Thursday, August 18, 2022

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Growing too fast can be dangerous to your company's health. Use the Sustainable Growth Rate ratio to track your company's financial ability to grow.
Accounting & Finance

How Fast Is Too Fast?

Charley Kyd -
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(Originally published in Inc Magazine.) What typically tops the list of worries of the chief executive officers of fast growing companies? Financing that growth, according...

How to Smooth Data by Using the TREND Function

Two economists have introduced a new leading indicator, which predicts a recession soon. These Excel charts illustrate their insight. If they're correct, Excel users will be very busy in the months ahead.

Consumer Sentiment Suggests a 2022 Recession

Your data can contain many important, hidden patterns. But simple transformations in Excel can help to reveal them—as this example illustrates.

Simple Transformations Can Reveal Hidden Patterns in Your Data

As inflation rises, so do mortgage interest rates—causing house prices to fall. Here's how Excel's PV function can help you estimate what you new house price will be.

Here’s How Inflation Could Affect the Value of Your Home

Featured Articles

Your data can contain many important, hidden patterns. But simple transformations in Excel can help to reveal them—as this example illustrates.

Simple Transformations Can Reveal Hidden Patterns in Your Data

Analytical Methods Charley Kyd -
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Excel users have at least two significant advantages over business professionals who rely on other analytical and reporting tools. First advantage: We Excel users can...
Use this unique Excel dashboard to track the general rate of inflation, your personal rate, and the rate of the goods and services you buy.

Inflation Tracker Excel Dashboard with Consumer Prices

Business & Economics Charley Kyd -
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U.S. President John F. Kennedy once said of a growing economy, "A rising tide lifts all boats." However, a rising inflationary tide does not lift...
Using Excel's LET, SORTBY, and SEQUENCE functions, and dynamic arrays, you easily can list any number of top and bottom results from a Table.

How to Report Top and Bottom Results Using Dynamic Arrays in Excel

Array Formulas Charley Kyd -
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In How to Use Excel’s LET Function, I showed several examples of a powerful function that Microsoft added to Excel 365 in the summer...
How to aggregate named groups of GL accounts.

How to Report GL Account Groups in Excel

Accounting & Finance Charley Kyd -
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Believe it or not, this income statement is quite sophisticated. It's not nearly as simple-minded as it looks. In fact, this income statement illustrates a...
In Excel, you can report named groups of GL account numbers, product codes, and so on—just as you report one such number. Here’s how.

How to Use Array Formulas to Report Groups of Accounts

Accounting & Finance Charley Kyd -
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Often, in accounting, marketing, and other departments, we'd like to report and analyze groups of items rather than one item at a time. In Part...

Blog

Growing too fast can be dangerous to your company's health. Use the Sustainable Growth Rate ratio to track your company's financial ability to grow.
Accounting & Finance

How Fast Is Too Fast?

Charley Kyd -
0
(Originally published in Inc Magazine.) What typically tops the list of worries of the chief executive officers of fast growing companies? Financing that growth, according...
As inflation rises, so do mortgage interest rates—causing house prices to fall. Here's how Excel's PV function can help you estimate what you new house price will be.

Here’s How Inflation Could Affect the Value of Your Home

A shortage of truckers is one cause of the supply chain crisis in the US. This Excel chart suggests that the problem won't end soon.

An Excel Chart of a Major U.S. Supply Chain Problem

A Lesson in Excel Analysis Learned from Rising US Inflation

Here's how you can split delimited text into an array with a short Excel formula, and then wrap the formula with the INDEX function to return any value from the array.

How to Split and Index Delimited Text with Excel Formulas

Business & Economics

You can ratchet down errors in your Excel reports by using an Error Summary Table that uses conditional formatting to alert you to errors.
Accounting & Finance

How to Set Up an Automatic Error-Checking System in Excel Reports

Charley Kyd -
0
Decades ago, I worked as a cost accountant for a large company. But because our department received terrible reports, I wrote my own reports...using...
If you're charting only your raw business data, you're missing many opportunities to give your readers useful business insight. Here are three simple tricks that will help you to turn your ordinary charts into analytical ones with much greater insight.

Three Simple Tricks to Improve Analytical Charting in Excel

On Valentine's Day, 2018, tens of thousands of major sites warned their readers that inflation is rising. But that might not be true. These analytical Excel charts suggest a different conclusion.

What Inflation? How Excel Charts Can Help You Avoid Fake Economic...

Find Leading Indicators Using Automated Cross Correlations in Excel, Part 1

The Monte Carlo method allows you to forecast performance using probability distributions for your assumptions. And Data Tables provide a quick and easy way to implement the Monte Carlo method. Here's how to do it.

How to Create Monte Carlo Models and Forecasts Using Excel Data...

Formulas & Functions

You can uncover hidden trends by charting the ratio of each month's performance to the same month one year earlier.
Analytical Charting

Introducing the Power of Year-Over-Year Performance Charts in Excel

Charley Kyd -
0
The purpose of management reports should be to help readers find and track patterns of performance…quickly and easily. That’s the attraction of charts, of course....
In finance, breakeven charts illustrate how your fixed and variable costs vary with your monthly sales. Here's how to set up break-even charts in Excel.

Map Costs and Sales in Excel with a Classic Breakeven Chart

Excel tracks many worksheet properties that formulas don't return. But you can fix the problem in VBA by writing a UDF, a User Defined Function.

Use VBA Functions to Return Excel Document Properties

The two Excel dashboard-like charts with May data show that consumer confidence has dropped like a rock since March. But Asia's data isn't available yet.

Dashboard-Like Excel Charts of International Consumer Confidence

How to Work with Dates Before 1900 in Excel

How to Work with Dates Before 1900 in Excel

Excel Methods

When we import data into Excel, dates can arrive in formats that Excel wasn't designed to translate. Here are some ways to make sense of unusual dates.
Dates and Times

How to Convert Unusual Date Text Imported to Excel

Charley Kyd -
0
When you import data into Excel, dates often arrive in formats that Excel doesn’t recognize. This is particularly true if your data comes from...
You need a volatile workbook to test Excel calculation speeds. Here's how I set one up to test lookup formulas.

A Volatile Workbook to Test Calculation Times for Excel Lookup Methods

This Excel table shows the top and bottom five results, with charts that show the most recent three month trends. And it updates automatically.

Show Top and Bottom Results in a Chart-Table

Two unusual formulas can use the SEARCH or FIND functions to search any number of cells for any number of words—almost instantly.

How I Set Up SEARCH and FIND Formulas on Steroids

Excel's FREQUENCY function was first created to calculate frequency distribution tables, which are needed for charting histograms. But the COUNTIFS function offers more power, and it's easier to use.

Use COUNTIFS, not FREQUENCY, to Calculate Frequency Distribution Tables for Charting...

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Popular

When you bring data from another source into an Excel worksheet, the data often includes rows that you’ll want to delete. Here's the first of two methods.

How to Delete Blank or Unneeded Rows, Method 1

Worksheet Interaction Charley Kyd -
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When you bring data from another source into an Excel worksheet, the data often includes rows that you’ll want to delete. Often, you’ll want...
When you want to look up data in Excel, you should never use a worksheet function with "lookup" in its name. Here's why...

Why INDEX-MATCH Is Far Better Than VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP in Excel

Downloads Charley Kyd -
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(Download the workbook.) Excel’s VLOOKUP function is more popular than the INDEX-MATCH function combination, probably because when Excel users need to look up data then a "lookup" function...
Excel provides several worksheet functions for working with normal distributions or 'bell-shaped curves.' This introduction to Excel's Normal Distribution functions offers help for the statistically challenged.

An Introduction to Excel’s Normal Distribution Functions

Business Statistics Charley Kyd -
0
(Download the workbook.) When a visitor asked me how to generate a random number from a Normal distribution she set me to thinking about doing statistics...
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