How to Create a Rolling Forecast of Seasonal Sales in Excel
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...
How to Count the Occurrences of Items in a List
"I have a list of repair orders (RO). I want to know how many one line repair orders there are in the list. So...
How to Audit and Improve Excel Business Plans
A client, who's a business-finance consultant, recently was hired to improve the financial forecast for a major startup company. He recently sent me the...
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...
Highlight Normal Results in Line Charts to Make Exceptional Results Stand Out
Line charts that show trends in performance are the most useful type of chart that management reports can contain.
All managers want good performance to...
Good Examples of Bad Charts: Chart Junk from a Surprising Source
For years, I’ve written that we Excel users should create “magazine-quality” charts for our reports and analyses.
However, we must be very careful of the...
Fourteen Ways to Improve Your Monthly Board Reports with the Help of Excel
Board reports should answer four types of questions:
1. What were the significant operating events last month? Are you on target?
2. How has your view...
Five Best Practices in Your Excel Reporting Strategies
Most Excel reports, forecasts, and analyses I've seen in my career could serve as excellent examples of what NOT to do in Excel.
These reports...
Find Future and Present Values from Scheduled Cash Flows in Excel
"I would like a Future Value command similar to the XIRR and XNPV functions, which allow compounding by using an interest rate and referencing...
Excel Is Great for Business Intelligence!
With the right access to data, Excel can become an outstanding Business Intelligence (BI) system.
Business Intelligence (BI) is the systematic use of information about...
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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