How to use Excel-based Financial Spreadsheets.

You'll need Microsoft Excel '07 or later installed on your computer to use these financial plan spreadsheets. It won't work using just MS Works. A huge tip the will make your life better, is to NOT use the MS Works interface to access Excel or Word. The goal is to have just Excel and Word icons on your Desktop, so you can create shortcut keys for them. Using Works just mucks everything up.

A site with a summary of keyboard and other shortcut keys

A site with tons of Excel help: http://www.j-walk.com/ss / excel/tips / index.htm

Programs are delivered in Excel 2007 format.

You can get the Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student suite that has the latest Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for ~$50. You can find this at most all office supply stores (most computer stores, Best Buy, sometimes Target, etc.). If you're still using Excel or Word '03 then you're operating in the stone age with primitive and broken programs, and really need to upgrade ASAP. Them "moving stuff around" via ribbons is annoying, but well worth the learning curve.

If you have a Mac, are using QuattroPro, OpenSource, Lotus 123, or any other non-standard platform, and want to know if these financial tools will work - follow the directions in the red text on most all of the product pages for downloading the free non-functional demo programs.

If you can download, open, and look at a functional spreadsheet demo, then you'll be able to use these financial planner programs. All you'll be able to do is look at the demo spreadsheets, as the formulas are stripped out. If you want to be 100% sure, then try any of the four functional demos that work as free teasers (bond, budget, TVM calcs, retirement calculator - via the above link).

Most of the money calculators will not download into PDAs, because they have password protection on the calculation sheets. Nobody knows why this is a malfunction, it just is. So please don't think they don't work on a real computer just because they won't work on a phone or a PDA - they will.

If the colors look funny either in the demo or the program, it's probably because you changed them on the color palette. Below is what Excel's default color palette looks like before modifications, so if yours looks different, then that's why (right click, Format Cells, Fill):

The Very Basics of Excel

Rows go left to right, and columns go up and down. The intersection of a row and column is called a cell. Cells are where you enter data or formulas. The current cell you're "on" is shown on the top left of your screen, under the menus.

When you open a new Workbook, it will go to the top left cell, and will display "A1." This is the cell in row #1 in column A.

How to switch between open workbooks in Excel: Press Control Tab. For some reason, this does not work in MS Word. This is just easier than going to View, Switch Window, then clicking on the other open workbook.

When you open a spreadsheet, the whole spreadsheet is called a workbook. Each workbook / spreadsheet can have many sheets within the spreadsheet. The technical name for sheet is Worksheet. These are the same things as pages in a book. Look at the bottom left and click on the sheets tab names to go to each sheet. If nothing is there, go to the very top left circle icon, Excel Options, Advanced, Display options for this workbook, and click Sheet Tabs.

If you want to have each separate workbook show on the Taskbar, then go to very top left circle icon, Excel Options, Advanced, Display, Show all windows in Taskbar.

All input areas, where you input data into the programs, are shaded green in our software. Anything that is gray or peach on a non-presentation sheet is not an input cell, and you probably won't be able to input anything into it (depending on the program). Most input cells change from green to gray when something is input into them. This is so you can quickly scan an input sheet, looking for green, so you can ensure you didn't forget to input something.

Passwords are not required for unprotecting presentation sheets. If you're inputting / typing in a cell, and the password protection dialog box comes up, just go to Review, Unprotect Sheet. If it unprotected, then a password wasn't needed. If it asks for a password, then you're stuck, because they are not given out to anyone for any reason. When you're done, re-protect the sheet. Protection is to prevent butter-finger accidents from destroying formulas on presentation sheets, and to prevent copying / reverse engineering of the software on actual protected sheets.

If you don't like what shows or prints on the very bottom of the page (usually our copyright blurb), this is probably just the Footer. These are never protected, and you can just change them by going to Page Layout, click the tiny box at the bottom right, then go to Header and Footer (then just delete everything using Custom Footer).

If you need to print something on a password protected sheet, and you need to tinker with column and row sizes, and you bought support, and it's in Excel 2007 format, then you can get a version sent to you that does that.

If you're inputting data, and strange things keep happening before you finish typing something, you probably are battling "AutoComplete." This is where Excel takes the first character you type, and then tries to help you by remembering what you used last with the same first letter(s), then it completes it all for you. This is used when people are doing the same thing many times. Most of the time, this is just annoying. To turn it off, do this: Excel Options, Advanced, Editing Options, and then ensure that "Enable AutoComplete for cell values" is not checked.

Another tip is to use Excel's "Freeze Panes" function. This will freeze the inside of the workbook on the selected column and row, so you can scroll around and see other parts of the sheet, but still be able to see the titles, dates, and the main parts of the sheet. To turn this off, go to Window, Unfreeze Panes. To turn it on, first put your cursor on a cell where you want to see what's both above and to the left all the time when you scroll. Go to View, Freeze Panes. Then scroll around to see what it did. More than likely you didn't get it right the first time, so you'll have to try again.

If you don't have Excel set up so individual workbooks show in your taskbar, then Go to View, Switch Windows. Also, Control Tab may work here too to quickly switch between Windows. How to set Excel up to do that: Click the circle icon at the top left. Click Excel Options. Click Advanced. Click Display. Click Show all Windows in Taskbar.

The biggest tip of all is Excel's built-in "Goal Seek" function. With this, you can do any and all of the "what if" and "Goal Seeking" functions that any other financial planning software can do, plus dozens more that they can't do. An excerpt copied from the retirement software page:

You can use Excel's built-in "Goal Seek" function to do your "What-ifs," which is something that no other retirement planning software can do. For example, just click on cell B35 of the Assumptions and Additional Need sheet, then go to Data, What-If Analysis, Goal Seek Change the "To value:" field to zero, then click on the bottom field, then on any other input cell that will help make the retirement plan reach the goals better (like a rate of return input field of an asset sheet).

Click OK, and Excel will automatically increase rate of return until the amount of more money needed shown in cell B35 goes to zero. Then you'll know what the rate of return you'd need to get to reach your retirement goals, assuming all other input stayed the same.

With this feature, you can do all of the "What If?" and "Goal Seeking" functions that any other retirement software can do, plus dozens more that they can't do (because it's not written in MS Excel). You can use both any result cell with any input cell with Goal Seek. For example, if you wanted to Goal Seek to determine what the Social Security inflation rate needs to be to only fund retirement through the wife's age of 70, with $100,000 left over, you can do that.

Just click on cell R38 on the Annual Summary Numbers sheet (see demo), open Goal Seek, input $100,000 into the middle field, go to the bottom field, click on cell E13 of the Summing & Input sheet, click OK, and Excel will increase the Social Security inflation rate in cell E13 until there is no more money needed to fund retirement at the wife's age 70, and $100,000 left over. You're going to get a crazy number like 75%, but you can do this, and any other crazy thing you can think of. You can use any of the dozens of input / result fields as the key variables in reaching your retirement goals.

To use these Excel-based Money Calculators, the User should already be Proficient in Basic Things Like:

• Knowing what sheet tabs are. These are the things at the bottom left of the workbook telling where stuff is - like pages in a book, where the book is the workbook; AKA spreadsheet. You should know how to move around from sheet to sheet within the same workbook.

• Opening workbooks (spreadsheets).

• Saving workbooks with different names and folders (directories) using the Save As... command.

• Moving around from cell to cell (click or use the four arrow keys).

• Knowing what a cell is, and how to locate and enter information into cells (press F5 and then enter the cell address to go directly to a certain cell).

• Knowing how to copy (Control C) and paste (Control V) data from one place to another.

• Changing the view magnification slider at the bottom right to make sheets look right on your monitor.

• Changing the size, inserting, deleting, hiding, and unhiding columns and rows.

• Tinkering with page setup margins, and row and column sizes, to format sheets to print right on your printer.

• How to unprotect a sheet or a workbook.

• How to undo something you just did (Control Z or click the Undo icon).

• And be able to deal with simple formulas, like =sum(b1:b10), and know that this will add the contents of all of the cells from B1 to B10.

Users should familiarize themselves with the basics of using Excel before purchasing these financial tools.

Some money calculators also assume the user has basic knowledge in TVM (Time Value of Money) concepts, and basic principles of investments (e.g., why you wouldn’t enter a municipal bond as producing taxable income into an IRA, etc.). There are short explanations of TVM parameters on the free financial calculator pages.

Please try to find the answers to Windows, MS Office, Word, and Excel questions yourself before calling or e-mailing for support.

More Generic Tips

Tips for saving financial planning client computer work are here. Basic personal computer tips are here.

Basic input concept for most all of these Excel spreadsheets: Input your data into the green-shaded cells of the input sheets (usually grouped in the middle of the workbook). This will flow through the calculation sheets, on the right side of the workbook. This will populate the presentation sheets (usually grouped in the left of the workbook), where you look at the results.

Then you fix mistakes, repeat, format, print.

There is no password protection on presentation sheets, so you can make any changes you want to.

If a cell is not colored green, then it's not an input cell, so you won't be able (and shouldn't) to do anything with it (if it's not a presentation sheet). If you could, then you may end up damaging the spreadsheet, breaking it.

Delete all of the sample input (everything in green-shaded cells) before inputting your data.

After manually setting the amount of decimal places that Excel rounds numbers to when it displays them, it still uses up to 21 decimal places in the calculations. So don't worry that it's only using the first decimal place in its calculations if you formatted it to display like that.

If you're an investing consumer (not a professional financial planner working with clients), then when you read "client, prospect, or they" just think "you." You would be both the advisor and the client (or spouse).

Since Y2K, Excel has had a hard time parsing years correctly. So if you input 6/30/11, Excel may sometimes think it's 6/30/1912. So instead, always input dates with the whole year types out, like this: 6/30/2012.

Read about financial planning software integration (sharing data between modules)

For Financial Professionals: How to E-mail Financial Plan Reports to Clients without Sending Working Programs

You probably don't want to e-mail working programs (Excel spreadsheets) to your clients because then they won't need to hire you to do the work anymore.

There are several ways to e-mail finished reports to clients without sending the working programs.

• You can use a PDF file maker. Once you have a program that prints to a PDF file (not easy to come by unless you can get Adobe to work, and want to deal with its constant updating process and littering its stuff everywhere), it's as easy as selecting a printer when you click Print...

You basically choose to print to the PDF file maker program. So you'd print all of the presentation pages, and then name and save the PDF file when closing. Then you e-mail the PDF file to the client. Then they open it with their PDF Reader, which most computers have (when it's new).

• The next method is to insert screen prints into a Word document.

In Excel, with the program up and ready to go, get the finished results to display on your monitor. Then press the Print Screen key (usually toward the right at the top row of function keys). This copies what's on your monitor into the Windows Clipboard. Then you go to a new blank document in MS Word, and paste (Control V).

We like to first format the docx without margins and in landscape. This works a lot better if you do it before the first paste. Then Control A and center everything.

What's on your monitor pastes as an image into the Word docx.

Then go to Insert, Break, Page Break so the images don't pile up on one another, and repeat until all of the results are in one document. Then you just e-mail the Word document.

This works great, but the image has what's on your monitor, which includes the frame of Excel. Try it and see.

• The next thing to do is to make a new spreadsheet and paste all of the results into it, then e-mail that spreadsheet. How to do that:

When you have the finished version of the program all done, go to cell A1.

Then open up a new spreadsheet (Control N). Go to cell A1. Save and name it something relevant to the client, like Smith's Retirement Plan.

Then go back to the program, and the sheet with the results you want to send.

Press Control A, to select the whole sheet. That doesn't work sometimes in Excel '07, so click the cell to the top left of the intersection of column A and row 1. Then press Control C to copy everything to the clipboard. Then go to the new workbook.

Don't paste here! You'll need to use the Paste Special function. So either right click in the blank sheet and then choose Paste Special, then click on Values, then OK. Or go to the Edit menu and do the same.

After you paste just the values, you'll also have to repeat that step process, but this time choose, Formats. Then repeat, pasting special Column Widths.

The point is that you want to Paste Special, Values only so just the results paste, and not the formulas. If you paste formulas, then they won't work on the client's computer (because the formulas will be referencing the program's spreadsheet, which is only on your computer).

Just the results will paste, so then you can e-mail that spreadsheet.

Be sure to delete all of the copyright and other references to toolsformoney as you don't want questions from that. That's also in the footer, so delete it from there too.

• This next method strips all of the guts out of the program, so you can just send the results. It's similar to the method above, but some find it to be more work.

When you have your work done, save the spreadsheet. Now save it again using a different file name so you won't alter the working version.

Go to the results sheet(s) you want to send. Go to cell A1.

Press Control A, to select the whole sheet. Then press Control C to copy everything to the clipboard. That doesn't work sometimes in Excel '07, so click the cell to the top left of the intersection of column A and row 1. Then press Control C to copy everything to the clipboard.

Use the Paste Special function. Right click in the sheet and then choose Paste Special, then click on Values, then OK. Then repeat, pasting special Column Widths. This deleted all of the formulas and replaced them with just the results.

Do that for all of the result sheets you want to send.

Now right click on the sheet tabs one at a time, for all of the input, calculation, and result sheets you don't want to send. Click Delete. This will delete the whole sheet from the workbook.

If you did it right, then all of the working parts of the programs have been deleted, and the result sheets didn't change because they don't have any formulas that refer to the deleted sheets.

Save and e-mail.

Generic free PC tips are here

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