Advanced MS Excel Formula You Must Know

If you’re a financial analyst, then you must be very proficient in Excel because you are going to spend a lot of time in using it. And by Excel proficiency, it means that you can move, manipulate, and analyze the data in each cell until it gives you a good business insight to make the right decisions for the business.

There are several MS Excel functions that every financial and business analyst should know as doing so makes their tasks easier. These are advanced tools that embedded in this MS Office program and novices don’t necessarily know how to use them.

Advanced MS Excel Functions for Analysts

Whether you’re a seasoned financial analyst or a promising one, knowledge in MS Excel is a requirement to be excellent at what you do. The functions included here are just some of the things that you should be very proficient at.

1. Index Match

Index Match is an alternative to the HLOOKUP and VLOOKUP functions that may have a few drawbacks or limitations. Index Match combines several powerful MS Excel formulas that could make financial analysis and modeling so much easier.

2. IF, AND, & OR Functions

The individual use of these functions is quite common. What’s not common is combining them into one formula. Financial analysts need to be very familiar with how to use these functions in order to extract pertinent data and create accurate audits.

3. OFFSET, SUM and AVERAGE

If you’re a financial analyst who is really good in MS Excel, then you know that these functions may be used together. While the OFFSET function is not really advanced, combining it with either SUM or AVERAGE makes the formula complicated yet functional. Needless to say, adding OFFSET to SUM makes a dynamic function.

4. CHOOSE

CHOOSE is another function that’s perfect for financial modeling. This function allows you to pick between certain options and return what you have selected. This is a good tool for creating assumptions for revenue growth for the coming years.

5. XNPV and XIRR

These two functions are very useful for investment banking, financial planning, and equity search because it works with data such as cash flows, dates, and discount rates. They allow you to apply specific dates to the cash flow that will be discounted.

6. SUMIF and COUNTIF

These two quite popular yet advanced formulas are useful for adding and counting cells that meet a certain criteria. It’s helpful if you need to make a conditional function on the spreadsheet while taking into consideration a certain quantity of data.

These are just some of the MS Excel formulas that financial and business analysts should know. There are more of them out there, with each of them adding more functionality to the spreadsheet. Learning all of these won’t just make their job easier, but they will also make their analysis and computing to the next level.

If you have dreams to make it big in your organization, the first thing you should do is enroll in an online MS Excel training school so you’ll learn how to use these functions and apply them to your job. Earn and Excel offers one of the best online courses in MS Excel, with a track record of employing dozens of professionals in UK’s top corporations.