Goodbye Mouse, Hello Keyboard

This post is for all the Excel nerds out there; hope you enjoy.

Since the second semester of my undergraduate program, I have been a huge fan of Microsoft’s Excel. I enjoyed creating spreadsheets to track my grades and I even got really creative and made my own GPA calculator. At the time, I felt like I knew a lot about Excel; boy was I wrong.

Fast-forward a couple of years and I now in my graduate program. A lot has changed during this time, one thing being my knowledge of Excel. Through my undergraduate program I used Excel almost daily for class projects or to track something in my personal life. This left me with a great understanding of the program and some of its capabilities. However, I still had much more to learn.

Once of my goals for the first part of my graduate program was to teach myself advanced financial modeling on Excel. I have completed FactSet’s DealMaven financial modeling course and am in the early stages of working through Breaking into Wall Street’s modeling course. One common these to these programs is the reference to keyboard shortcuts, which makes sense to increase productivity. However, one comment really stood out—it was said that you should attempt to avoid using the mouse as much as possible.

This, at first, seemed near impossible; yet I still attempted it. After a few weeks of working through modeling, I find myself being able to complete more and more tasks without the need for a mouse. And let me tell you, this has drastically increased my productivity within Excel. It is amazing how much faster you can work through the creation of a model once you know the key strokes to complete common tasks.

One really great Excel add-in that helped not only increase my productivity, but also made it easy to reduce use of the mouse was Macabacus. At the time of this post, I have only used the free version add-in and it is truly amazing. They provide intuitive short-cut keys to complete common modeling tasks such as changing formatting, font floor cycle and increase/decrease decimal places. Another great feature is their advanced formula audit tools. If you have ever build or worked with an in-depth Excel model you know how important it can be to audit your formulas—Macabacus makes this daunting task seem a little bit easier.

Long story short, this add-in is amazing and well worth checking out if you are an avid Excel user. Here is the link to their site with the free download; did I mention they offer some great free models? Enjoy.