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Rob's s1452 Notes

🧭 Spreadsheet Basics

Spreadsheets, particulatly Microsoft Excel, are a vital tool in Finance. Doing your problem set and exam calculations in Excel can help your organize your problem-solving process and correct answers. In general, this course is a great opportunity to learn Excel, and I am here to help you if you ever get stuck.

This page is a quick tutorial for learning the key skills that I find most helpful when doing work for the classes I do with Bruce. I estimate it should take 20-30 minutes total, and after you go through it, you will learn more about Excel as you watch sections.

Spreadsheet tips

Learning the very basics of Excel is a piece of cake and will be a great investment in yourself going forward.

Note: Scroll down to the bottom for free alternatives!

To start, Microsoft has produced an Excel basics tutorial, but you only want to watch the first four videos (about 5.5 minutes total)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-video-training-9bc05390-e94c-46af-a5b3-d7c22f6990bb

In addition to the very basics above, there are three skills I use all the time in section. They will be helpful for you on the homework and exams as well. If you watch the following skills before watching my sections, these three skills will become second nature for you as well.

  • Point and Click cell references help me do calculations quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Sc8YHV8vs (4 minutes 21 seconds)
  • I also use autofill by grabbing and dragging the little square that appears when you select a cell. It saves me a lot of time!
    https://www.excel-easy.com/examples/autofill.html
  • When you use autofill, be sure to double click on the cells afterward to see which cell references the new cells are using. Sometimes Excel has to guess. If it changes a column letter or row number and you don’t want it to, you can lock it by adding a dollar sign right before the letter or number. This is known as an absolute reference: (You can also use the F4 key on your keyboard to add the dollar signs and lock the cell references.)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSNuRasYl60 (9 minutes)

Upping your spreadsheet skills will help you complete questions more rapidly and confidently. The following three skills are my absolute favorite Excel skills. I consider them completely foundational. Just make sure to practice the skills before you use them.

Also during section, I will remind you to use the β€œIncrease Decimal Places button”

Don’t forget - I’m here to help! Just drop me a line!

Free Alternatives

Everything I demonstrate in Excel can also be done in Google Sheets, which is excellent and completely free. It has all of the computational power of Excel, is used by many companies, and is great for collaboration. To use it, you just go to https://sheets.google.com. You need to have a gmail account, but it only takes 30 seconds to make one (I have 10!). You can find more information here.

Office on the Web is also free. I prefer Google sheets to Web-based Excel, but if you are a fan of Office, you can use it for free in your web browser. (Microsoft Office normally starts at $70 per year.)

To access these free web apps, just head to Office.com and sign in with a free Microsoft account. Click an application iconβ€”like Word, Excel, or PowerPointβ€”to open the web version of that application. You can also drag and drop a file from your computer onto the Office.com page. It will be uploaded to your Microsoft account’s free OneDrive storage, and you can open it in the associated application.

Office’s web applications have some limitations. These applications aren’t quite as full featured as the classic Office desktop applications for Windows and Mac, and you can’t access them offline. But they do offer surprisingly powerful Office applications, and they’re completely free.

These functions will be most useful in our class.

Google Sheets is free and has all of these functions. You already have a Google Sheets account if you have a Gmail account. Just go to sheets.google.com to use it.

Here are some examples of how to use the built-in functions of Google Sheets to check your answer for NPV and IRR problems. As mentioned above, you must use the techniques described in class to get credit for the problems. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XUirhaEJx02crAigqLGDj0xNYgAtMih5L0rqIRyPOAM/edit?usp=sharing

You can also do similar calculations in Microsoft Excel..