Excel Resources

One of the authors of your textbook, Dr. Timothy R. Mayes at Clemson University, has a great personal website, TVMCalcs.com, that has great resources for using Excel and also for using financial calculators (all brands and models) to solve primarily time value of money and other problems.

Microsoft has many good resources on its Excel website, including tutorials, templates, and much more. office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/

LinkedIn Learning is a fee-based huge repository of professional video tutorials on just about every software system in existence, as well as a wealth to professional development and business self-help courses and videos. The Excel tutorials here are excellent and range from basic to very advanced.

YouTube.com also has a large number of tutorials on just about avery aspect of using Excel. Just search on EXCEL plus whatever particular topic you are interested in. For example, serching on "Excel Amortization Table" will turn up many useful tips and tutorials.

OfficeTuts has an extensive free set of easy-to-follow tutorials on specific operations in Excel from basic to quite advanced. Together they form a progressive tutorial course that can teach you all of the basics of Excel quickly and efficiently. This is a great place to start when you get stuck on how to use any tool, operation, or function in Excel.

ExcelHow is another free set of tutorials that cover a huge depth of topics in Excel. The site includes a blog by the site's author that has frequent posts about interesting and challenging things to do in Excel.

OnlineExcelTraining.co.uk has an outstanding free downloadable Excel resource book, "Answers to 625 of the Most Common Excel Questions" that provides in-depth information on a huge array of interesting and useful topipcs. Working thtough the questions or just using it as a go-to resource will greatly improve your Excel knowledge and skills. You will find it on the main page of their website towards the bottom. There is also an interesting and challenging Excel Skills Workbook, which is a "testing workbook" that requires you to complete seven Excel tasks in 20 minutes. It times you, auto-corrects your work, and produces a personalized report of your performance in terms of efficiency and Excel knowledge. The site also offers training courses for a fee that can be used to prepare for several certifications that the company offers.

A Guide to Using Excel for Business at SmartAdvocate.com is a great compilation of articles and tutorials from many sources that provides many useful Excel tips and tricks as well as in-depth tutorials on many basic and more complex operations and procedures -- all for free.

TeachExcel.com is a great Excel training and forum site with courses (all free) on a wide array of topics including VBA, and over 400 Excel tutorials and macros.

AutomateExcel.com has a series of free Excel tutorial covering formulas and functions, keyboard shortcuts, and VBA coding at http://www.automateexcel.com/tutorials-practice-tests.

HowToExcel.org has lots of great free tutorials on all aspects of Excel in an interesting and fun format.

Excel Easy is a great resource with many useful and easy to follow tutorials covering just about all of the functions and operations in Excel.

WallStreetMojo has lots of excellent information and tutorials on Excel applications in financial analysis and modelling. See in particular their free ratio analysis guide using Excel.

Sumit Bansal has a tremendous website at trumpexcel.com that is packed with excellent tutorials and tipson wide range of Excel applications, including a downloadable ebook called Excel The Smart Way. Lots of very useful and interesting things here.

SimpliLearn.com says it is the world's largest professional certifications company. They have training courses in a wide variety of skill and applications, and a good number of them involve Excel. Do a search on Excel to see what if offered. One is Financial Modeling with MS Excel Foundation Certification Training, which is would be a good follow-up to this course.

Guru99 has an excellent set of Excel tutorials that cover a wide range of topics from basic to advanced. They are set up to form a course if you do them in sequence, or dive into whatever topic you need to understand.

YodaLearning.com has a number of useful free tutorials at https://yodalearning.com/tutorials/ and also offers longer ones for a reasonable charge. The site has tutorials on Powerpoint, Word, Access, and Visio as well. 

Compute Expert is blog site that provid several very useful tutorial on Excel usage, a great liest of formulas and functions, and a Tips and Tricks page -- all free.           

AnalystCave.com provides a wealth of great tutorials and other material that focuses primarily on Excel VBA. If you want to get into VBA and have some fun foing it, this site is for you.

Avidian, a vendor of a CRM add-in tool for Microsoft Outlook, provides a great set of Excel tutorials covering topics from the basic to the more complex with many helpful tips and tricks. This is an up-to-date and interesting resource that is very well done and very useful.

Acuity Training has an in-depth set of excellent tutorials on using Excel for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). While you may not need to do much SEO, that topic environment allows the application of many of the great data analysis tools that are available in Excel and that you might need for other things.

PowerSpreadsheets.com provides a number of free tutorials on using Excel VBA, and you sign up to receive blog posts from the author on a many Excel tips and tricks.

Activia Training has a free resource center specifically for Excel users. It includes a number of free resources and tools; including video tutorials and Excel templates to help people to become more organised. Check it out at https://www.activia.co.uk/microsoft/excel-resources.

Pearson Software Consulting provides an extensive set of Excel tips, templates, and how-to articles that cover a huge array of procedures and operations, including VBA applications in Excel.

About.com has a good repository of tips and tricks at this link.

Spreadsheeto.com is a blog on using Excel that is written by two friends, Kasper and Mikkel, from Denmark. There are some good tips here covering a wide range of topics.

Dheeraj Vaidya (CFA, FRM) has a great website on wallstreetmojo.com with a very nice Free Comprehensive Guide to Financial Analysis/Ratio Analysis that uses many Excel examples, as well as a number of other great resources for financial analysis using Excel.

ExcelExercises.com is a great resource that focuses on teaching Excel to users through hands-on exercises rather than videos or written content so learners can really internalize the functions and keystrokes. The coverage does not include much on financial analysis, but it provides excellent coverage of general functions and formulas that every Excel user needs to know well.

SheetBoss.com  is similar to ExcelExercises.com, but focuses on Google Sheets rather than Excel. It has a number of helpful tutorials on fundamental functions, formulas, and operations in Googel Sheets. 

The Excel Addict has a site that is full of great tips and tricks.

Puneet Gogia has a content-rich Excel blog and many useful tutorials on his ExcelChamps.com website. Check it out to get some help and good informaion on many Excel skills and procedures.

Dr. Aswath Damodaran is a professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU. He provides a tremendously useful repository of financial data, with much of it in spreadsheet format with some interesting computations included. We will use some of these spreadsheets in our class. He also provides a set of very useful spreadsheet models on a huge array of corporate finance and investment topics.

The field of Business Intelligence (BI) involves transforming raw data into useful and meaningful information for managers and analysts. Excel is a dominant force in this field due to its power and flexibility in manageing data in many different forms. See what 27 Excel experts have to say about the future of Excel in Business Intelligence in this Investech.com article.

A web search will turn up many other resources. If you know of any good sites concerning Excel and/or financial models, let me know and I will add them to this page.

Excel Utilities and Tools:

ExcelTemplate.net offers a large selection of great templates for business, finance, and several other fields. Many of them are quite complex and so are great tools for learning new tricks and technques. Everything is free, so check it out.

Able2Extract PDF Converter: Allows you to convert a PDF or part of a PDF into an Excel spreadsheet. It also extracts data from HTML (webpages) and from text sources and converts it to Excel format. It runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux platforms. See more about this product at http://www.invesintech.com/able2extract.html.

AbleBits.com offers a reasonably priced add-in for Excel with 60+ professional tools with 300+ options and use cases for you to accomplish many tasks in Excel more easily and efficiently. These tools are great for more advanced users who work with complex spreadsheets and data sets on a regular basis.

PDFConverter.com, a vendor of software to convert PDFs into other editable file types including Excel, provides a useful list of Excel learning reasources.

PDFtoExcel.com provides a free and anonymous conversion tool to transform a PDF into an Excel spreadsheet. It's very useful and east to use.

EasyPDF.com is an all-in-one online tool that offers all types of PDF conversion to other formats and vice-versa, PDF to Excel conversion included. OCR conversion of scanned images, like invoices and reports, is supported as well. Using this tool will make your PDF management easy. It's totally anonymous (no registration needed) and 100% free.

kutools by ExtendOffice provides a wide array of very useful Excel add-ins that will improve your productivity and surprise you with their usefulness. There is a free version and a paid version. Spring for the $19 and get the paid 2-year subscription if you use Excel a lot like I do.

CometDocs.com has an app called Image to Excel that extracts photos of tables, invoices, receipts, etc., into Excel spreadsheets on your iPad and iPhone.

CleverPDF.com offers 20 PDF tools online for free. PDF to Excel is one of the main features. Compared to other PDF to Excel converters, CleverPDF offers smart table detection options which can detect tables depending on the table borders or table structure. Many financial reports are in PDF format, so converting PDF to Excel is an easier way to analyze and organize the data.

Other Related Resources

FinancialModelingPlus.com provides two complete online books for free that cover topics related to this course, although they do not directly  nclude instruction in Excel. The two titles are Modeling Projected Financial Statments (without a plug) and The ABCs of DCF and Valuation and Modeling. Both are very useful and professionally written.