Course Notes

Excel Crash Course

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 Advance Your Career

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 Excel Crash Course

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 Introduction

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 Objectives

• This course will teach you to:

• Follow best practices

• Speed up your modeling and increase efficiency

• Strengthen your analytical prowess

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 Excel Layout

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 Excel Layout

• Workbook

• Worksheets

• Cell name

• Formula bar

• Ribbon

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 Workbooks, worksheets, cells and formula bar

• The workbook and worksheet is the main “playground” of the financial

modeler

• Cells are used to store data

• The formula bar is used whenever a function is needed (such as sum)

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 The ribbon

• The ribbon contains all the fancy buttons at the top of the page

• This allows the user to change properties of cells, such as their size,

formatting and color

• This also allows the user to use the many tools and functions built into

Excel, such as “What if Analysis”

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 Excel Settings

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 Settings Overview

• Options

• Formatting

• Formulas

• Advanced

• Protection

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 Changing Your Settings

• These settings can be changed in the Excel Options section

• We recommend changing the default font to Arial Narrow to maximize the

amount of information that can be displayed on the screen

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 Changing Your Settings

• In the formulas section, we can set calculation to automatic or manual

• We can also set error checking to indicate any issues with our model

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 Changing Your Settings

• Under save, we can change our default save type

• Under advanced, we can change the default behavior of the Enter button

• Finally, we can also customize our ribbons to remove tools we don’t use

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 Basic Financial Analysis Setup

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 Key Learning Objectives

• We want to demonstrate to you best practices for model layouts and

structure

• We want clean formatting, enough details and dynamicity, and ease of

understanding and use

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 Format, background, special numbers, column width, freeze
panes

• We use formatting and background colors to point out headers

• In our demonstration, we set yearly periods as headers

• We use special numbers to separate actual years and estimate years

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 Format, background, special numbers, column width, freeze
panes

• We utilize column width to make sure no text is hidden

• And we freeze panes so that headers stay whenever we scroll down, and

no matter how far

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 Paste Special, Font Colors, Format Numbers, Sum

• Paste Special allows the user to dictate which characteristics of a cell is

carried over (values, formula, formatting, etc)

• Font colors are highly valuable to represent specific types of data

(assumption/input vs. processed data)

• Finally, we demonstrate the use of sum to add up all line items

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 Percentages, fill right, font colors, borders, view gridlines

• Percentages can be used to calculate some growth assumptions for our

estimate years

• We can fill right to carry these assumptions over

• Again, font colors are highly valuable for pointing out hardcoded data

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 Percentages, fill right, font colors, borders, view gridlines

• Borders help separate portions of the income statement and other

financial statements

• Gridlines are optional

• Under view, gridlines can be turned off to make the worksheet look cleaner

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 Advanced Financial Analysis Setup

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 Structure, organization, duplicate sheets and
grouping

• We demonstrate how to duplicate a worksheet, so we can keep our basic

sheet and create a duplicate for our advanced setup

• We can group all line items of the income statement to hide and unhide

together

• We copy the header formatting for each groups first line

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 Anchoring Cells and Grouping

• We create a common size income statement by dividing all line items in the

income statement with revenue

• Using anchoring, we can create a growth model with the common size

income statement

• Anchoring means that one cell will stay fixed even when formulas are

carried over

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 Naming cells, tracing, auditing

• Cells can be named for easier referencing and use

• Simply type the desired name in the little Name box above the A column

• Tracing precedents allows the user to see which cells a cell relies on

• Tracing dependents allows the user to see which cells rely on a specific cell

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 Go to special, conditional formatting

• Go to special allows us to find all constant hardcoded cells, or all cells that

are formulas

• Conditional formatting changes the background color, font size, font color,

or font of a cell when a criteria is met

• Conditional formatting is useful for pointing out value ranges, or errors

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 Dynamic Titles and Headers

• Dynamic headers can be used to modify itself when another cell changes

• In our example, we add the currency denomination to our financial

statement headers

• We also add a dynamic year to one EBITDA line item

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 Functions and Formulas

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 Date functions and time periods

• =TODAY() returns todays date

• =EOMONTH() returns the end date of a month based on inputs

• =DATE() returns a date based on inputs

• =YEARFRAC() returns the fraction a period takes out of a year

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 Sum, average, sumproduct, median

• SUM adds up specific cells

• AVERAGE averages specific cells

• SUMPRODUCT adds the sum of two groups of cells

• MEDIAN displays the midpoint of a subset of data

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 IF Statements

• IF statements are used a conditional function; these are extremely

powerful

• The IF statement allows you to set criteria, a function to perform if criteria

is true, and a function to perform if it is false

• More IF statements can be used within itself, if it’s included as a function if

the criteria is met or not met

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 Rounding and absolute

• Rounding functions can be used to round decimal numbers to integers

• Round uses default rounding to the closet whole number

• Rounddown always rounds down

• Roundup always rounds up

• Absolute returns non-negative values

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 Min, max, small, large

• Min returns the smallest number in a range of cells

• Max returns the largest number in a range of cells

• Small returns the nth smallest number in a range of cells

• Large returns the nth largest number in a range of cells

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 IFError, find and replace

• IFError allows you to set a value that will appear if the original formula

would have a returned an error such as #DIV or #NAME

• Find allows you to search within cell values or formulas for a specific string

or number

• Replace is used in conjunction with find to replace any found values with a

specified value

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 Advance Your Career

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