Spreadsheet skills workshop

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This course covers spreadsheet skills. During the course you will:

• Use a wide range of Excel functions and practice applying them in finance settings.
• Learn how to choose the best function to solve a problem when several functions are available.
• Cover techniques to perform complex calculations in a single cell that would otherwise take many cells to do.
• Be shown the errors that spreadsheets can generate and techniques for eliminating or managing those errors.
• Review the finance principles and assumptions underlying the main spreadsheet financial functions.
• Apply the tools, utilities and features available in spreadsheets to make them more effective and user friendly and to speed their development time.
• Review how financial statements can be modelled in spreadsheets.
• Examine the principles of financial model design and apply those to design, develop, test and maintain financial models.

About this course

Spreadsheets provide many functions, tools and features that can be used in finance. This course describes those functions, tools and features, illustrates how they work and shows how they can be used in a variety of practical finance settings. Some of the functions are powerful but often underutilized, and other financial functions are sometimes misunderstood or misinterpreted: Special emphasis is given to those functions.

A well-designed spreadsheet can pay significant dividends: The course shows how good design skills together with a mastery of spreadsheet functions leads to efficient, user-friendly, maintainable, robust, responsive and error-free financial spreadsheets.

Outline

Audience

This course's intended audience is spreadsheet users in finance who wish to understand and apply the important functions, features, tools and techniques that spreadsheets provide.

Level

This is an intermediate through to advanced level course.

Duration

The course comprises one day. An optional second day follows this course and on day that further spreadsheet skills are covered.

Prerequisites

You will need spreadsheet skills at an intermediate level. You should be able to use formulae, and understand how cells are referenced (e.g. $A1:$B5).

Format

The course has a “hands-on” format. Each participant works with a laptop for the major part of the course on practical financial spreadsheet topics.

Content

Following is an overview of this course's content.

Key spreadsheet functions, tools and features

This section reviews the most useful spreadsheet functions, tools and features and gives examples of their applications. These are covered:

Financial functions

This section explains the mathematics underlying spreadsheet financial functions. The benefits of knowing the underlying mathematics include: 1) Being able to solve problems from “first principles” if the problems are too complex to be solved by inbuilt financial functions. 2) Ensuring that functions are used correctly (e.g. that inputs are of the form that Excel “expects”). The following functions are covered:

Data validation and forms controls

Spreadsheets provide features to make it easy for users to enter inputs and to lessen the chance that incorrect or inappropriate values are inputted. The following are covered:

Reviewing the principles of financial model design

As with any area of expertise, it is essential that the principles of financial modelling and model design are understood in order to use these models for more advanced decision-making. The following are covered:

Applying the principles of financial model design

There are many applications and types of financial models. This section involves applying the principles of model design to constructing models. Models and applications covered include:

Solving problems iteratively

Some types of financial problems are too complex to solve in a single step. This section describes the mathematics behind iteration and explores the different ways that such problems can be solved iteratively. These are the methods covered:

Links

Do a spreadsheet skills self-assessment

Try our live spreadsheet skills competition

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