heard of them, let alone seen them used.
The Table feature in Excel (not to be confused with PivotTables or Data Tables!) is a great tool for organising and analysing large amounts of data. For this reason, like PivotTables, they are sometimes not used in pure financial modelling, but as a very useful tool in reporting and analysis, they are also worth a brief mention. See this article for more information about the use of Tables in Financial Modelling.
The two useful features of a Table are:
Those new to named ranges sometimes struggle to see the benefits of including them in financial models. It’s true that most of the time named ranges are not entirely necessary, but there are some good reasons to use named ranges when building a model:
Considering holding a course in-house? There are many advantages of arranging an
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Now that the Introduction to Financial Modelling course as well as my book Using Excel for Business Analysis has finally been updated for Excel 2013 after several months of hard work, you can imagine my surprise and delight when the preview of Excel 2016 became available for download 🙂
In this practical webinar, financial modelling expert, Danielle Stein Fairhurst recording in Dubai for Informa, discusses and demonstrates hands-on strategies for reducing the risk of error when creating financial models.
One of the biggest issues facing financial modellers using Excel for their models is the possibility that there could be a mistake in their work! It’s probably one of the most career damaging things that can happen to a financial modeller, and certainly a high risk of any business using Excel for the purpose of financial modelling.
A well-built model will have the following attributes:
Dashboards are in-vogue now. Chances are your boss is asking for one right now. Traditionally dashboards are associated with a six week development lead time or big budgets, which means critical business decisions that should be taken yesterday are now delayed by two months. But we can create quick, powerful and awesome dashboards using Microsoft Excel in less than two hours (ok, maybe three).
