Excel University Blog

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PMT

Cost of Borrowing Revealed

By Jeff Lenning | September 23, 2025 |

When it comes to understanding the true cost of borrowing, we can’t afford to rely solely on advertised rates. Terms like APR (Annual Percentage Rate) and APY (Annual Percentage Yield) might seem interchangeable, but they tell very different stories due to compounding. With Excel’s built-in financial functions like NOMINAL, EFFECT, PMT, and RATE, we can…

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Loan Calculations from First Payment to Payoff

By Jeff Lenning | September 16, 2025 |

Understanding how loan payments are structured can feel overwhelming but Excel gives us powerful tools to make these calculations quick and simple. Whether we’re evaluating monthly payments, interest breakdowns, or savings from early payoff, Excel’s financial functions (PMT, IPMT, PPMT, CUMPRINC, CUMIPMT) help us every step of the way. This post is brought to you…

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Money Math Five

By Jeff Lenning | September 9, 2025 |

Mastering 5 Key Financial Functions: PMT, PV, FV, NPER, RATE Whether we’re planning to buy a car, save for retirement, or pay off a loan, numbers play a central role in our financial journey. Excel gives us powerful tools to analyze and plan financial scenarios. In this post, we’ll walk through five key Excel financial…

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PPMT Explained: Dynamic Loan Schedule

By Jeff Lenning | June 10, 2025 |

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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How to Become a Millionaire with this Simple Formula (PMT)

By Jeff Lenning | April 15, 2025 |

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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Dynamic Amortization Schedule with SCAN

By Jeff Lenning | January 23, 2024 |

In this tutorial, we’ll create a fully dynamic amortization schedule based on the number of months entered. For example, if you enter 12 months, the amortization schedule will span 12 rows. If you enter 360 months, the amortization schedule will span 360 rows. The technique demonstrated in this tutorial uses the following functions: SCAN, SEQUENCE,…

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Calculate the Payment of a Loan with the PMT Function in Excel

By Jeff Lenning | February 14, 2013 |

Thanks to Excel’s PMT function, computing the monthly payment of a loan with various terms is easy. In summary, you provide the function with the basic loan information, including the loan amount, the interest rate, and the term, and the function will compute the payment. You provide this basic loan information to the function through…

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