I wrote a blog article a while ago with links to some good Excel and Financial Modelling online resources. Due to its popularity at the time, and the fast moving pace of the online world, I thought it was time to update it!
I’ve been showing this video supplied by Microsoft in my training recently, and lot of people have asked me for a copy, so here it is! Some of my favourite new features in Excel 2016 are:
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:
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 🙂
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).
Using Excel for Business Analysis provides practical guidance for anyone looking to build financial models. Whether for business proposals, opportunity evaluation, financial reports, or any other business finance application, this book shows you how to design, create, and test your model, then present your results effectively using Excel 2013. The book opens with a general guide to financial modelling, with each subsequent chapter building skill upon skill until you have a real, working model of your own.
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Some of you will know that ever since Indian Excel guru and blogging sensation Chandoo visited Australia in 2012 to run his extremely popular Advanced Excel and Dashboard courses, I’ve been trying to convince him to come back Down Under and run another series. We are hoping that he’ll find time to make another visit in 2015 and we’ll certainly keep you posted and hope to announce it soon. He hasn’t agreed to come just yet, but as we were chatting last week, he did talk me to into joining
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