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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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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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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Sunday, September 23, 2007
Display Scenarios Using a Drop-Down List
In my finance classes at Metro State, I frequently use Excel as a presentation program. I prefer it to PowerPoint because it allows me to do a live demonstration of concepts, rather than showing static slides with static pictures.
One tool that is very often useful is Excel’s Scenario Manager. If you aren’t familiar with it, the Scenario Manager is a tool that lets you specify values to place into certain cells when you choose to display a scenario. So, you can have one worksheet, but display any of several scenarios (best base, base case, worst case, etc). The problem with this tool is
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