Excel University Blog
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Functions
Understanding the principal portion of your loan payments over time is a key step in financial modeling and reporting. Fortunately, Excel makes this process easy with the CUMPRINC function. In this blog post, we’ll take a detailed look at how the CUMPRINC function works, build a cumulative principal schedule, and ultimately construct a simple dynamic…
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If you’re managing loans or curious about how much interest you’re paying each month, Excel’s IPMT function is here to help. In this post, we’ll not only explore how the function works, but we’ll also take it further by building a fully dynamic loan amortization schedule—one that updates automatically when you change any loan inputs.…
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Managing loans and tracking monthly payments just got a whole lot easier. In this tutorial, we’ll explore the PPMT function in Excel—a lesser-known but incredibly powerful function that calculates the principal portion of a loan payment for a specific period. Even better, we’ll show how to transform this function into a fully dynamic loan amortization…
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Imagine having a financial crystal ball—something that gives us a glimpse into how our money could grow into the future. That’s exactly what Excel’s FV (Future Value) function offers. Whether we’re saving for retirement, planning an investment, or just trying to hit a savings goal, FV gives us the power to explore different scenarios and…
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Understanding the concept of present value can be one element in our financial decision making process. From evaluating loans and subscriptions to complex financial instruments like reverse mortgages, Excel’s PV function provides an accessible, effective tool for comparing future payments in today’s dollars. In this post, we’ll explore how to use the Excel PV function…
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Understanding how to calculate interest rates is crucial for financial planning. Whether you’re determining the interest rate for a loan or projecting your investment growth, Excel’s RATE function is a powerful tool. In this post, we’ll explore how to use the RATE function to unlock hidden financial insights, covering loans, balloon payments, and investment goals.…
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Managing finances effectively often requires understanding how long it will take to pay off a loan or reach a savings goal. Excel’s NPER function helps us determine the number of periods needed based on interest rate, payments, and loan amounts. Whether we’re looking at loans, mortgages, or investments, this function is crucial for financial planning.…
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Ever wondered how much you need to save each month to reach a financial goal, like becoming a millionaire? The PMT function in Excel can help you calculate that with just a few simple inputs. While the PMT function is traditionally used to calculate loan payments, we can also use it to determine how much…
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A spin button in Excel is a great way to create an interactive and dynamic scrolling range for reports, dashboards, or data analysis. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to insert a spin button, link it to a cell, and use it to scroll through data by days, weeks, months, quarters, and years. Let’s…
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When working with messy data, we often turn to Excel, but with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, we now have new ways to tackle these challenges. In this post, we’ll compare Excel and ChatGPT side by side, using three common data tasks: We’ll see how each tool handles the job, the pros and…
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