Help and ideas for busy numbers people
Structuring data in spreadsheets is really important for producing good financial models and reports.
However, data designed for humans to read should look different from data designed for computers to read.
Continue reading “Structuring data in spreadsheets – for humans and computers”I’m a late adopter of Cell Styles in Excel. Before I started doing financial modelling and consulting work for other people, I didn’t really appreciate how useful they were.
I wish I’d learned them a lot earlier as they would have been helpful in earlier roles, too.
Continue reading “Why you should use Cell Styles in Excel”
At a recent webinar, the presenter led by suggesting that in these tough economic times there is more of a need for live financial data. (They may have been selling a product).
I think it’s much more about the decisions that you need to take from the financial data.
Continue reading “The need for live financial data (or not)”This blog post probably won’t make a lot of sense unless you read Part 1 first.
Having customised our VAT report in Xero in part 1, we’re now going to use Power Query to turn this into a journal.
Continue reading “Monthly irrecoverable VAT adjustments with Xero and Power Query: Part 2”I asked on LinkedIn the other day whether people would be interested in my method for posting monthly irrecoverable VAT adjustments and was pleasantly surprised by the responses.
So here goes.
Continue reading “Monthly irrecoverable VAT adjustments with Xero and Power Query: Part 1.”
There’s no particular reason why you should listen to my views on how to keep to New Year’s resolutions. This quick blogpost is just to share a few thoughts. Excel is involved, obviously.
Continue reading “Tracking resolutions throughout the year (with Excel, obviously)”
I attended an excellent livestream last week about Excel dashboards, presented by the legendary Chandoo. In his tutorial, he built a KPI dashboard in Excel in around an hour. As well as learning lots of useful tips, it also made me think about the key skills (Excel and otherwise) that you need to build a great dashboard.
Continue reading “Creating dashboards in Excel – key skills”I have the visual sense of a blind goat, but over the years I have picked up a number of Excel design tips which I apply to any spreadsheet that someone else has to look at.
This post sets out ten areas which you can look at to make your spreadsheets cleaner and more professional.
I’ve written this post on the assumption that you are reading spreadsheets online, but most of these Excel design tips also work for printed documents.
The first tip is the easiest – turn off gridlines. Gridlines are the lines marking the rows and columns.
Have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) ever featured so much in our news bulletins? As a nation we are suddenly poring over death and testing rates and graphs as never before.
Our new-found love of stats highlights six lessons I’ve learned over the years from producing board reports and analysis.
Continue reading “Coronavirus and Key Performance Indicators”