Customer Reviews

Financial Analysis With Microsoft Excel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Amazon advertises this book as being written in December 1997! It is from 1996 and uses the old Excel program! I was very discouraged when I opened it and put the software in! Guess that is the chance you take when you don't buy at a bookstore where you can look for yourself!

Should be "Introduction to Excel using Finance Examples" At an introductory level, the Excel coverage is OK. But the finance component is extremely shallow. The authors need to team up with someone who knows finance. Those who seriously want to learn what this text wanted to offer should try "Financial Modeling Using Excel and VBA" (Wiley Finance)
by Chandan Sengupta.

This is the text for the FIN 4200 class taught by Dr. Mayes at Metro State College in Denver. When he wrote it he was frustrated with the lack of material available to teach under-grads what they needed to get employment in the business world or do more advanced work in grad school.

Having survived Dr. Mayes' class I can say this book is an Excellent text for learning practical advanced spreadsheet techniques. It is NOT a replacement for a corporate finance text, doesn't represent itself as that, and the chapters are actually laid out to parallel Brigham's Intermediate Financial Management text which is the text used in corp finance at Metro.

Each chapter represents approximately one week's topic, and it is necessary to do the problems at the end of each chapter to develop the skill needed to achieve his purpose. He also has all kinds of useful Excel type stuff on his website at (http://clem.mscd.edu/%7Emayest)

An excellent book that really shows you how powerful Excel can be. But, at the same time, it also teaches you about Finance using Excel. Very, very good. A regret: I would have liked more explanations, in general, on the financial concepts used in the book (especially in the last chapters).

To Dr. Mayes: in your next book, the advanced one a reviewer speaks about, could you give more explanations in general on the financial concepts. Otherwise, keep using this great tool, Excel, or even Access 2000. I refer you to "Building Accounting Systems using Access 97" by James T. Perry, et al. I would think that you could use Access 2000 to apply financial analysis if Access is better suited than Excel, which I am not so sure; although Mr. Perry seems to give quite convincing arguments in favour of using Access instead of Excel.

Thanks for your book that I really liked. I am now up-to-date with Excel and I am keen to learn more about Finance. Thanks to you :-)

I wanted to learn about principals of finance such as depreciation etc...this book is NOT for that. It assumes you know a good bit about finance, but have never heard of Excel...not a likely scenario.

What is missing from this book is Cd-rom containing all excel illustrations and questions used in this book.

This book is horrible if you do not have the basic understanding of finance or excel. The usual book will have multiple examples throughout the book of each concept that is being discussed. This is not what occurs in Financial Analysis 4e. What I need to know should be in the book and isn't. It forces one to use alternate sites to attain the knowledge that is lacking in the book.

Skip Accounting 101 and 102!! Forget Finance!! Go to the source! The authors make power Excel-using a breeze. Simply laid out, easy to understand. Enough financial theory to educate, but not enough to drown in. Gives you step-by-step templates of how to set up your worksheets. This book, in combination with Excel's Spinner control, lets you forecast budgets, cash flows, financial ratios, and more like a high-powered CFO. I can't wait for their advanced financial analysis book due out soon. I recommend this as a "must have" for anyone interested in money or any Excel power-user wanna-be's. I actually read this in my spare time just for kicks!!

This book got me a very comfortable start with spreadsheets, and it is interesting to experience how effective it is in combining spreadsheet proficiency with finance proficiency, as the author intends. Although somebody buying this book today may have concerns with its utility given its publication date, I've just begun using spreadsheets with Excel 2000 and I still found the book immensely useful. You may, however, find yourself yearning for the version of Excel current at the book's publication date simply so you might bypass any dealings with that notoriously --and incredibly-- stupid paperclip 'helper'.

This is an excellent self-study book. You learn MS Excel and Financial Analysis at the same time. You can learn (by doing) the construction of financial statements & cash budgets. For those interested in financial economics the book teaches about the Capital Asset Pricing model, Return On Equity, Net Present Value and the Cost of Capital. It even contains a section on forecasting which is invaluable to those looking to do rather than read about it. Best of all it shows you how to do this stuff with a readily available desktop application(excel). Furthermore, you learn not just how to input the authors formulas but how to build your own using the IF, AVERAGE, TREND functions etc. etc.
The best thing about this book is that you don't just read dry definitions of finance and economic arcana, but practice it as you go along. This really helps to build your skills!