The Near Future #VALUE Series

One of the most consequential decisions when preparing a financial model is to choose the granularity of your timeline. Should your calculations be annual, quarterly, monthly…or even daily? The right answer depends on the purpose of the model, the outputs it will generate, the type of decisions it needs to inform and who the users and stakeholders are.

One of the advantages of the Microsoft 365 subscription model is that most users receive regular automatic updates to Office applications, including Excel. The downside is that often users are not aware of great new functions and features. With this in mind, we have created this summary of recent functions.

With increasing renewable penetration in the electricity mix, negative power prices are becoming more prevalent in Europe. Increasingly, buyers in pay-as-produced PPA agreements are unwilling to pay for generation during negative hours. In this post, we share a tool to evaluate the impact of this risk on PPA value.

External links in Excel are links to data outside or external to the active file, usually in another Excel file.  These references are static and prone to breaking. This blog covers guidance on how to avoid, find and eliminate these links.

While I’m no shortcut absolutist, I do know that you can greatly improve your financial modelling efficiency by learning a few shortcuts by heart. I have compiled a list of my top 15 shortcuts – if you master these, you will increase your Excel speed exponentially.

The Camera functionality in Excel allows you to take a snapshot of a section in your Excel file and paste it elsewhere as a live picture. The pasted picture remains linked to the source data, which means that it is continuously updated.

The Styles Manager allows you to save pre-defined styles in the back-end of an Excel file, enabling any user of the file to access and apply consistent styles across the workbook.

While the Paste Special function in Excel is widely used to paste only selected properties of a copied range, this menu offers some powerful additional functionality. In this post, we discuss how to use Paste Special to scale numbers or change sign.

This functionality does exactly what it says on the tin: it opens an additional ‘window’ into your Excel workbook. This allows you to look at different sections / sheets in the same file simultaneously.

For the inaugural edition of the Near Future #VALUE series, we’ve consulted our little black book and compiled a list of our least favourite Excel practices. Some of these are obvious transgressions while others might be more contentious.