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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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Is your company growing faster than it can afford? The Sustainable Growth Rate can
help you manage your company's financial ability to grow.
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Is your company spending thousands of dollars for
business dashboards that serve up your performance measures like pablum?
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Here are some products and services we use on our own computers. Our first recommendation:
Remote Data Backup for Businesses
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Okay, so "art" might not be the correct word. But these cartoons were
created in Excel
Check them out!
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 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.
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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.
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 Variable-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.
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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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Pablum
Dashboards
