Escaping Excel Hell – Tips for Forecasting and Budgeting

When preparing a budget or forecast, especially if extra funds are being sought, the last thing you want is a major error. If it is found by the potential funder it’s one problem. Not spotting it at all is another. Unfortunately it is very easy to make a mistake using Excel, such as missing costs and getting links between sheets incorrect.

Excel is a great tool for one person preparing a budget for a simple business. As things get more complex, other tools are more appropriate to handle aggregation and use by multiple people. Some of these tools use Excel as the user interface, or a grid that looks somewhat like Excel.

Whatever tool is used, it’s important to remember: [...read more...]

Automating Excel Business Processes

Excel is a marvelous software tool. It’s pretty well standard on business PCs, and most people have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how it works.

You can list data in a simple database, and use the range of formulae to add and manipulate data. So Excel (or some other spreadsheet) is often the first tool thought of and used for a business application such as order processing or budgeting.

However it’s worth thinking of Excel as [... read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Management Reporting

If you have two choices of how to produce management reports, which would you prefer:

1. Into a web browser direct from the relevant system(s)?
2. [...read more...]

Traffic Light Charts for Excel

We’ve looked before at add-ins for gauges and sparklines, but haven’t looked at “Traffic Light Charts”. These apply colour highlights to trends, as in the example left.

[...read more...]