Tips & Tricks for Excel-Based Financial Modeling, Volume I

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Historical Perspective

I am not a historian but I have seen some mind boggling inventions and changes in the way we had been performing our data manipulation and calculations in my lifetime. This is a very interesting anecdote to remember since my childhood.

1. 1965: My father was a cashier in a bank. I used to see big (24-inch × 24-inch × 4-inch thick) books called ledgers. Each page of these ledgers used to have several columns and rows. Each book covered debits and credits for certain accounts. These ledgers were used to account for all the daily bank transactions of debit and credits. Sometimes my father used to come very late from the office and when asked for the reason, my father would say “the ledger was not balancing—there ...