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 table of financial information


One of the most advanced and least used functions of Excel is the use of the table within Excel. Granted, a worksheet is a variety of table; however, specifying the data within your worksheet as a table unlocks numerous formula functions that were otherwise unavailable. In addition, when you specify your data as a table, Excel is able to interpret additions to the table and automatically include formulas, equations, and other items that are assigned manually.

In this recipe, you will learn how to specify data as a table and view the information with a data table effect.

Getting ready

Data tables in Excel are powerful; however, they must be laid out correctly to harness their full potential. Data tables must have column headings, each column must be a consistent data type, and there should never be a blank space within your dataset.

How to do it...

The data for the table should already be included within the Excel worksheet. We will begin by selecting...