Tuesday, January 31, 2023

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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 -
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...

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

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.
Analytical Charting

Three Simple Tricks to Improve Analytical Charting in Excel

Charley Kyd -
0
For years, my Excel charts of trends used a simple idea: To gain insights about periodic data, just chart it. What else was there to...
The Weekly Economic Index (WEI) combines ten weekly measures to estimate the growth in the United States' GDP each week. It's the only measure of its kind.

Chart of the New Economic Index that Tracks GDP Weekly

Each fat line in this chart indicates when a recession has occured for the specified country. You can use the same method to show other Boolean conditions.

Chart Recessions and Other Boolean Conditions in Excel

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

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

Here's how to use Excel to figure out whether you're making or losing money on the cash you borrow, why it matters, and what you can do about it.

Weighing Your Debt Load

Formulas & Functions

Excel includes many outstanding features that you probably don't know even exist. Here's how to find those features and to use the ones you need.
Worksheet Interaction

How to Find and Use Excel’s Best Hidden Features

Charley Kyd -
0
Excel has many outstanding hidden features. Here are a few that I use frequently… In Excel 2013 and above, when you close Excel's last...
In VBA, you'll save time and frustration by always declaring your variables and by also using Hungarian notation. Here's why and how to do that.

Declaring Variables in VBA: Three Keys for Success

The First Excel Dashboard Report

Three More Simple Tricks to Improve Excel Charts for Business

Three More Simple Tricks to Improve Excel Charts for Business

Excel ranges can work like relational tables. You can join them by common fields. Query them with SQL. And use queries in PivotTables. Here's how.

Use MS Query to Treat Excel as a Relational Data Source

Excel Methods

The extreme variability caused by seasonal sales makes it difficult to track and forecast your underlying sales trends. Here's how to solve that problem.
Charting Methods

How to Create a Rolling Forecast of Seasonal Sales in...

Charley Kyd -
0
The Excel chart below shows the typical saw-tooth pattern of seasonal sales. Seasonal sales have about the same pattern every year, every week, or both. In...
Using Excel 2007 and above, you can create shaded areas in charts to specify areas of special interest. Here's how to do this using normal curves.

How to Create Normal Curves With Shaded Areas in Excel

Simple spreadsheet edits can introduce costly Excel errors. Here are three techniques that can help you to reduce your errors in Excel.

Three Ways to Reduce Errors in Your Excel SUM Formulas

Here's how to calculate the annual rate of inflation both by comparing prices several years apart, and by several months apart.

How to Calculate Inflation in Three Different Ways

These tables summarize the performance of Excel's 15 worksheet functions use different methods to round data.

Overview of Excel’s Rounding Functions

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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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