Gyroscopic Investing

What is a good way to learn Excel?

I have a lot of info penciled on home-made charts.  I imagine there are easy ways to start filling the boxes, at least to verify what I've already done.

MG, Tyler and Pet Hog are my current inspirations for trying Excel.  Great charts on those 10 year PPs, gentlemen!

Thanks.

YouTube! Search for "Learn Excel." You'll probably find lots of stuff. Or, if you're more of a textual learner, just Google that instead and read the stuff you find.

I use open office because I haven't figured out a way to get excel for free apart from work.

But as a computer programmer I am absolutely amazed at some of the things non-programmers do with Excel. Somebody even built an animated  game which completely blew my mind. As a programmer I can tell you that there are much easier ways to do something like this with modern programming languages but the fact that somebody went to the trouble to do it with an Excel spreadsheet, probably because they just realized they could, is "like totally awesome" if I can use some millennial vernacular.

I learned many of my techniques back in engineering school.  There was one professor in particular who was a true expert and wrote a book on it:  http://www.amazon.com/Every-Engineer-Sh ... 0849373263 . It's thick and reads like an engineering text, but will teach a lot of advanced tricks. 

These days, Google is your best friend.  There are more built-in functions in Excel than you'll ever know how to use, so searching for how others solve problems is a great way to learn.  Another good method is to study the spreadsheets of others.  I learned a lot from the Simba spreadsheet, for example.  Even though I feel pretty competent in Excel, I've only scratched the surface of a small percentage of what it's fully capable of.

EDIT -- this seems to have a ton of great free info:  http://www.skilledup.com/articles/free- ... rials 

Thank you, gentlemen.

And what about "Excel for Dummies?"

My first effort with spreadsheets way back was with baseball statistics, as a practice effort.  I mined some surprising facts.  I just want to verify the stuff I've done that extends to the year 2048, for now.  Afterwards, I can play the nuance game.

For the most part, you resident hotshots did the requisite heavy lifting.

The work you've done, showing and commenting on the various shades of green (4 to 10 years out, as barrett noted) is reassuring.  Has this new work changed, refocused or rededicated your agile minds re the 4x25?

Thanks again.

I think understanding what the basic model of a spreadsheet is (and has been historically) is a very nice foundation to have before playing with the modern day version of spreadsheets.

Here's a great NPR podcast (from Planet Money) about the development of the modern day spreadsheet and it's historical roots.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/ ... readsheets

That... and a bit of math and a bit of comfort in writing equations with variables is all you will need...

PS and Mark,

Thank you.

Tenn,

I lost the last spreadsheet to a computer upgrade but crude (and forgotten) calculations indicate Bobby Murcer, 1971, had 1 of the top 100 Hitting years in baseball history.  Some author from the mid 70s agreed.  I don't think it was Bill James.  Since that finding, many better years have been registered.

Desert wrote: Nice episode!  It brought back some memories of my finance major/computer geek older brother showing me Lotus 123 in the 80's.  I wasn't all that impressed ... until I got into Engineering studies, and then geeked out heavily myself. 

I got you beat!  I was using SuperCalc on CP/M-80.  I just couldn't understand why I should care.  Because of that, I was a late Excel spreadsheet adopter.  Even now I feel insecure about my Excel knowledge in that its not where it should have been if I had started earlier along with everyone else.  What an annoying feeling!  There will always be someone bigger, faster, stronger. 

Does anyone remember "Quattro"?

Desert,

Lotus One, Two, Three, Quattro!

It was a Borland product, of Turbo Pascal fame.  Quattro was a pretty good spreadsheet, as I recall.

WildAboutHarry wrote: Lotus One, Two, Three, Quattro!

It was a Borland product, of Turbo Pascal fame.  Quattro was a pretty good spreadsheet, as I recall.

I always like how pretty Borland softwares were for MS-DOS.  Microsoft eventually copied the look somewhat.

BTW, Quattro is still being sold by Corel.  It's part of the WordPerfect Office suite.

MachineGhost wrote: I always like how pretty Borland softwares were for MS-DOS.  Microsoft eventually copied the look somewhat.

I loved the simplicity of Turbo C.

If there is one thing the Microsoft engineers didn't believe in, it was simplicity.

I cringe whenever I have to use Microsoft Word at work. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to defeat what it is trying to do.

In 1979 I worked at The Byte Shop in Denver selling microcomputers... We sold Apple computers that you had to load the operating system and programs with cassette tapes... Before floppys...  When I would demo VisiCalc on the machines, everybody was blown away!  I bet I sold more computers based on that one program than anything else... I think VisiCalc and all the subsequent spreadsheets programs created the personal computer industry.  I used Lotus 1-2-3 and QuattroPro for years...  As an engineer, I really liked QuattroPro a lot as it was the first spreadsheet I found that displayed logarithmic scale on charts...  Still use spreadsheets for 95% of my work...

Ah, computer nostalgia!

I didn't realize that Corel was still selling Quattro.

I used a bunch of Borland products in years past - Turbo pascal, Turbo C, Turbo Assembler, etc.  Great tools.  I still have a 2-D Turing machine I wrote in Turbo C (with Turbo Assembler parts) that, last time I checked, still ran on Windows XP.  Maybe I'll dust it off and give it a try on Windows 8.

In addition to providing great tools in the early PC days, the founder of Borland, Philippe Kahn, is credited with pioneering the phone camera.

Any time spent learning spreadsheets is time well spent.  Learning to use the macro facility (Visual Basic for Excel) is a real plus as well.

You can do a lot of good basic work with the online spreadsheet available at drive.google.com  I use the heck out of it. Don't put truly private info into it, though.

Great news. 

My 22 year old came home from grad school this weekend for Father's Day.  When she heard of the Excel dilemma, she grabbed the penciled sheets and started explaining.  I was allowed to participate and learned a good bit.  She found a few flaws which pleased both of us.

This was fun for her, she said, because it was not a mass of physics calculations and she was not getting graded with mistakes causing points off.

I pointed out what the experts do in cash threads and the "Worst 3 year PP Performance" thread.  She, and other family members agreed that some folks are super human and, here in the forum, super heroes.

I've got a couple of books on order at the library and now have enough ability to play with some projections.  I'm thinking a 33 year projection with a CAGR of 2 % will be fun.

THe Youtube videos are good.  I must continue those tutorials.

Thanks, so far, folks, with the Excel help.

All that tuition money has a payoff.