Free Interactive Spreadsheet Guide.

About the free interactive spreadsheet guide

The free interactive spreadsheet guide has these goals

• To show how common business and finance tasks can be carried out by spreadsheets. Surprisingly, there are few compilations like this, that present a wide ranging and consistently presented set of examples.
• To allow you to master some of the most important spreadsheet functions. The guide explains how important functions work and gives examples of how they can be used.
• To let you test your mastery of the spreadsheet functions in the guide by carrying out a set of exercises.

Outline

The free interactive guide will give you:

• A wide ranging and consistently presented set of examples that show how spreadsheets can be applied to common business and finance activities
• Comprehensive descriptions and sample applications of the most useful and powerful spreadsheet functions
• Illustrations of how individual functions can be combined to solve practical problems
• Guided exercises that will further your spreadsheet design skills
• Cross references and hyperlinked indexes for easy navigation through the guide
• Links to online resources to further progress your spreadsheet skills

All of the above is available for free in a user-friendly and enjoyable format.

Following is an overview of this resource.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 presents a set of spreadsheet applications. The applications are broad in scope, some are fairly basic and others are more complex. Their purpose is to illustrate many of the capabilities - some of them not well known - of spreadsheets. Almost all of the examples are interactive.

Chapter 2

Most things that are complex are built from a set of simple and fundamental components. That's true also with spreadsheets. Each example in the preceding chapter was made by choosing about 8 functions from a set of 40.

In this chapter we look at the "building blocks" of spreadsheets - the individual functions that can be combined to make complex applications. We descibe what the functions do, how they are used and give examples of their applications.

Chapter 3

Individual spreadsheet functions - as described in the preceding chapter - serve specific and usually simple purposes. But what if we want to do something that an individual function can't? Then we need to combine two or more functions - in effect to design a "super-function". The more functions you need to combine - the harder this is to do. In this chapter we take first steps in this design process - by combining two or three functions to build "mini-applications".

Chapter 4

Having completed the earlier chapters you are now in a position to test your design skills in a more open-ended environment. You are given a set of problems to solve and you need to work out which functions to use and how to combine them to solve the problems.

Chapter 5

This chapter gives you links to our on-line resources whereby you can further advance your spreadsheet skills.

Assessment

You can test your spreadsheet and financial modeling skills by downloading the following assessement spreadsheet. The spreadsheet contains topics ranging from easy to quite difficult.

Click here to download the assessment spreadsheet.

Register

You can register your interest for any of our courses by selecting the "Register" menu item at the top of this page.