Saturday, June 14, 2008
Coin Tosses and Stock Price Charts
Prior to the 1960’s, most investors believed that future securities prices could be predicted (and that great riches were to be had) if only they could discover the secret. Many investors still believe this today, despite much evidence that suggests that they would be best served by simply owning the entire market (investing in index funds) rather than trying to pick individual stocks.
The efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) essentially states that techniques such as fundamental and technical analysis cannot be used to consistently earn excess profits in the long run. The EMH began with
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Sunday, March 16, 2008
Analyze Google AdSense Data Using Pivot Tables
Webmasters who use Google’s AdSense service to place ads on their site know that the analytical tools that AdSense supplies are pretty weak. Fortunately, it is easy to get report data from the site and into Excel where we can use all of the analytical tools that Excel provides. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate how webmasters can use PivotTables to analyze AdSense data. There are many reports that you can create in AdSense, and they are all candidates for analysis within Excel, but I will be demonstrating how to use pivot tables to analyze the "This month, by day" report that is
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Saturday, March 08, 2008
Testing a String for Proper Case
Have you ever needed to check a string in a worksheet cell to see if it is in proper case? By "proper case" I mean that the first letter of each word in the string is capitalized and the other characters are lowercase. For example, you may have a list of people’s names (maybe for a mailing list) and you need to be sure that the names are written properly (e.g., John Smith, not john Smith or John sMith). It seems that this should be easy in Excel, but it isn’t obvious (at least there is no easy, built-in function that you can use to validate the string). In this post I will demonstrate three
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Sunday, February 03, 2008
Charting Economic Time Series with Shaded Recessions
If you read the business press or government economic reports, then you have undoubtedly seen charts that show recessionary periods with shading. In this post I will demonstrate how to create this type of chart in Excel 2007. The same technique is applicable to all versions of Excel, though the mechanics of creating the charts in earlier versions are slightly different. Users of other spreadsheets, such as Open Office Calc should be able to use a similar procedure.
Obviously, if we are to chart an economic data series and shade the recessions then we need data. For this post I will be
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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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