Excel Formulas That Multiply and Divide In Home Costs Calculator

Last week I wrote about Excel formulas and about my first demo on basic use of them. That demo shows how to make Excel calculate sums.

Now I have recorded another tutorial for the kalmstrom.com Tips section: Excel formulas for multiplication and division.

Excel reports
The reason I am publishing a series of Excel tutorials right now is that we have begun using Excel for statistics in the kalmstrom.com applications.

Currently our helpdesk products as well as our resource booking add-on and our solution for project and task management in Outlook have these Excel reports. Soon we will add them to our Outlook add-on for time reporting too.

We have of course made it easy to create reports on various aspects of how the kalmstrom.com products are used, but it is also possible to create custom reports on the data.

Correctly used Excel is an excellent tool, and I hope that the new Excel reports and my tutorials will stimulate kalmstrom.com Community Members to extend the use of it.

Home costs
Excel is not only useful in business related reports and statistics. Like many others I use Excel for private calculations too, and as an example for my tutorial I have taken such an application: the costs of owning a home with a mortgage.

In the demo I show how to make Excel calculate the different costs associated with the home, and I create the formulas in a way that make it easy to introduce changes.

If, as an example, the interest is changed, I can enter the new interest in one cell only, and Excel will calculate the home costs with the new value.

Make it look nice 
When the formulas are in place and work as they should, it is a good practice to apply formats and cell styles to make the Excel sheet more appealing and easier to read and use.

In my example I remove the decimals and set the cell styles so that cells with formulas and cells with input values look different.  That way I can quickly see what can be changed and what should be kept as it is.


In the kalmstrom.com Tips section you can find many more pointers and "how tos" on SharePoint, Excel, Outlook and other platforms. Please take a look! If you are a Community Member you are also welcome to suggest new demos that would be good to have in the Tips section.

By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions