For business users of Microsoft Excel.
For business users of Microsoft Excel.

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Learn how to create Excel dashboards.

 
     
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Should You Raise Prices?
Or Should You Lower Them?

Suppose you plan to increase profits by raising or lowering your prices. Your unit sales probably will increase if you cut prices and decrease if you raise prices.

A little-known formula can help you decide whether your change in price, combined with the likely change in unit sales, will help your gross profits or hurt them.

By using this formula in a calc-plot chart, you can get a better picture of all your pricing options. This will help you to brainstorm your pricing strategy more easily.

Create Cycle Plots in Excel
To Chart Seasonal Sales Data

This chart displays eleven years of seasonal data in new way. It's called a Cycle Plot.

Here, the chart shows the trend for all sales in each of the twelve months. The horizontal line shows the average sales for each month.

We show you how to create Cycle Plots of your own data.

New! Plug-N-Play Excel Dashboards

You can print your own Excel reports like these today with our new Plug-N-Play Excel Dashboard Kit #1.

Our new low-cost package provides ten dashboard report designs and fifteen color themes, for a total of 150 different reports. Just enter your data and print your reports.

Learn more about this quick and easy way to create Excel dashboard reports.

Two figures from the first spreadsheet dashboard report, created with Lotus 1-2-3.

The First Dashboard
Used in Spreadsheets

This figure shows two graphs from the first spreadsheet dashboard report, created using Lotus 1-2-3 in 1984. Each line of the charts consists of text in cells. We offer more examples of this report and offer a brief description of how it was created. 

Using Excel to Calculate
Frequency Distributions

When you're analyzing data that can have multiple values, it's often useful to know how often various ranges of values have occurred.  For example, how many products have you sold at different prices? How many employees are in each pay grade? How many expense accounts rose or fell by certain amounts?

Although Excel's FREQUENCY function was designed to calculate frequency distributions like this, you also can use SUM-IF, SUMPRODUCT, and Excel 2007's COUNTIFS function. We offer a summary of your options.

Cash Trap

To be honest, this item has no direct connection with Excel. But it certainly describes an issue that many Excel users will recognize.

As far as that goes, the style will be familiar if you've ever read Kipling.

You might find it worth your time.

Reporting Periodic Data
From Excel Databases

It's a common problem. Each day or week or month you import data into a spreadsheet, and then you update your reports to display the new information. However, unless you've designed your Excel reports carefully, you'll have to change your Excel formulas to include that new information.

Instead, we show an easy way to let Excel formulas do all the work.

Returning Items from a List
Using Excel's Data Validation

One easy way to return an item from an Excel database is to add a dropdown list box to your spreadsheet. But suppose you want to return additional information about that item, how do you do it?

You can use Excel's Data Validation feature to return the item, and INDEX-MATCH to return other items. We show you how.

Weighing Your Debt Load

Is debt your enemy or your friend? It's your friend if you're making money on the cash you borrow. The EOA ratio compares directly to the interest rate on your debt. When your EOA exceeds your interest rate, you're making money from your debt.

 

Growing Too Fast?

Is your company growing faster than it can afford? The Sustainable Growth Rate can help you manage your company's financial ability to grow.

Pablum Dashboards

Is your company spending thousands of dollars for business dashboards that serve up your performance measures like pablum?

 

Stuff We Use

Here are some products and services we use on our own computers. Our first recommendation: Remote Data Backup for Businesses

Benford's Law & Planning

Unless you're a public accountant, you probably haven't experimented with Benford's Law.

Auditors sometimes use this fascinating statistical insight to uncover fraudulent accounting data. But it might reveal a useful strategy for investing in the stock market. And it might help you to improve the accuracy of your budgets and forecasts.

 

Array Alternative

SUMPRODUCT offers great power to summarize lists of data in Excel worksheets. It works somewhat like array formulas, but without the complications.

Unfortunately, Excel's help topic ignores the real power of this function.

Array Formulas

Excel array formulas can summarize Excel data quickly and easily.

We explain the most powerful and flexible approaches. The most powerful method is to use Excel arrays, which can give you summaries using any number of criteria.

 

Future Values

A reader asks how to calculate Future Values from cash flows that aren't necessarily periodic.

We show how to calculate both Future and  Present non-periodic values.

Kyd in BPM Magazine

In Don't Discard Those Spreadsheets: The Power of Excel-Friendly OLAP, Charley Kyd offers a practical response to the anti-Excel attitude that is common these days among people who promote expensive BI and BPM systems for large companies.

The article offers an agile and low-cost alternative to those systems.

 

Excel Art

Okay, so "art" might not be the correct word. But these cartoons were created in Excel

Check them out!

Display Key Stats in Excel

Do you uncover miscellaneous facts each month, with no obvious way to report them?

Business Week magazine uses figures somewhat like this one to solve the problem. We show how to create and maintain them in Excel.

 

Excel Shortcut Keys

Most  shortcut keys work the same in both Classic and New Excel.

We provide tables that show all shortcuts we know that launch dialogs both in Excel 2007 and in earlier versions of the product.

Create Accordion Reports

Create accordion reports in ExcelVariable-length lists, can take a lot of work to set up in Excel. But an Enterprise Excel system, and some clever Excel formulas, make these "accordion reports" a breeze.

 

Low-Cost Excel BI

Most Business Intelligence (BI) systems are expensive. But we've found a way to get started with an Enterprise Excel BI system for a tiny fraction of the normal cost.


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