Spreadsheet skills for finance [Day 1]
This course covers advanced 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.
The course is followed by an optional second day which covers additional advanced spreadsheet skills.
- About
- Facilitator
- Outline
- Content
- Assessment
- Register
About the 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.
About the facilitator
This course's facilitator is Alex Palfi. Alex had ten years of experience with Macquarie Group in presenting finance courses internationally. He has presented courses in financial modelling, spreadsheet skills, visual basic, valuation, and option pricing and risk management in London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Thailand, South Africa, Brazil, Australia & New Zealand.
Alex has worked in Investment banking, commercial banking and software development industries. Alex's university qualifications are in engineering. He obtained Masters and Bachelors degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
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.
Following is an overview of this course's content.
| Key spreadsheet functions, tools and features |
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| This section reviews the most useful spreadsheet functions, tools and features and gives examples of their applications.
These are covered: |
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| Financial functions |
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| 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: |
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| Data validation and forms controls |
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| 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: |
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Register
You can register online for any of our courses by selecting the "Register" menu item at the top of this page.
