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

Counting by colors instead of numbers


There are many uses for colored cells within Excel. We have used them in earlier recipes for timesheet representations, and for locating blank information. Many time-based applications utilize color to represent data. When you are presented with the colored representations, it becomes tedious and difficult to extract data without the manual counting processes. Depending on the size of the data, manually counting is an ineffective use of time and resources.

Excel offers several new functions in versions 2007 and higher that will allow you to sort by color or group information; however, counting the colored items is not available.

In this recipe, you will learn to create an Excel add-in that will provide color-counting functionality. We will use a basic timesheet worksheet where each colored block will represent 60 minutes of time.

How to do it...

In our timesheet, we have colored hour blocks for each hour an employee works. In column B, we will calculate...