The tutor discusses Excel’s conversion of dates to serial numbers. In financial calculations, the time duration is often important. Consider the following example: Calculate the duration from April 27, 1988 to March 16, 2016. Mathematically, the problem can be thought …

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The tutor shows how to use a spreadsheet (Excel) to compute a recursive deduction rate using a circular reference. In yesterday’s post I brought up an example in which a deduction depends upon the income minus that same deduction. It’s …

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The tutor shows an example of naming items in a spreadsheet for use in a formula. This post focuses on Microsoft Excel; hopefully I’ll do a similar one for a generic spreadsheet soon. Let’s imagine Jones faces two tax rates: …

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The tutor provides a brief hint about using trig functions of angles in degrees on LibreOffice Calc. A person who doesn’t use a spreadsheet very often, probably needs it to work quickly and reliably the rare time they do use …

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The tutor promotes his equal-opportunity point of view towards computing. I use Microsoft’s programs: witness my post from Sept 28 about using Excel to calculate IRR. However, some of my computers aren’t Windows; rather, they’re Linux. I don’t have a …

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The tutor finally brings up the elephant in the room. I’ve been writing this blog since August 2012; herein are over 500 articles confronting problems, methods, or ideas that might occur in an academic milieu. Numerous of them centre on …

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