Are you brave enough to enter the ModelOff competition, that tests your financial modeling skills in Excel?
To help you decide if you’d like to enter, there are workbooks with questions from previous years, available for download. For example, can you find and fix the errors in a complex workbook?
There is a discussion on the Mr. Excel forum too, where you can see the questions and solutions, and read what other people suggest as alternatives solutions. Even if you don’t want to compete, you might learn some interesting new tricks there.
To register, go to the ModelOff website, for more details and deadlines
- Round 1 (online) is Oct. 25th, and Round 2 (online) is Nov. 8th.
- The Top 16 finalists will compete in New York in December.
Contextures Posts
Here’s what I posted recently:
- Select from a drop down list of countries, and a macro automatically clears the dependent City cell, to prevent mismatches.
- Google knew that it was my birthday last week, and created a special Doodle, just for the occasion. Do you find that charming or alarming?
- For a humorous peek at what other people are saying about spreadsheets, read the latest collection of Excel tweets, on my Excel Theatre blog.
Other Excel Articles
Here are a few of the Excel articles that I read recently, that you might find useful:
- Did you know about the data entry shortcut that Gasper Kamensek discovered, while teaching a basic Excel class? When I checked the survey results, all the respondents had picked “No” (including me).
- Take a look at the amazing dashboard that Robert Mundigl built, featuring an animated chart.
- It was Teacher’s Day this month, and Chandoo asked his readers to post their favorite Excel tips, in honor of the occasion.
- Ken Puls is happy about the new Merge Columns feature in Power Query. Maybe they’ll add that in Excel one day.
- Andrew Wulf shares the lessons that he has learned from a lifetime of programming. My favorite – Never stop learning.
- Filtering has been enhanced in Power Map, and Custom Maps have been added. You should receive the update soon, if you have an Office 365 subscription that includes Power BI.
- Jon Peltier pushes Excel to its limits, by creating a Swimmer chart. It shows patient responses to drug treatments, but you could adapt the technique for other uses.
- Donna Gilliland uses conditional formatting and Sort by Color to group text entries in a worksheet.
Excel Announcements
Here are some upcoming events, courses, recently published books, and other new items, related to Excel.
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Excel VBA for Financials, 2-day course led by Excel experts, Jan Karel Pieterse and Tony de Jonker
This Dutch course is specifically aimed at the Finance professional. It has no frills, and no technical mumbo-jumbo – just the VBA you need to achieve more success in your daily job. Date: November 19 and December 3, 2014 Location: Utrecht (Netherlands) |
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Registration has opened for this year’s ModelOff competition. Test your financial modeling skills against top modelers from around the world. Participants from over 100 countries progress through two Online Qualification Rounds with a Live Finals Event held in New York.
Note: A video starts to play automatically on the ModelOff site – turn off your speakers, if you don’t want to alarm your co-workers. |
Share Your Events and Articles
If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please share a link in the comments below, with a brief description. Thanks!
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