At the surface, an Excel table just sounds like a way to organize data. In truth, this generic name covers a ton of useful features. Tables containing hundreds or even thousands of rows and columns can be instantly recalculated and totaled, sorted and filtered, updated with new information and reformatted, summarized with pivot tables and exported. Continue reading
Looking for a way to visualize a large volume of data in a little space? Sparklines are a quick and elegant solution. These mini-charts are specially designed to show data trends inside a single cell. Continue reading
When you hit the Print button in Excel, the entire spreadsheet is printed by default. But what if you don't really need to print out all the content of a huge worksheet? Then set the print area that includes only your selection. Continue reading
Living in a digital world, we still need a printed copy every now and then. At first sight, printing Excel spreadsheets is super easy. Just click the Print button, right? In reality, a well-organized and beautifully formatted sheet that looks great on a monitor is often a mess on a printed page. Continue reading
When you know the internal rate of return of a project, you may think you have all you need to evaluate it - the bigger the IRR the better. In practice, it's not that simple. Continue reading
For many years, finance experts and textbooks have warned about the flaws and deficiencies of the internal rate of return, but many executives keep using it for assessing capital projects. Do they enjoy living on the edge or simply are not aware of the existence of MIRR? Continue reading
Calculating IRR for periodic cash flows is easy. In real life situations, however, cash inflows and outflows often happen at irregular intervals. Thankfully, Microsoft Excel has a special function to find IRR in such cases, and this tutorial will teach you how to use it. Continue reading
IRR in Excel is one of the financial functions for calculating the internal rate of return, which is frequently used in capital budgeting to judge projected returns on investments. Continue reading
Microsoft Excel has a special function for calculating NPV, but its use can be tricky especially if you have little experience in financial modeling. The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how the Excel NPV function works and point out possible pitfalls when calculating the net present value of a series of cash flows. Continue reading
As with other Office applications, Excel ribbon is your primary interface that contains every command and feature you'll ever need. What to know what Excel is capable of? Go explore the ribbon! Continue reading
Introduced in Excel 2007, the ribbon allows you to access most of the commands and features available in Excel. Why would you want to customize the ribbon? Perhaps you will find it convenient to have your own tab with your favorite and most used commands at your fingertips. Continue reading
Ribbon is the central point of whatever you do in Excel, the area where most of features and commands available to you reside. Do you feel the ribbon takes up too much of your screen space? No problem, one click of your mouse, and it is hidden. Continue reading
Getting to the commands you use most often should be easy. And it is exactly what the Quick Access Toolbar is designed for. Add your favorite commands to the QAT so they are only a click away no matter what ribbon tab you currently have open. Continue reading
You want to access one of advanced Excel features but are stuck at the very first step: where's the Developer tab they all talk about? The good news is that the Developer tab is available in every version of Excel though it is not enabled by default. This article shows how to quickly activate it. Continue reading
In Microsoft Excel, there are 6 different functions for calculating variance but all of them are designed to find variance in the classical sense, i.e. how far a set of values are spread out from their average. In this article, you will learn how to calculate percentage variance between two cells. Continue reading
Variance is one of the most useful tools in probability theory and statistics. In science, it describes how far each number in the data set is from the mean. In practice, it often shows how much something changes. In this article, we will analyze different methods of calculating variance in Excel. Continue reading
Even in the modern versions of Excel, there is no easy way to insert a vertical line in a chart. However, "no easy way" does not mean no way at all. We will just have to do a little lateral thinking! Continue reading
The tutorial shows how to make an amortization schedule in Excel to detail periodic payments on an amortizing loan or mortgage, including an amortization schedule with extra payments and a variable number of periods. Continue reading
The interest portion of a loan payment can be calculated manually by multiplying the period's interest rate by the remaining balance. But Microsoft Excel has a special function for this – the IPMT function. In this tutorial, we will go in-depth explaining its syntax and providing real-life formula examples. Continue reading
When you make periodic payments on a loan or mortgage, a certain part of each payment goes towards the interest and the remainder is applied to the loan principal. In this tutorial, we will look at how to use the PPMT function to calculate the principal portion of the payment. Continue reading
Before you borrow money it's good to know how a loan works. Thanks to the Excel financial functions such as PMT, PPMT and IPMT, computing periodic payments for a loan is easy. In this tutorial, we will have a closer look at the PMT function. Continue reading
Scientists love quantifying different things, and they even found a way to quantify uncertainty. For this, they calculate confidence intervals, or margins of error, and display them by using error bars. Continue reading
These days when technologies, markets and customer needs are changing so rapidly, it is critical that you move with trends, and not against them. Trend analysis can help you identify underlying patterns in data movements and project future behavior. Continue reading
In statistics, there exist many different forecasting techniques and some of these techniques are already implemented in Excel. This tutorial will teach you how to forecast in Excel based on historical data and may help you save money on specialized forecasting software. Continue reading
In Microsoft Excel, there are several functions that can help you create linear and exponential smoothing forecasts based on historical data such as sales, budgets, cash flows, stock prices, and the like. Continue reading
Flash Fill is one of the most amazing features of Excel. It grabs a tedious task that would take hours to be performed manually and executes it automatically in a flash. Continue reading
The fastest way to get some specific information about a cell in Excel is to use the CELL function. Among other things, it can tell you whether a cell is protected or not, retrieve the cell address and value, show a full path to the workbook that contains the cell, and a lot more. Continue reading
To create a cell reference in Excel, you can type the column and row coordinates manually. Alternatively, you can get a cell address from the row and column numbers supplied to the ADDRESS function. Continue reading
As simple as it seems, Excel cell reference confuses many users. How is a cell address defined in Excel? What is an absolute and relative reference and when each should be used? In this tutorial, you will find answers to these and many more questions. Continue reading
One of the most useful features of Excel tables are structured references. When you have just stumbled upon a special syntax for referencing tables, it may look boring and confusing, but after experimenting a bit you will surely see how useful and cool this feature is. Continue reading
