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 If
you prepare balance sheets in Excel, you can make them a lot more
useful to your readers. Just add Sources and Uses information to
your ordinary balance sheets.
This simple improvement tells readers how each balance sheet item has changed, and how those changes have affected cash
flow.
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 (Updated
Nov-08) Excel
2007's 'Ribbon' is the most significant change that
Microsoft has ever made to Excel's user interface. We wanted
to find out what Excel users in business think of that change.
If you haven't taken this short survey. Please do so now.
Tell us what you think about
Excel's Ribbon.
The preliminary results of this survey are in, and the results are clear. You can see the results here.
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 These
are challenging times.
The Chairman of the US Federal Reserve System says we're in a
financial storm.
Costs are rising. Credit is limited. Taxes are going up. Layoffs are in
the news. Some businesses and cities are suffering record deficits; some
are going bankrupt.
If companies do avoid the storm, we know that Excel users likely will
show them the way.
We offer five reasons this is so.
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 (Updated
Nov-08) Excel 2007 is significantly different from earlier versions of
Excel. So we wondered how widely used it is among its business
users. That is, what's the Excel 2007 market share?
Months ago, we started to ask which version of Excel you use.
You now can see
the current results of our
poll here.
If you haven't voted in the poll, please do so now. You can vote
near the top of this page.
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 Are
Ford and GM heading for bankruptcy?
Prof. Edward Altman says they are. He's the man who invented Z-Scores, the
best-known analytical tool for predicting the likelihood of business
bankruptcy.
More to the point, is your largest customer heading for bankruptcy? Your
most important vendors? Your own employer?
We show you how to calculate Z-Scores with Excel.
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Hauser's Law says that the most effective way politicians can increase tax
collections is to cut tax rates. This isn't theory; it's been hard, cold
reality in the US since 1950, as our article demonstrates.
If you want to cut your own tax rates,
download the workbook shown here and use it to convince your politicians that
they'll have more money to spend if you have more money to spend!
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 Do you monitor
the health of your receivables using the "accounts-receivable collection period," also
called the "Days Sales Outstanding in Receivables" (DSO)?
If so, you know a lot less about the health of your receivables than you think you do.
Learn why DSO fails and how Excel can give you more accurate results, results that also can
improve your cash flow forecast .
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 You can print your own Excel reports like these today with our new
Plug-N-Play Excel Dashboard Kit #1.
Our new low-cost package provides ten dashboard report designs and fifteen
color themes, for a total of 150 different reports. Just enter your
data and print your reports.
Learn more about this quick and
easy way to create Excel dashboard reports.
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Suppose you
plan to increase profits by raising or lowering your prices. Your unit sales probably
will increase if you cut prices and decrease if you raise prices. A little-known
formula can help you decide whether your change in price, combined with the likely
change in unit sales, will help your gross profits or hurt them.
By using this formula in a calc-plot chart, you can get a better picture
of all your pricing options. This will help you to brainstorm your pricing strategy
more easily.
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 This chart displays eleven years of seasonal data in new way.
It's called a Cycle Plot.
Here, the chart shows the trend for all sales in each of the twelve months. The
horizontal line shows the average sales for each month.
Learn to create Cycle Plots here.
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This figure shows two graphs from the first
spreadsheet dashboard report, created using Lotus 1-2-3 in 1984. Each line of the
charts consists of text in cells. We offer more examples of this report and offer a
brief description of how it was created.
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It's often useful to know how often various ranges of values have occurred.
Example: How many employees are in each pay grade? We show various ways that
Excel can solve this type of problem.
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This item has no direct connection with Excel. But it certainly describes
an issue that many Excel users will recognize.
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One easy way to return an item from an Excel
database is to add a dropdown list box to your spreadsheet. But suppose you want to
return additional information about that item, how do you do it? We show you how.
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Do you create periodic reports using data stored in an Excel databases? We show an easy way to let
Excel formulas do the work.
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Is debt your enemy or your friend? It's your friend if you're making money
on the cash you borrow. The EOA ratio compares directly to the interest rate on your debt. When your
EOA exceeds your interest rate, you're making money from your debt.
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Is your company growing faster than it can afford? The Sustainable Growth Rate can
help you manage your company's financial ability to grow.
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Is your company spending thousands of dollars for
business dashboards that serve up your performance measures like pablum?
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Here are some products and services we use on our own computers. Our first recommendation:
Remote Data Backup for Businesses
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Unless you're a public accountant, you probably haven't experimented with Benford's
Law. Auditors sometimes use this fascinating statistical insight to uncover
fraudulent accounting data. But it might reveal a useful strategy for
investing in the stock market. And it might help you to improve the
accuracy of your budgets and forecasts.
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SUMPRODUCT offers great power to summarize lists of data in Excel worksheets.
It works somewhat like array formulas, but without the complications. Unfortunately,
Excel's help topic ignores the real power of this function.
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Excel array formulas can summarize Excel data quickly and easily.
We explain the most powerful and flexible approaches. The most powerful method
is to use Excel arrays, which can give you summaries using any number of criteria.
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A reader asks how to calculate Future Values from cash flows that aren't necessarily
periodic.
We show how to calculate both Future and Present non-periodic values.
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In Don't Discard
Those Spreadsheets: The Power of Excel-Friendly OLAP, Charley Kyd offers
a practical response to the anti-Excel attitude that is common these days among
people who promote expensive BI and BPM systems for large companies.
The article offers an agile and low-cost alternative to those systems.
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Okay, so "art" might not be the correct word. But these cartoons were
created in Excel
Check them out!
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Pablum
Dashboards
