When building corporate funds, financial analysts often wish to know how long it will take to reach the desired corpus. When applying for a loan, you may want to find out how many payments are required to repay it in full. For such tasks, Excel provides the NPER function. Continue reading
Weather you are thinking about buying an insurance annuity or putting some money in a saving account, you are wondering - is that a good deal? To know it for sure, you need to find the present value of an investment. For this, Microsoft Excel provides the PV function. Continue reading
If offered a choice to receive a certain sum of money right now or defer the payment into the future, which would you choose? For most of us, taking money now is a natural instinct. In the financial world, this is explained by the time value of money concept. Continue reading
Building your personal and corporate finances requires thorough planning. One of the most important factors of success is understanding how much an investment made today will grow to in the future. That is called the future value of investment, and this tutorial will teach you how to calculate it in Excel. Continue reading
When you know the internal rate of return of a project, you may think you have all you need to evaluate it - the bigger the IRR the better. In practice, it's not that simple. Continue reading
For many years, finance experts and textbooks have warned about the flaws and deficiencies of the internal rate of return, but many executives keep using it for assessing capital projects. Do they enjoy living on the edge or simply are not aware of the existence of MIRR? Continue reading
Calculating IRR for periodic cash flows is easy. In real life situations, however, cash inflows and outflows often happen at irregular intervals. Thankfully, Microsoft Excel has a special function to find IRR in such cases, and this tutorial will teach you how to use it. Continue reading
IRR in Excel is one of the financial functions for calculating the internal rate of return, which is frequently used in capital budgeting to judge projected returns on investments. Continue reading
Microsoft Excel has a special function for calculating NPV, but its use can be tricky especially if you have little experience in financial modeling. The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how the Excel NPV function works and point out possible pitfalls when calculating the net present value of a series of cash flows. Continue reading
The tutorial shows how to make an amortization schedule in Excel to detail periodic payments on an amortizing loan or mortgage, including an amortization schedule with extra payments and a variable number of periods. Continue reading
The interest portion of a loan payment can be calculated manually by multiplying the period's interest rate by the remaining balance. But Microsoft Excel has a special function for this – the IPMT function. In this tutorial, we will go in-depth explaining its syntax and providing real-life formula examples. Continue reading
When you make periodic payments on a loan or mortgage, a certain part of each payment goes towards the interest and the remainder is applied to the loan principal. In this tutorial, we will look at how to use the PPMT function to calculate the principal portion of the payment. Continue reading
Before you borrow money it's good to know how a loan works. Thanks to the Excel financial functions such as PMT, PPMT and IPMT, computing periodic payments for a loan is easy. In this tutorial, we will have a closer look at the PMT function. Continue reading
In Microsoft Excel, there are several functions that can help you create linear and exponential smoothing forecasts based on historical data such as sales, budgets, cash flows, stock prices, and the like. Continue reading
What-If Analysis is one of the most powerful Excel features and one of the least understood. In most general terms, it allows you to test out various scenarios and determine a range of possible outcomes. In this tutorial, we will focus on one of What-If Analysis tools - Goal Seek. Continue reading
Run regression analysis in Excel to get the answers to the following questions: Which factors matter and which can be ignored? How closely are these factors related to each other? And how certain can you be about the predictions? Continue reading
In this tutorial, intended for beginners, we will touch only lightly on theory and calculations behind the Excel LINEST function. Our main focus will be on providing you with a formula that simply works and which you can easily customize for your data. Continue reading
The tutorial explains the basics of the Compound Annual Growth Rate and provides a few formulas to calculate CAGR in Excel. Continue reading
Did you know that Excel contains a special tool that can help you find optimal solutions for various decision problems? This tutorial covers all main aspects of the Excel Solver add-in and provides a step-by-step guidance on how to use it most effectively. Continue reading
The tutorial explains the compound interest formula for Excel and provides examples of how to calculate the future value of the investment at annual, monthly or daily compounding interest rate. You will also find the detailed steps to create your own Excel compound interest calculator. Continue reading
