5 Tips: Excel for Non-Financial Communicators

Posted: October 06, 2012

[caption id="attachment_10883" align="alignright" width="800"]image from www.burrellesluce.com[/caption]Presenting financial information in communications can make business- and consumer-based content visually sing. Many communicators shy away because they're not number crunchers. Excel is a key program for those who need or want to communicate important data in cool ways. Here are a few great articles and advice from BurrellesLuce on the subject.

After the BurrellesLuce June newsletter, Meaningful Metrics: Finance for Communicators, readers asked us to provide practical tips for working with financial models. The number one request: offer some resources that could help non-financial communicators use Microsoft Excel more efficiently.

As requested, and without further ado, here are 5 tips to help make you a master at Excel.

1. Know the basics. Do not underestimate the Help tool (the question mark); it is one of your greatest resources for how-to instructions, templates, tips and more in Excel. This primer from Studyfinance.com, created for Excel 2007, also provides tutorials about entering and editing data, working with formulas, formatting worksheets, and creating charts.

2. Choose the right template. Setting up spreadsheets can be time consuming, particularly if creating them for the first time. Having a template means more efficient, consistent, and accurate reporting of efforts, as well as the ability to compare and replicate results going forward. In addition to various templates and worksheets available in the Help section of Excel, there are a number of resources online to get you started. EXINFM offers over 100 free spreadsheets ranging from Capital Budgeting Analysis, Comparable Models, ROI Models, and others.

3. Double check your formulas. Excel is a great tool for driving numbers and ROI. However, one wrong formula or miscalculation and you risk over- or under- valuing your efforts. Mathematical functions like AutoSum (quickly adds the values in a column or row), SUMIF (totals cells in a selected range based on a defined criteria), and SUMPRODUCT (weighted average) are just some of the Excel-defined functions that take the guesswork out of reporting figures and that expedite the process. When using data to drive decisions, always remember to check and recheck your formulas and results.

Read the entire article 5 Tips: Excel for Non-Financial Communicators.

Biz Tip Provided by Laurie Lee Dovey, Content Provider and POMA Executive Director

Biz Tip Courtesy of BurrellesLuce