Financial Functions

Use the spreadsheet of your choice to make financial decisions relating to investments and loans.

Understand how inflation affects a cashflow and get to grips with internal rate of return.

Spreadsheets take the hard work out of financial calculations, but you still need to know how to do them. What the computer takes away is the need to be good at arithmetic. Computers do the sums for us, no matter how complicated or extended, and never get the wrong answer. This allows us to concentrate on the way that the calculations work rather than the arithmetic that they lead to.

Financial Functions With A Spreadsheet assumes that you are familiar with the fundamental operations of the spreadsheet of your choice, Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc or similar, and introduces you to the built-in functions provided for making financial decisions.

Throughout the book sample spreadsheets and charts are presented with details of how you can construct them for yourself and use them for you own investigations and investment decisions.

• Understanding Percentages
• Time Is Money - Simple and Compound Interest
• Effective Interest Rate
• Introduction to Cashflow - Savings Plans
• Cashflow Continued - Annuities
• Exploring Repayment Loans
• Coping With Irregular Cashflow
• Investment Analysis
• Advanced Investment Analysis - Internal Rate of Return

Janet Swift is the author of several popular spreadsheet titles published by I/O Press. She has shared her extensive expertise with spreadsheets in many publications and on the Swift’s Spreadsheets section of the I Programmer website, where she is a regular contributor, writing on topical issues to do with data analysis.