Monday, July 30, 2007

Video: Using Controls to Change Chart Data

One of the best things about Excel is its seemingly infinite flexibility. In this video I demonstrate how you can use controls from the Forms toolbar to change the data in charts. There are so many ways to use this technique for presentations that it was difficult to choose one. I decided to show a very simple example that compares some financial ratios for GE over time to the industry averages.

The basic idea is that you use a control (a drop-down list in this example) to choose which of several data series to display in the chart. As part of the formatting of the control, you will

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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Google Spreadsheets and Google Finance

Call me an Excel bigot, if you must, but I haven’t really played with Google Spreadsheets much. I’m not a big fan of online applications. But, my mind is open and I recently learned of a really great feature: Google Spreadsheets can link to data in Google Finance! This means that you can have live data in your spreadsheet without needing a Bloomberg feed. You can also attach working spreadsheets to your Web (or Blog) pages. Let’s see how well this works:

So, how does this work? Easy. First you will need a Google account. If you have a GMail address, you are good to go - just use the

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Sunday, July 15, 2007

Loan Amortization Tutorial Added

For some reason, I get quite a few requests for amortization schedules, so I have created a new loan amortization schedule tutorial and posted it to my Excel tutorials. It starts out by describing in detail how to amortize a loan using formulas, moves into using the IPMT and PPMT functions, and then creates a full amortization schedule. At the end, I made it a bit fancier by adding IF statements, conditional formatting, and charts.

You can access the tutorial at this link.

I also created a tutorial for the TI 83, TI 83 Plus, and TI 84 Plus calculators. One of the cool things about

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