Sunday, April 27, 2025
When you're refinancing, this chart allows you to use the tip of your finger trade off your monthly payments and your total payments as you consider the term of your loan.

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...
Now that you've calculated your cross correlations—that is, your time-shifted correlations—here's how to chart them professionally.

Find Leading Indicators Using Automated Cross Correlations in Excel, Part 2

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In Part 1 of this discussion about automated cross correlations, I explained how to set up  the cross-correlation Data Table shown below, in columns...

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

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It all seems so simple... To improve your forecasts of sales or other measures, you simply need to find leading indicators...measures that are highly correlated...
Should You Raise Prices? Should You Lower Them? These Excel Charts Can Help You Answer Those Questions

Should You Raise Prices? Should You Lower Them? These Excel Charts Can Help You...

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In the early 1980s I was the CFO of a company owned by a man whose first instinct was to cut prices. When business was...
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

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When I worked as a CFO, my monthly reports always included a breakeven chart. It was one of the most popular reports I produced. But...
An article in the Wall Street Journal about babies born during the winter months offers some great advice about charts for Excel users in business.

Excel Charts, Seasonality, & Analysis: Five Lessons from the WSJ

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A 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal offered some great advice for Excel users in business. The article, New Light on the Plight of...
You can uncover hidden trends by charting the ratio of each month's performance to the same month one year earlier.

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

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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....
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

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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...
Three More Simple Tricks to Improve Excel Charts for Business

Three More Simple Tricks to Improve Excel Charts for Business

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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...

Latest Articles

Excel Flowbook Revolution

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,...
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.

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

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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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