You have decisions in your business. These are as unique as your job. You need unique tools to help you visualize the future and compare your options. You may think that Excel does not support these important issues, that it is only for record keeping and status reporting. Let Jacoby Consulting introduce you to the decision-making power of Excel. It’s more than just another pretty graph!

Announcing a new series of on-demand classes

Learn these techniques wherever you are, whenever you want, in the new series of Udemy courses, Excel for Decision Makers. The first in the series, Getting Answers from Data using Excel for Mac or Windows, takes you from messy data to actionable insights through several hands-on real-world case studies. Along the way you’ll learn powerful Excel techniques including PivotTables, lookup functions, replicated formulas and more. Contact me if you’d like a coupon to take it for $12.99 (regularly $49.99). I’m looking forward to hearing what you learned and how you’ll use it. An expanded version of this class is now available to the corporate clients of Michael Management: Answers from Data: Excel PivotTables and More with Case Studies.    If you need a quick probability refresher, check out this course on Udemy  or this one on Michael Management. They both include spreadsheets for the formulas and to simulate random events.

We can help you

We can build decision spreadsheets for you or teach you the essentials of Excel for decision makers. You’ll find that you don’t need 99% of the stuff in that big Excel book.

What decisions do you need to make? Contact us. We provide free, ready-to-use spreadsheets for decisions suggested by our readers.

You can’t predict the future. Uncertainty is what makes hard decisions so hard.

• What if the market changes?
• What if inflation goes crazy?
• What if I don’t get enough orders?
• What if I get too many?
• What about random fluctuations?

Excel gives you the flexibility to look at all the possibilities. What are your risks? Easily turn any spreadsheet into a Monte Carlo model to look at what fate might send your way and assess your risks.

The good news is that Excel is a wonderful tool for making the decisions you need to make, because spreadsheets are easy to change and examine. Explore the problem. Look at alternative outcomes. What can you change to reach your goal? What are the risks and how will they change the results? What are the factors that drive the outcome?

More good news. The techniques are easy to learn. A few simple formulas will build a sophisticated spreadsheet that gives you real insight. No macros. No technical jargon.

Here’s what you’ll learn.

• All the Excel you need, even if you’ve never used it before
• Easy techniques for quickly building useful spreadsheets
• How to use spreadsheets to understand and make a decision

Look for Carol Jacoby’s book, Simple Spreadsheets for Hard Decisions. New book coming in 2023: Excel for Decision Makers.

Contact us about classes or individual support in building spreadsheets customized to your decisions.

Download an example of the spreadsheets used in the classes to compare alternatives:

SMART decision technique

One of the most useful features of the book is Appendix A, a compendium of the key Excel techniques for decision-makers. This has been updated for current versions of Excel and available here for free download. Earlier versions are available here as well.

Appendix A Windows 2016, 2013

Appendix A 2007 Windows

Appendix A Windows 97, 2000, 2003

Appendix A Mac 16

Appendix A 2011 Mac

Appendix A 2004 Mac

Here is a zip file of all the spreadsheets for the book:

simple spreadsheets