In reviewing a few models today, I was reminded how rare it is to find straight-line depreciation modelled in a concise, neat and accurate way. Although straight-line depreciation is notionally the simplest depreciation method, it is possibly the most difficult to model – as you’ll see below. Read the rest of this entry »
Straight-line Depreciation
July 28, 2009
6 Comments | 
Financial Modelling | Tagged: Spreadsheets, Excel, OFFSET, Design, Straight-line depreciation, MIN | 
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Posted by Darren Miller
Review of Google Docs
July 16, 2009I met with Rickard Wärnelid of Corality yesterday, and we got talking about collaboration functionality within spreadsheets. (Rickard subsequently posted some comments about using Excel’s shared workbook functionality on his financial model audit blog.) I don’t use Excel’s shared workbook functionality mainly because I do most of my modeling work alone. However, as Rickard points out, Excel spreadsheets that have this sharing functionality turned on have limited functionality – so much so that I could not see myself wanting to use it.
When I do need to work with others (e.g. a client, a colleague) I generally make sure only one of us is in the spreadsheet at any given time. This involves phone calls, emails or IMs to ensure that you are “it” and can safely open the model and make changes. Clearly this is suboptimal – something Google, Zoho, and others have latched onto with their web spreadsheet offerings. Now even Microsoft is coming to the party with Office 2010 – which by all accounts will provide similar collaboration functionality.
I’ve been using Google Docs spreadsheet more and more due to its awesome ability to share spreadsheets with multiple people via the web. Read the rest of this entry »
10 Comments | Financial Modelling | Tagged: Budgeting, Collaboration, Excel, Google Docs | Permalink
Posted by Darren Miller
What’s the difference?
July 7, 2009Following on from the previous post, once you’ve started on the path of setting out your model in blocks of related cells, you may become obsessed with knowing that all the cells in the block contain the same formula. After all, there’s no point in arranging your spreadsheet into nice blocks of logically consistent cells, if one or more of the cells in a block has a different formula to the others. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Financial Modelling | Tagged: Spreadsheets, Excel, Design, Blocks, Inconsistencies, Macros | Permalink
Posted by Darren Miller
