Book Image

Excel 2010 Financials Cookbook

By : Andre Odnoha
Book Image

Excel 2010 Financials Cookbook

By: Andre Odnoha

Overview of this book

<p>Excel is one of the mostused software tools in the world and just about every business has a copy somewhere. Despite its power and flexibility it is not always clear how to use it to perform some of the most important tasks in any business: organizing, analysing, and presenting financial information.<br /><br />Excel 2010 Financials Cookbook contains a rich collection of useful techniques for handling financial data in Excel. From integrating data from a variety of different sources, through organazing and analyzing financial data, to presenting it in a variety of graphical forms, this book has you covered.<br /><br />The book deals first with "normalizing" financial data -- that is, bringing data from a number of different sources into a single format where you can analyze them together. Then you'll learn techniques for managing and analyzing the data before discovering ways to present it graphically. The book then looks at Excel's built in features for financial analysis, and even shows how you can combine the built in features to build your own analysis functions.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Excel 2010 Financials Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a box and whisker plot


A box and whisker plot is a common graphical summary function for viewing five separate data values in a single graph image. Five number summaries are invaluable methods for displaying useful information about a large set of data. In financial analysis, the box and whisker plot will display the average, minimum, maximum, and upper and lower quartiles of financial transactions. Having this information will allow a quick estimate of financial strength. Despite its usefulness, the box and whisker plot is not a function or graph type that is native to Excel.

In this recipe, you will create a box and whisker plot from the five-number summary of annual transactions for a retail location over a 3-year period.

How to do it...

We will start by utilizing a five-number summary and corresponding labels:

  1. 1. Select cells A1 through F4.

  2. 2. From the Excel ribbon toolbar, choose Insert | Charts | Other Charts:

  3. 3. In the Other Charts drop-down, choose Stock | Volume - Open ...