Excel for the CFO

Excel for the CFO

By P K Hari

Holy Macro! Books

PO Box 82

Uniontown, OH 44685

Excel for the CFO

© 2013 Tickling Keys, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information or storage retrieval system without permission from the publisher. Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and accurate as possible, but no warranty or fitness is implied. The information is provided on an as is basis. The authors and the publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book.

Author: P K Hari Hara Subramanian

Tech Editor: Bob Umlas

Development Editor: Kitty Wilson

Layout: Tyler Nash

Cover Design: Shannon Mattiza

Indexing: Nellie J. Liwam

Published by: Holy Macro! Books, Box 82, Uniontown OH 44685, USA

Distributed by: Independent Publishers Group, Chicago, IL

First Printing: November 2012. Printed in USA

ISBN: 978-1-61547-011-2 Print, 978-1-61547-211-6 PDF, 978-1-61547-331-1 ePub,

978-1-61547-111-9 (Mobi)

LCCN: 2012949174

Acknowledgements

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. - Aristotle

Let me start with a big thanks to all those who have bought my earlier titles Excel for the CEO and Excel for the Small Business Owner. Having been published way back in 2006, these titles are still in print and making the cut in sales, which has reinforced a lot of belief about the value of hands-on training approach (I call this the Do & Learn method) deployed in those titles.

Despite being a qualified public accountant by profession, am known more for my combination of techno-functional skills, which facilitates automation with ease. This reputation has been built over a period of almost 15 years, during which I have donned various hats in organizations of different sizes, gaining lot of exposure in identifying and solving problems with automation. My automation projects uses a combination of various features of Microsoft Office (predominantly Excel, Access, Word, Outlook and VBA), but Excel remains my first preference for its unsurpassed flexibility and readiness to customized solutions.

Much of what I am today is not with any formal qualification in computers, but because of hard work, determination to succeed and a passion to simplify things. Not to forget the support and guidance of quite a few mentors and bosses who have done a lot by presenting me real complex problems along with complete freedom and motivation to solve. I have a huge list of such well-wishers, friends and supporters - a long list for which I will have to publish a separate book, but would like to convey my thanks to at least a few of them here for their support in all my initiatives.

My sincere thanks goes to my first Guru in the Audit profession - Mr. L. Mallikharjuna Rao (Senior Partner – Brahmayya & Co, Auditors, India) for inculcating in me a strong and ethical work culture. I also place on record my gratitude and appreciation for the enormous support and wonderful opportunities that are continuously made available by Mr. Krishnaraj Thiagarajan (Vice President-Global Finance, Cognizant Technology Solutions) and Mr. Robert Telesmanic (Senior Vice President-Finance & Corporate Controller, Cognizant Technology Solutions).

I shall ever remain grateful to Ms Karen McLoughlin (CFO, Cognizant Technology Solutions) for her motivation and to Mr Gordon Coburn (President, Cognizant Technology Solutions) for his continued mentoring, support and guidance.

My special thanks go to Bill Jelen for his continued support in my works with Excel. He has been a great motivator and is the one who got me to writing these books.

Any excel book without a credit to knowledge gained from the articles of John Walkenbach would be incomplete, as he is an established authority who has guided many people including me to success with Excel. Thanks to you, John!

Working on a title of this size while keeping up with all other professional commitments at work is a tough ask, and it demands quite a bit of sacrifice from the personal life if anyone has to make the cut. Luckily for me, my mother Mrs Meenakshi and my wife Priya managed all my pressures back home, and gave me all the time I needed to accomplish this. Priya has always been my good friend, philosopher, first critic and doubled up as my typist, secretary and took on many more avatars to get this book completed on time. My son Ananthakrishnan and my daughter Abhirami need a special mention too, as they remain a continuous source of love, affection and bubbling energy for everyone in my family. At this tender age, they have sacrificed a lot of their personal playtime with me so that I could juggle around the tight schedules of writing the book.

Special thanks go to Bob Umlas, technical editor of this title, who took a lot of interest in sending the most relevant queries to get better solutions from me and to Kitty Wilson, the copy editor who has worked hard to ensure that the styling is brought up to the best standards of a technology title. Finally, my sincere thanks to you for choosing this title and in encouraging me further to develop my approach towards knowledge sharing.

Good friends, Good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. – Mark Twain

Wishing you the best experience with Excel,

P.K.Hari

Chennai

September 2012

Email: pkhariaiyer@gmail.com

Blog: www.excelwithhari.blogspot.com

Dedications

To the memory of my father Mr P S Krishnan,

who has instilled in me all the best features of education, culture, commitment and devotion.

1- Brushing Up on Excel 2010 Basics

Welcome aboard! This book is written based on actual experience using Excel 2010 for practical problem solving in the finance organization. The solutions and scenarios you will encounter here have been time tested and perfected. They will help jump-start your innovative thinking about new challenges that you encounter in your work.

Because this book is designed for finance professionals, it assumes that you are already aware of the fundamentals of Excel operations. However, you may be new to using Excel 2010 or find it handy to have a refresher, so this chapter provides a bit of guidance on the basics. (If you’re a power Excel user, you may want to take a quick glance through this chapter and then head for Chapter 2.)

Here’s what this chapter covers:

•  The parts of an Excel workbook

•  The ribbon in Excel 2010

•  The Backstage view

•  File-handling operations

•  Navigation and selection

•  Data editing and formatting

The Parts of an Excel Workbook

To make the best use of this book—and Excel 2010—you need to understand some basic terms and know the various parts of an Excel workbook. This section will re-familiarize you with Excel’s parts and terminology.

To begin, take a look at Figure 1, which shows the parts of a basic Excel workbook. The following sections examine each of the parts called out in this figure.

Figure 1 The parts of an Excel workbook

The Title Bar

The title bar shows the name of the active file (the file that is currently open) followed by the name of the application. For example, the title bar in Figure 1 says Book1 - Microsoft Excel, which indicates that Book1 is the active file and Excel is the application.

Note: Previous versions of Excel presented the information on the title bar in the opposite order: the application name followed by the name of the active file (for example, Microsoft Excel – Book1). What a simple, thoughtful change!

The Quick Access Toolbar

The Quick Access Toolbar is a customizable palette of the commands you use most often. By default, the Quick Access Toolbar has Save, Undo, and Redo buttons, but you can easily customize it. Here’s how you customize the Quick Access Toolbar:

1. Click the down arrow at the right end of the Quick Access Toolbar. A drop-down menu appears, showing some commonly used commands.

2. Select from the drop-down list those commands that you want to add to your Quick Access Toolbar. Deselect commands from this list to remove them from your Quick Access Toolbar.

3. To add to the Quick Access Toolbar commands that don’t appear in the drop-down menu, click More Commands. The Excel Options dialog appears, as shown below.

Figure 2 Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar

4. Select the Choose Commands From drop-down to see a huge variety of commands and macros.

5. If you see a command or macro you want to add to your Quick Access Toolbar, select it in the box under Choose Commands From and click Add. Excel adds it to the Customize Quick Access Toolbar list on the right.

Note: You can use the Customize Quick Access Toolbar drop-down on the right side of the Excel Options dialog to choose whether to apply your customizations to the current workbook only or to all documents.

6. When you’re done adding commands and macros to your Quick Access Toolbar, click OK to close the Excel Options dialog. Excel adds your choices to the Quick Access Toolbar.

Tip: Finance folks commonly add favorites such as Paste Values, Print Preview, Trace Precedents, and Trace Dependents to the Quick Access Toolbar. You can choose to add these or any other commands you use often.

The Ribbon

Office 2007 introduced the ribbon as a replacement for the traditional menu bar. Each of the tabs in the ribbon more or less replicates the earlier menu groups—but in a more orderly and comprehensive grouping. You’ll learn more details about the ribbon a little later in this chapter.

Tip: You can click the Minimize Ribbon button (or press Ctrl+F1) to temporarily hide the ribbon if you want to view a larger work area.

The Help Button

The Help button, as you might guess, takes you to a search box that offers you options of both online and offline Help topics. In Excel 2010, as in other Office applications, you can press the F1 key instead of clicking the Help button to bring up Help.

The Minimize, Maximize, and Close Buttons

There are two sets of minimize, maximize, and close buttons: one at the application level and another one at the worksheet level. You can use these buttons to minimize, maximize (or restore), and close Excel or the current worksheet.

Tip: Microsoft generally offers a few ways to approach a task. For example, instead of using your mouse to click the minimize, maximize, and close buttons, you can use the following keyboard shortcuts:

Ctrl+F9: Minimize the active file.

Ctrl+F10: Maximize/restore the active file.

Ctrl+W: Close the active file.

Alt+F4: Close Excel.

Rows and Columns

A worksheet is a collection of many cells, each of which is formed by the intersection of a row and a column. A cell is identified by its cell address, which is a combination of the column letter and row number. For instance, the cell address of the 26th row in Column A is A26.

Microsoft Excel 2010 supports a maximum of just over 1 million rows (1,048,576, to be precise) and 16,384 columns. This is a welcome change for many corporate users who were inconvenienced by the 65,536-row limit in previous versions of Excel.

The active row is the current working row of a worksheet. You can select the whole active row by pressing Shift+Spacebar. Similarly, the active column is the current working row of a worksheet. You can select the entire active column by pressing Ctrl+Spacebar.

The Active Cell

The current working cell is called the active cell in Excel, as well as in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The active cell is identified by a thick black border around the cell. In addition, the row and column headings of the active cell are highlighted in a different color to make it easy to identify the current working row and column.

The Formula Bar

The formula bar shows the formula contained in the active cell and makes it available for editing (see Figure 3). The formula bar is handy because the active cell usually displays only the results of the formula it contains.

As with many other things in Excel, you can control whether you want to see the formula bar. To hide the formula bar, you select the View tab in the ribbon and deselect the Formula Bar check box.

You can change the size of the formula bar in order to view more or less content. You click the down arrow that appears at the end of the formula bar (or press Ctrl+Shift+U) to toggle between a large formula bar and a smaller one.

Figure 3 The formula bar

The Function Wizard helps you select and insert functions into the active cell. To activate it, you click the Function Wizard (ƒx) button to the left of the formula bar (or press Shift+F3).

When you are editing a formula in the formula bar, you see two more buttons to the left of the Function Wizard button: the û and ü keys. You can use these to cancel (û) the current edit or apply your formula changes to the active cell (ü).

The Name Box

The name box and named ranges are some of the most important features available in Excel. The name box is especially useful when you’re navigating in a large worksheet. If you have a fairly good idea of which row and column number you want to view, you can click the name box, type the cell address (for example, AA1875), and press Enter. You are then transported directly to the chosen cell. (Another way to navigate around a worksheet is to press F5, which brings up the Go To dialog.)

The name box is also useful when you have named ranges. You can select one of the available ranges by using the name box drop-down. (You will learn more about named ranges in Chapter 5.)

Note: Sadly for power users, Excel doesn’t offer a predefined shortcut key that you can use to immediately access the name box. To overcome this hassle, Pearson Consulting has created a workaround—a macro you can use to set the focus to the name box. Check out this link for details: http://www.cpearson.com/excel/NameBoxShortcut.htm

The Scrollbars

Scrollbars have been familiar to computer users since the days of Windows 3.1, so they don’t require much explanation. Excel has both horizontal and vertical scrollbars.

You can control whether the horizontal and/or vertical scrollbars should be displayed on a workbook. To do so, you select File, Options. In the Excel Options dialog that appears, you select Advanced and then, under Display Options for This Workbook, you select whether to display the horizontal and/or vertical scrollbars.

The horizontal and vertical scrollbars automatically adjust with the size of the work area. By default, the vertical scrollbar in a new worksheet is visually just as long as the size of the screen. As you edit the worksheet, the vertical scrollbar adjusts itself to accommodate the data in the file. Let’s say you enter some data in Cell C550. You then see that the vertical scrollbar has grown smaller in size; when you pull the scrollbar tab down to the bottom of the screen, you reach Cell C550. This handy navigation feature helps you more quickly access your data.

Tip: Pressing Ctrl+End also takes you to the last active cell in the current worksheet.

Tab Scroll Buttons

Tab bar scrolling has become a popular feature in various Windows programs—and even browsers. When there are too many sheets in a workbook, you can’t see all their tabs within the available work area. In such a situation, you can choose to see the leftmost or rightmost sheet by selecting the leftmost or rightmost scroll button. Or you can choose to browse through the left or right side of the scrollbar, one sheet at a time, by using the second (browse left) or third (browse right) button.

Another available tab scrolling option is to right-click in the tab scroll buttons area to bring up a list of all the available tabs in the workbook. You can use this list to easily select and navigate to a tab. In addition, a couple keyboard shortcuts are available for tab scrolling: Ctrl+PgUp moves you one tab to the left, and Ctrl+PgDn moves you one tab to the right.

Yet another cool option available in the tab buttons is to jump to the next group of tabs (those which are not in view) – achieved by pressing shift while clicking on the tab navigation buttons. For instance, if you can see only 4 tabs in current view, and your file has more than 4 tabs, you can shift-click the Next tab button which would immediately scroll the other tabs in to view.

Note: Similar to the way you can choose to display or hide the horizontal and vertical scrollbars, you can choose to show or hide the display of tabs in a workbook. To do this, you select File, Options. In the Excel Options dialog that appears, you select Advanced and then, under Display Options for This Workbook, you select whether to display sheet tabs.

The Status Bar

The status bar appears at the bottom-left corner of the active workbook. It shows the current status of the workbook, which may be Ready, Edit, Circular Reference, or Calculate, depending on the circumstances.

Since Excel 2007, the status bar has been customizable. By right-clicking in the status bar, you get the context menu shown in the following figure.

Figure 4 Customizing the status bar

Here’s what you can customize by using this context menu:

•  Whether the active cell mode is displayed

•  The status of the information management policy, security, permissions, and signatures

•  The status of display items such as caps lock, numbers lock, and scroll lock, along with fixed decimal display, overtype mode, end mode, and macro recording

•  The status of the selection mode

•  The status of the page number

•  The status of mathematical functions, such as average, count, numerical count, minimum, maximum, and sum

•  The display of upload status, shortcuts, zoom percentage, and the zoom slider

Note: The zoom slider is of great help in quickly adjusting the window size to suit your requirement, and it is certainly a welcome addition to the status bar.

The default selection in the mathematical functions section is Sum, but you can choose to select all six functions at the same time. When you do, the status bar shows the six different values for a group of selected items (see Figure 5). This is really handy because it means you don’t have to insert in the worksheet a separate formula for each math function.

Figure 5 Previewing results of all the math functions on the status bar

Tip: Excel 2003 made it possible to turn off the status bar. However, considering the great value that the status bar now provides, Microsoft has removed the option of turning it off. Power users can still count on VBA to turn it off though.

The Ribbon in Excel 2010

The ribbon was introduced in Office 2007, and it was a major change from the Office 2003 menu bar. However, the ribbon in Office 2007 was not very customizable; unless you used a third-party tool, you couldn’t add new tabs to the ribbon, and you couldn’t add or rearrange the commands on the ribbon. Many Excel users expressed their displeasure with this situation.

Note: Some users still find it difficult to understand why the ribbon was introduced and how to get around with the ribbon. To address such concerns, Microsoft has put together a collection or resources at

http://www.office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/office-ribbon-find-commands-FX101851541.aspx. Microsoft also provides a resource workbook that shows the menu-to-ribbon mapping for all commands that used to exist in the menu bar. You can download this Excel 2010 workbook from

http://www.office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/excel-2010-menu-to-ribbon-reference-workbook-TC101842354.aspx?CTT=5&origin=ZA101859927.

Microsoft listened to users’ concerns about the customizability of the ribbon. Office 2010 gives you full control over what you see on the ribbon. To customize the ribbon, you follow these steps:

1. Right-click anywhere on the ribbon and click Customize the Ribbon (or select File, Options). The Excel Options dialog appears.

2. Select Customize Ribbon on the left side of the Excel Options dialog (see following figure).

Figure 6 Customizing the ribbon

3. On the bottom-right side of the Excel Options dialog, click the New Tab button. You can then create a new tab and rename it with a name of your choice (why not yours?).

4. After you create a new tab, click the New Group button at the bottom right of the Excel Options dialog to create groups of commands. You can easily add commands to the group by selecting from the list of commands available on the left side and clicking Add.

You could create a custom tab for the ribbon that includes all your most frequently used commands. This would help you reduce your work time and streamline your productivity. In addition to the flexibility and comfort your new tab would give you, you’d have a sweet customized version of Excel that would be sure to impress your audience when you’re giving a presentation.

Tip: Microsoft has made available some video tutorials that make it easier to understand the concept of customizing the ribbon. You can find them at

http://www.office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/video-customize-the-ribbon-HA101850352.aspx.

The Backstage View

Excel 2010 has a brand-new feature called the Backstage view (see Figure 7). Many common activities—such as save, print, and share—have become one-click jobs from within the Backstage view. It also houses a lot of jam-packed features—so much so that the Backstage view could easily be called the center stage of Excel 2010.

When you click the File tab of the ribbon, the Backstage view appears. It makes available all the file-related commands, including Save, Save As, Open, Close, Info, Recent, New, Print, and Save & Send. In addition, it includes Help,