Financial reporting is often rife with repetitive tasks and carries the risk of misstated numbers. In this webcast, Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, will show you ways to create an utilize financial reporting templates, both as workbooks and worksheets, that you can use as clean slates. You’ll also see how to create financial reports from a general ledger report by way of using pivot tables. You can then filter the pivot table with both the Slicer and Timeline features. Each month you’ll simply save over the existing general ledger report and your spreadsheet-based reports will update automatically.

David demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) version of Excel. David draws your attention to any differences in the older versions of Excel (2019, 2016, 2013, and earlier) during the presentation as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the webcast.

• Using Power Query to extract data from text files, accounting software, and other data sources
• Adding rows to a blank pivot table to create instant reports
• Applying a consistent look and feel to your charts by way of chart templates
• Combining the VLOOKUP and MATCH functions to summarize income statement data for use in a waterfall chart
• Enlivening staid lists of numbers with the Data Bars conditional formatting
• Filtering data within pivot tables in Excel 2010 and later by way of the Slicer feature
• Filtering data within pivot tables based upon date ranges in Excel 2013 and later by way of the Timeline feature
• Filtering pivot tables to show fewer columns and/or rows of data
• Illustrating financial statements with the Waterfall chart in Excel 2016 and later
• Illustrating numbers within a list by using the Icon Sets conditional formatting