Excel Efficiency: Quick and Easy Financial Statements in Excel

Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, teaches you how to create dynamic financial reports—for any month of the year—on a single worksheet. Many Excel users build a worksheet for each month of the year, which can be inconvenient and tiresome to revise. Rather than using such a cumbersome method, David demonstrates how to apply the VLOOKUP, OFFSET, and SUM functions to quickly create accounting reports that allow you to toggle to any reporting period with just a couple of mouse clicks. In addition, David shares effective ways to export data from your accounting package so you can create a “set-and-forget” link to your accounting data in Excel.

David demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in Excel 2016. He draws your attention to any differences in Excel 2013, 2010, or 2007 during the presentation as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the webcast.

Topics Covered:

• Creating an in-cell list by way of Excel’s Data Validation feature.
• Improving the integrity of spreadsheets with Excel’s VLOOKUP function.
• Discovering how to incorporate Check Figures and Alarms into your work.
• Overcoming VLOOKUP’s quirks by using SUMIF to look up numeric values.
• Using Excel’s VLOOKUP function to look up an item description based on an input provided by the user.
• Using Conditional Formatting to draw attention to reports that don’t balance to the source data.
• Learning a simple design technique that greatly improves the integrity of Excel’s SUM function.
• Learning why, in many cases, you should export reports intended for spreadsheet analysis to a .CSV file instead of an Excel workbook.
• Seeing how to use the Trusted Document feature in Excel 2010 and later to suppress the Data Connection security prompt.