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Calculating Loan Payments (3)

In most situations you omit both of these optional arguments. Let’s create a simple loan calculator using the PMT function. Start with a blank worksheet and then follow these steps: Put the labels Amount of loan, Annual rate, Term in years, and Monthly payment in cells B2 through B5, in order....

Maestro

Calculating Loan Payments (2)

The PMT function uses the following syntax: PMT(rate, nper, prin, [fv, type]) The first three arguments are required. They are rate is the interest rate for the loan....

Maestro

Calculating Loan Payments

Few people can make it though life without taking out one or more loans. By extending payments over a period of time, a loan enables you to buy something now that otherwise you would have to save for over a long time. Big ticket items, such as a car or house, are perhaps the most common uses of loans....

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Charting Your Course (2)

You can see the dialog box for step three has several tabs, but I’ll discuss only the Titles tab. You can add text for the following items: Chart title A title displayed above the chart Category (X) axis A label displayed below the horizontal axis Value (Y) axis A label displayed next to the vertical axis...

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Charting Your Course

One of the features that has made Excel so popular is its charting ability. You can easily create a wide variety of charts based on data in the worksheet. When the data changes, the chart updates automatically. Excel charts are very sophisticated, but, by using the Chart Wizard, you can create many great-looking charts with a few mouse clicks....

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Formatting Money and Percentage Values

I mentioned earlier that you can use the Format Cells dialog box to specify the number formatting for cells. Formats for money and percent values are most important for the topics of later chapters, so let’s take a look....

Maestro

Excel and Money

Excel has a number of features designed specifically for working with financial data. These are, of course, particularly relevant to this book. This section reviews these features. Cash Flow Excel uses a cash flow model for dealing with financial data. This is a lot simpler than it sounds, and means simply that money values are treated as positive values if the money is...