Book Image

Hands-On Financial Modeling with Excel for Microsoft 365 - Second Edition

By : Shmuel Oluwa
Book Image

Hands-On Financial Modeling with Excel for Microsoft 365 - Second Edition

By: Shmuel Oluwa

Overview of this book

Financial modeling is a core skill required by anyone who wants to build a career in finance. Hands-On Financial Modeling with Excel for Microsoft 365 explores financial modeling terminologies with the help of Excel. Starting with the key concepts of Excel, such as formulas and functions, this updated second edition will help you to learn all about referencing frameworks and other advanced components for building financial models. As you proceed, you'll explore the advantages of Power Query, learn how to prepare a 3-statement model, inspect your financial projects, build assumptions, and analyze historical data to develop data-driven models and functional growth drivers. Next, you'll learn how to deal with iterations and provide graphical representations of ratios, before covering best practices for effective model testing. Later, you'll discover how to build a model to extract a statement of comprehensive income and financial position, and understand capital budgeting with the help of end-to-end case studies. By the end of this financial modeling Excel book, you'll have examined data from various use cases and have developed the skills you need to build financial models to extract the information required to make informed business decisions.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Financial Modeling Overview
4
Part 2 – The Use of Excel Features and Functions for Financial Modeling
8
Part 3 – Building an Integrated 3-Statement Financial Model with Valuation by DCF
15
Part 4 – Case Study

Chapter 5: An Introduction to Power Query

Power Query is one of the most innovative and game-changing features introduced to Microsoft Excel. In this chapter, we will offer an introduction to Power Query, including its advantages and a step-by-step illustration of how to use it.

A financial analyst or financial modeler receives data from a wide range of sources. Most of the time, you don't have control over this, so you might end up having to work with data in different formats such as .txt, .csv, .xls, and .pdf. Also, the data would have been prepared by people of vastly varying Excel competence and discipline.

As a result of this, the data usually comes with a lot of formatting and layout inconsistencies that have to be addressed before it is ready for your model. Traditionally, correcting these errors used to be one of the most tedious aspects of modeling, until the advent of Power Query.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to get and transform data using...