This is the home page for a site to document an Excel toolkit for business school students.  The material is organized into categories and tags as with other WordPress sites.

The spreadsheet paradigm did not start with Excel (VisiCalc and Lotus 123 were around at the beginning) and there are alternatives around now (Open Office, Google Docs, etc.). But Excel has become a standard and has aspects that are not found in other applications and knowing the richness of Excel is valuable for analyzing data and supporting decision making.

Excel can be used primarily as a place to store data. Columns are used for different aspects of the data (name, address, city) and rows are for each observation (Pete, Mary, Tom). For large collections of data, there are better tools than Excel, but quite often Excel can perform well with large data sets and provides many tools for summarizing data.

Excel also provides the ability to calculate values using data stored in spreadsheet cells. The connection of data and calculations provides the ability to build a model that can show the results of complex interactions. A simple example is a loan amortization (payoff schedule). Once the details of the loan are entered in spreadsheet cells, formulas can be constructed to show the loan balance over time. Changes in the loan details immediately are recalculated in the loan balance calculations, and this can allow a decision maker to choose the loan structure that creates the most attractive loan repayment schedule.

Throughout much of this site, the words “spreadsheet” and “Excel” will be used interchangeably. If there are places where something can only be done with Excel, that will be noted, and spreadsheet will be used more generically. Google docs and Open Office are two alternatives to Excel, but they only have a subset of the functionality of Excel.

For the purposes of this site, most of the examples will be based on Excel 2013. Many people still use older versions of Excel, and most of the functionality is the same, but the user interface has changed quite a bit from the 2003, 2007 and 2013 versions. Now a cloud version, part of Office365, has been released and it has a reduced set of menu options.

Slightly more complex is the relationship between the Mac and PC versions of Excel. Some versions are quite incompatible, due to the implementation of the macro language available in Excel. At this point, most files can be shared back and forth between platforms, although there are still some incompatibilities. And unfortunately, some of the “add-in” packages available for Excel can be used with the PC version of Excel.