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 →
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 …
Spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel: Date as a serial number Read more →
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 …
Spreadsheets: Excel circular reference: recursive deduction calculation Read more →
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: …
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 …
Spreadsheets: trig functions w/ degrees in LibreOffice Calc Read more →
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 …
Spreadsheets: internal rate of return (IRR) on LibreOffice Calc Read more →
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 …
Spreadsheets: Excel: calculating internal rate of return (IRR) Read more →