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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Many analysts and modellers would agree that public speaking is not their favourite part of the job and whilst it might be fun to imagine your senior management in their underwear, it’s probably more helpful to be prepared by following these basic tips.
We often hear it said that Excel is the “second-best solution” to a problem. There is usually a better, more efficient piece of software that will also provide a solution but we usually default to the “Swiss army knife” of software, Excel, to get the job done.
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If you have sluggish Excel models, it might not just be the file size that is slowing things down. Often it’s the memory being used and when things get really bad, you might even get a “Not enough Memory” or “Not 
enough system resources to display completely” error message. When you get this frustrating message, the only solution is to close Excel and restart it, so let’s look at some ways to improve the performance of your Excel models.
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