Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Native Excel 2007 Viewer Now Available
Microsoft released a new version of the Excel Viewer program on 14 January 2008. This version natively (without conversion) supports the viewing and printing of Excel 2007 files as well as all previous Excel files back to Excel 97. Here is the description from the site:
With Excel Viewer, you can open, view, and print Excel workbooks, even if you don’t have Excel installed. You can also copy data from Excel Viewer to another program. However, you cannot edit data, save a workbook, or create a new workbook. This download is a replacement for Excel Viewer 97 and all previous Excel Viewer
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Monday, January 14, 2008
Disallow Special Characters Using Data Validation
Excel’s data validation is a wonderful tool for ensuring that only acceptable data is entered into a cell. This is particularly helpful when users other than the one who created the worksheet will be filling in the data. The data validation tool allows you to set up rules that govern the types of data that are allowable, to present input messages that inform the user about the rules, and to display error messages if the rules are violated. Quite obviously, this can reduce errors in the worksheet.
The most powerful type of data validation is the Custom type, which is based on formulas. In
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Friday, January 04, 2008
Chart the Yield Curve Using Yahoo! Finance Data
The U.S. Treasury yield curve is of tremendous importance in the financial world, so those of us who teach finance often find it desirable to show a chart of the current yield curve. I’ve used many sources over the years, but my favorite disappeared a few years ago. The data is readily available, so creating your own yield curve isn’t that difficult. It is a bit of a hassle, though. In this post I’m going to show how you can create a “live” U.S. Treasury yield curve using Excel’s Web Query feature and data from Yahoo! Finance.
If you go to the Yahoo! Finance Bonds Center you will see a
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