The tutor explains how to make a loan payment table. Example: Make a table to show the retirement of a $5000 loan, at 5.99% compounded monthly, with monthly payments of $221.58. The loan will be retired in 24 payments. (Note …
Spreadsheets: how to make an amortization table in Excel or LibreOffice Calc Read more »
The tutor explains how, on Excel, to make a grid useful for displaying a graph. In these days of software availability, one would expect making squares on a page to be obvious. Here’s the easiest way I know: In Excel, …
Microsoft Excel: how to make a square grid for graphing Read more »
The tutor explains the use of Excel’s built-in function to calculate the number of work days between two dates. Excel’s networkdays() function is located in the Formulas tab by clicking the Date & Time icon. It calculates the number of …
The tutor shares a find from today’s Excel session. I use Excel for very specific purposes, mainly programming and such. There are common skills I’m only now accumulating. Today, from Microsoft, I learned that the Select All button is the …
The tutor opens the discussion about how to display, automatically, a cell’s content according to its value. What if, in Excel, you want to display any value between 78 and 93 in green? Well, you can, using conditional formatting. On …
The tutor shows an example using Excel’s cumprinc() function, which calculates the reduction of the amount owing over a specific duration. A question a mortgage holder might ponder: “When I go to refinance after 5 years, how much will I …
The tutor points out an elegant feature of spreadsheets. Formulas in Excel default to relative referencing. Consider the following illustration: Let’s imagine you input 101 in cell e10. Then, in f11, you input the formula =e10. Of course, when you …
The tutor points out a handy hint that will be obvious to spreadsheet veterans, yet perhaps very useful to beginners. Let’s imagine you’ve entered a city name in a cell: Medicine Hat, Alberta. However, you notice you mistyped the name: …
The tutor points out how a spreadsheet can show holiday awareness. Most holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, Halloween, or Christmas, happen on a set date. However, Easter is different. As a child, I overheard it’s the Sunday after the first …
The tutor continues about Excel’s handling of dates. I mentioned in my March 16 post that Excel can convert a date into a serial number for convenient calculation of duration between dates. The serial number is the number of days …
Spreadsheets: converting date to serial number in Excel using DATEVALUE Read more »