Learn to: Use functions and understand how they work within a formula Take advantage of 150 built-in Excel functions Evaluate investment performance or forecast expenses Use Excel to compare rates to make good financial decisions Deciding on a mortgage? Need to track your expenses? Microsoft Excel can help--here's how! Excel is a tool that's equally useful for analyzing your investments and cataloging your recipes. So why not claim all the power it offers? This book shows you how to take advantage of over 150 built-in Excel functions that you can use in formulas to crunch numbers for just about every purpose. Best of all, it explains everything in plain English! If you're an Excel newbie -- get a quick course in how Excel works and how to use the formulas tab, Insert Functions dialog box, and array functions All about math -- discover math and finance-related functions that help you track costs, interest rates, and return on investments Statistically speaking -- explore functions used in descriptive statistics, including the Average function and others that help you glean details from your data Predicting the future -- learn how to use predicting factors to forecast and look for trends in your financial picture Strings attached -- find out how to manipulate and work with strings of text Digging in your data -- uncover ways to pluck pieces of data from a database and how IF, HLOOKUP, and VLOOKUP can make your life simpler Open the book and find: Ways to use Excel in decision-making Plenty of real-world examples Advice on managing inventory Cool database functions Help correcting formula errors Tips on working with dates and times How to create an amortization table The top ten functions you should know.