Microsoft Excel tips and tricks for accountants

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A Better Way to Gauge Profitability

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Return-on-equity (ROE) is the correct profit metric to evaluate the performance of a business. However, the primary emphasis on financial ratio analysis must be on operating performance. The “advanced” version of the DuPont model remedies the original model’s failure to cleanly separate the effects of operating and financing...

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May 11, 2021

Format column headings in Excel to make them easier to read

Learn three simple formatting tricks to make column headings – or other cells – more readable in Excel.

May 6, 2021

Excel depreciation advice; risk management lessons learned

Hear more on calculation of depreciation in Excel from a Technology Q&A author, and hear from a risk management expert on what organizations have learned in the past year.

May 1, 2021

8 ways to calculate depreciation in Excel

The first section explains straight-line, sum-of-years’ digits, declining-balance, and double-declining-balance depreciation. The second section covers the remaining depreciation methods.

April 13, 2021

See descriptive statistics in Excel

Learn how to use Excel to quickly calculate basic descriptive statistics for a dataset, including mean, standard deviation, minimums, and maximums.

March 9, 2021

Add the Data Analysis ToolPak to Excel

Excel’s Data Analysis ToolPak allows you to perform many advanced data analytics functions. Here’s how to enable it.

February 9, 2021

Various ways to display formulas in Excel

There are a number of different ways that you can display formulas in Excel. This can be useful when investigating why a certain formula isn’t working correctly or when grading your students’ worksheets to ensure they are using formulas correctly.

February 1, 2021

Discover more about your data with Ideas

Excel Ideas will analyze your dataset and give you recommendations, or ideas, for charts, PivotTables, and PivotCharts that work with your
dataset.

February 1, 2021

Searching within Excel comments

You can search for text that is contained within comments, hidden or unhidden, of an Excel spreadsheet.

February 1, 2021

A better way to save

You can specify a default location to save your Excel workbooks. You can also “pin” other locations so that they are quickly accessible every time you save.

January 12, 2021

Spend less time on repetitive tasks with Excel macros

Make mundane tasks easier by harnessing the power of automation.

January 1, 2021

Create your own Excel template

You can make templates in Excel for all sorts of preferred “defaults.”

December 8, 2020

Use VLOOKUP to help manage your gradebook

VLOOKUP is a formula that allows you to “look up” certain data and retrieve it into another table, by row. This function can be especially useful when you have a well-structured table with information organized by rows (such as a gradebook)!

December 1, 2020