Maximize Excel: Accounting Charts
Presented by David H. Ringstrom, CPA
 
Duration: 100 minutes

In this presentation author and Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, shares lots of tricks and techniques you can implement to create, streamline, and even automate Excel charts. You'll see how to build self-expanding charts that automatically display new data, along with self-updating chart titles. David will show how to create a rolling chart to display results such as trailing twelve-sales. You'll also learn how to create and use customized chart templates, build a Waterfall Chart to illustrate a financial statement, and troubleshoot frustrating chart issues.

David is the author of “Microsoft Excel 365 for Dummies”, “Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures”, and has written or co-authored six other books. He demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Excel for Microsoft 365. David draws your attention to any differences in Excel 2021, 2019 or 2016 during the presentation and in his detailed handouts. The handouts include an Excel workbook with most of the examples he uses during his demonstrations.

Excel for Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based product that receives periodic feature updates. Conversely, perpetually licensed versions have year numbers in their names and do not receive any feature updates.

 
Who should attend: Professionals seeking to utilize Excel's charting features more effectively.
 
Topics covered:

• Using the Recommended Charts feature to create suitable charts from data with a couple of mouse clicks.

• Illustrating financial statements with the Waterfall chart feature.

• Enlivening charts with clip art.

• Creating pivot charts from lists of data in Excel.

• Understanding how pivot chart formatting works much like formatting other types of charts in Excel.

• Creating rolling charts that automatically display data for the last five years, six months, or whatever time frame you choose.

• Printing only a chart from a worksheet.

• Managing the pivot chart buttons that control filtering and other aspects of pivot charts.

• Eliminating the need to manually resize charts when data is added—automate this with tables instead.

• Converting a chart to a static picture for archival purposes or for use in other applications.

• Linking chart titles to worksheet cells as a step toward a self-updating chart title.

• Linking charts to dynamic array results to create self-updating charts without using programming code.
 

Learning objectives:

• Identify the chart type in Excel 2016 and later that is particularly suited to presenting financial statements in chart form.

• Identify the area of a chart that you right-click to copy the formatting in anticipation of pasting the formatting to other charts.

• State the default file extension for chart templates.

 
 
Level:
Basic
 
NASBA Field of Study:
Specialized Knowledge (2 hours)
 
Program Prerequisites:
None
 
Advance Preparation:
None