The Definitive Guide to Business Finance: What smart managers do with the numbers, Second Edition

How to excel at numbers

Think of a spreadsheet as being a page in a note pad. Each page is ruled off into a large number of rows and columns. This creates a grid of little boxes, each of which is called a cell. You type descriptive text (e.g. budget categories, names), numbers or instructions into the cells. The layout of cells gives order to your text and numbers, but the real power of spreadsheets is that they can understand and act on your instructions. You can tell the spreadsheet to perform useful tasks such as ‘add up the numbers in the five rows above this cell and show me the result’ or ‘if the number in this cell is negative display it in red’. Generally, when you look at a spreadsheet, you see the results rather than the underlying ...