Payback period in capital budgeting refers to the period of time required for the return on an investment to “repay” the sum of the original investment. For example, a $1000 investment which returned $500 per year would have a two year payback period. The time value of money is not taken into account. Payback period intuitively measures how long something takes to “pay for itself.” All else being equal, shorter payback periods are preferable to longer payback periods. Payback period is widely used because of its ease of use despite the recognized limitations described below. – via Wikipedia The Question…

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Way back in 2008, I wrote about using SUMPRODUCT to duplicate the functionality of SUMIFS which was introduced in Microsoft Excel 2007. SUMPRODUCT is a powerful excel function and is more commonly used to multiply two arrays. Let’s first understand the syntax of SUMPRODUCT. If you’re impatient, you can skip the tutorial and download the sample excel file from the end of this post. It contains solved examples with the related formulae. We’ll be using the following table in the example. Syntax: SUMPRODUCT(array1,array2,array3, …) Array1, array2, array3, …     are 2 to 255 arrays whose components you want to multiply and…

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Two weeks, we looked at the syntax of VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH. Last weeks tutorial should have walked you through the basics of VLOOKUP. In this post, we’ll use a similar file from the VLOOKUP tutorial to find a value from the table using INDEX and MATCH. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please go through the VLOOKUP tutorial. Alternatively, if you’re ready to jump right into INDEX/MATCH, then let’s get started. Firstly, create the above table in Excel. I’ll be using Excel 2010 in my example. You can also download the examples file before you proceed. The file…

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Last week, I introduced you to VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH. In this post, we’ll use VLOOKUP to find a value from the table. Firstly, let’s create the above table in Excel. So whip up the installation of Excel you have. You can use either of Excel 2003, Excel 2007 or Excel 2010. I’ll be using Excel 2010 in my example. Download the examples file before you proceed. The file contains a Questions sheet which you can practice in and a Solutions sheet as well. If you haven’t had a chance to review the basic syntax of the functions, please do…

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Excel has several  lookup and reference functions. The main purposes of most of the plugins is to lookup some cell or cells from a set of data (usually presented in a table). Of these, the most popular ones are VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH. Usually INDEX and MATCH are used in combination as a replacement to VLOOKUP. This post will walk you through the basics syntax of the functions. In a future post, we’ll use them to lookup some values. VLOOKUP You can use the VLOOKUP function to look up the value of a cell from a range of cells, usually…

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If you working on some project or presentation and what to share the work with your fellow buddy that very second for some corrects or proofreading, then what you do? Springnote is web 2.0 service which makes real-time collaboration on office documents and notes easy, here other users can comment, and add content as needed. Springnote has all the features and capabilities of a word processor including all elements. You can add images, movies, audio, other presentation, and many other plugins. It also provides you with RSS to track changes in the documents and all activities made on it. But…

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I have just stumbled upon a very cool web application that allows you to use word processor with in your web browser. Shutterbrog lets you edit your documents online totally free of charge. It offers a very user friendly interface and makes every thing easy for you. You get the option to either edit your existing documents or create a new one. You can edit these documents in PDF, Microsoft Word, plain or rich text content. With Shutterborg, you don’t have to worry about the text formatting. Simply right click your selected text and choose the desired formatting option or…

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If you have lost your password for any MS Word or Excel document and are unable to recover it, try using this Free Word / Excel Password Recovery application. It’s a freeware product and all you need to do is install it, open the file that you need to recover. Choose the character set “a to z” and the expected lenght of your password and click GO. It will than try every possible combination that matches your password.  It might take a bit time depending on the characters and length of your password, the larger the character set, the longer…

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A long time ago, I wrote a tutorial on creating custom labels in Microsoft Word. Creating a custom label is necessary only if you don’t plan to use the many inbuilt label templates. The next step after creating a custom label is the actual label merge process. If you are familiar with Mail Merge, the process is almost similar. You can start merging labels by going to the Mailings tab followed by Start Mail Merge and selecting Labels from the drop down that appears. We next select the Label we want. You can select labels from different vendors or select…

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How many times have you struggled to send PowerPoint Presentations and Word documents to your friends / colleagues only to be overwhelmed by their sheer size! You can choose to zip or rar these files and send them across, but this would require the user there to have a program to unzip or unrar the files. PPTminimizer for Word and PowerPoint compresses PowerPoint presentations and Word documents without changing the file formats. Features: File compression by up to 98% Compresses all PowerPoint presentations from PowerPoint 97 to 2007 (PPTX) Compresses all Word documents from Word 97 to 2003 Keeps the…

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