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

Calculating the number of payments in a loan


When purchasing equipment or other items utilizing a loan, it is important to know how many payments it will take to pay off the item completely. Granted, loan information will often provide a minimum payment to pay off a loan over a set term; however, to maximize the amount of capital, it is important to know how much quicker a loan will be paid off with a higher payment.

In this recipe, you will learn to use payment functions to calculate the number of payments to pay off a loan amount, including interest.

How do it...

We will begin by entering all applicable loan information into the appropriate cells of the worksheet:

  1. 1. In cell A6, enter the title, # of payments, and in cell B6, enter the formula =NPER(B4/12,B5,B3) and press the Enter key:

    Excel now shows that it would take just over 47 months to pay off the loan with the current payment schedule.

    A financial manager may now adjust the payment information in order to adjust the payment schedule...