The Most Powerful Ways to Summarize Excel Data for Reporting and Analysis
(Note: I wrote this before Microsoft introduced Excel Tables or SUMIFS. This post is scheduled for an update.)
Excel users often need to summarize data...
Manage Periodic Payments with an Excel Cash Calendar
Most companies must write checks periodically to companies that don't send invoices. Often, their accounting systems provide little help in keeping track of these...
Chart Your Rate of Change to Reveal Hidden Business Performance
What insights can you gain from the following Excel chart of Apple's quarterly revenues over the past 18 years?
I see three things. First, their...
How to Create Bullet Graphs to Replace Gauges in Excel
Business presentations desperately need a replacement for dashboard gauges. Gauges consume too much space in a report. They use excessive "chart junk." They're not...
Three More Simple Tricks to Improve Excel Charts for Business
In 3 Simple Tricks to Improve Analytical Charting in Excel, I showed you how to shift time periods, index your data, and chart your rate...
Calculate Mortgage Payments and Your ROA with an Excel CalcPlot Chart
An Excel CalcPlot Chart allows you to plot values in three dimensions, not merely two. Here are two examples.
Mortgage Paments
Mortgage interest rates are at...
How Excel’s MIRR Function Can Fix the IRR Function
The calculation of an Internal Rate of Return is very appealing...at first glance.
When you know the IRR of a prospective investment, you seem to...
Show Useful Year-to-Date Variance Charts in Your Excel Dashboards
Many companies have a difficult time creating charts of spending variances. In fact, many companies rely on charts that are nearly useless for that...
How to Create Normal Curves With Shaded Areas in Excel
Adding shaded areas to normal curves like this is a challenging task in Excel charting. But once you know how, it's not difficult to...
Read a Text File with VBA in Excel, and Write the Text to a...
"I need to write a text file into one row of my Excel spreadsheet, cell by cell, 20 characters at a time. It's urgent....
Latest Articles
Getting Radical with Excel
It's time to think about Excel in a radical new way—when we use it to work with business or economic data.
It's time, in fact,...
How Fast Is Too Fast?
(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
Years ago, I read that Prof. William S. Cleveland had suggested that data could be smoothed by calculating a centered trendline through adjacent data—a...
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