The Business Ways

Making financial forecasts or performing investment analyses that need to include depreciation? Microsoft Excel can help. Excel’s DB, or declining balance, depreciation function lets you calculate fixed-declining balance depreciation.

The DB function calculates fixed declining balance depreciation for an asset given the cost, it’s salvage value, estimated economic life, the accounting period for which depreciation is being calculated, and, optionally, the number of month in first year. (If you don’t include the optional month argument, Excel sets this value to 12.) The DB function uses the following syntax:

DB (cost, salvage, life, period, month)

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Need to calculate statistical averages? Microsoft Excel supplies several easy-to-use statistical functions for just such a purpose says bestselling computer book author Stephen L. Nelson

Excel provides useful functions for finding the mean, median, and mode of a data set. In general, the functions look at a set of values and then make the expected calculation. For example, the mean functions, which calculate averages, take the sum of the values in the set and divide it by the number of values.

AVERAGE

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Need to count the cells in a worksheet range that contain data averages? Microsoft Excel supplies several easy-to-use functions for just such a purpose says bestselling computer book author Stephen L. Nelson

If you select a range of cells, you can have Excel find how many cells are in that range using the count functions. This sounds a little goofy, but a handful of easy-to-understand examples show how this works–and suggest when you might want to use the “cell counting” functions.

COUNT

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