Special Report: Benchmarking Tech Spending

 A number of crucial factors will drive CFOs to higher and higher levels of tech spending in the next couple of years, according to experts quoted in this CFO Special Report on information-technology expenditures.  The prime suspects, says one analyst, are social media; mobile devices like smartp...

By David Katz • Aug. 26, 2013

Something new to blame on enterprise software projects

The world’s largest dairy exporter, Fonterra of New Zealand, is looking into its IT systems in the wake of a botulism scare that led to a partial ban of Fonterra products in China and a total ban in Russia this month, according to a ZDNet article.Then again, the connection between botulism an...

By Keith Button • Aug. 20, 2013

Explore the Trendline➔

The CFO Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence’s impact on the office of the CFO continues to evolve, and finance chiefs must be aware of the opportunities it will create for growth. 

By CFO.com staff

Several factors driving IT security spending increases

The bring-your-own-technology trend and the shift to cloud computing solutions are “forcing businesses to rethink their security posture and fueling product refresh cycles,” Canalys reported.IT security spending in North America is forecasted to increase 5 percent over the next five years, Ca...

By Keith Button • Aug. 20, 2013

Lawsuit filed over bad software outsourcing

Orange County had hired a contractor to develop custom software to modernize its tax collection—a project that was to take three years and cost about $8 million, according to a Computerworld report. But the project was costing  more than $16 million and taking twice as long, the county claim...

By Keith Button • Aug. 20, 2013

Measuring the Full Impact of Digital Capital

On July 31, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis will release, for the first time, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures categorizing research and development as fixed investment. It will join software in a new category called intellectual-property products.In our knowledge-based economy, this is ...

By James Manyika and Jacques Bughin • July 29, 2013

The Exciting Potential of the Industrial Internet

Have you heard of the phrase “Industrial Internet”? Coined by General Electric, it refers to the integration of complex physical machinery with networked sensors and software. Its components include machine learning, big data, the Internet of things and machine-to-machine communications. If you t...

By Timothy Chou • July 11, 2013

Turning Trash into Treasure

Where staffers have the ability to freely create or download files such as Word documents, spreadsheets, emails or the output from Smart-Boards, and then store the files somewhere in your organization’s IT infrastructure, cloud or otherwise, they are adding to your pool of unstructured data. Glob...

By Rob Livingstone • July 1, 2013

Making a List

Q: I need to create a unique list of customers from a large list. How do I do it?A: You can build a pivot table report with customers in the row area of the layout. Because the pivot table creates a summary report, the first column of the table will include the unique list of customers.Here’s wha...

By Bill Jelen • June 5, 2013

Social Business: Valuable Inside as Well as Out

When’s the last time you approached an employee, perhaps about a new software tool or a cloud-based financial management system, and asked, simply, “What do you think of this?” If you can’t recall, says Vala Afshar, chief marketing and customer officer for network security firm Enterasys, your bu...

By Taylor Provost • May 23, 2013

Taming the Hydra of Big Data

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a more broadly-focused column by our regular contributor Rob Livingstone. It will feature advice and analysis on Big Data and other emerging, potentially disruptive technologies.  Big Data is the next “big thing” to come out of the IT world, and car...

By Rob Livingstone • May 9, 2013

All the Excel Shortcuts

 If you would like to submit a question to Bill “MrExcel” Jelen, e-mail him at [email protected].

By Bill Jelen • May 8, 2013

More Department Leaders Make Their Own IT Decisions

Senior management executives are increasingly budgeting for information-technology purchases particular to their own functional areas or departments, beyond what’s included in corporate and IT-department budgets.In a survey by research firm Forrester, conducted from August to November 2012, 92 pe...

By Taylor Provost • May 7, 2013

Group Therapy

Q: Can I apply groups without using subtotals?A: Just select columns or rows to be grouped and select Data, Group. It is fairly tedious to add many groupings, but this can be easier than continually hiding and unhiding rows or columns.Select the entire column for Jan, Feb, and Mar (Figure 1) and ...

By Bill Jelen • April 15, 2013

Many Unhappy Returns

CFOs are suckers for precision. They can recite exact figures about the percentage growth of their employers’ share price in after-hours trading, for example, or tell by how many cents the company beat analysts’ expectations in its latest quarterly earnings report. They unspool figures and ratios...

By Josh Hyatt and Matt Surka • April 15, 2013

Oracle Blames “Unmotivated” Sales Force for Weak Quarter

Oracle CFO Safra Catz cited a “lack of urgency” among the sales staff as the reason for a sluggish third quarter during the technology giant’s earnings call Wednesday afternoon. The company reported a 1% decline in total revenue from the same quarter last year, which left its executives “not at a...

By Taylor Provost • March 21, 2013

What’s in a Name?

Q: I’ve seen how to assign a name to a cell. Is it also possible to assign a name to a constant? That could be useful for a number, such as a local sales tax rate, that changes periodically.A: To assign names to constants, follow these steps:1. Select Formula, Define Name.2. In the New Name dialo...

By Bill Jelen • March 21, 2013

Horizontal Help

Q. Why doesn’t Excel offer horizontal subtotals? For example, I’d like to add a subtotal in E for Q1 (see Figure 1). A. This is a great question. Although it takes a lot of steps to create horizontal subtotals, using the shortcut keys speeds up the process. Follow the steps below.1. Select the ...

By Bill Jelen • Feb. 7, 2013

An Isolating Task

USER PROBLEM: My company assigns an account ID in the format SSS-XX-YYYY. I need to isolate the XX portion of the account ID in order to subtotal or sort the data. What is the best way to do that?SOLUTION: You can insert a new column and use the MID function to isolate the necessary digits from t...

By Bill Jelen • Dec. 15, 2012

Filtering Filters

Q: I don’t want to offer filter dropdowns for quantity and revenue in my customer sales sheet, because they confuse the people who use the worksheet. I want the filters to be available only on columns A:D. What’s the best way to do that?A: You normally apply a filter by selecting the entire data ...

By Bill Jelen • Nov. 15, 2012

Rank and File

Q: I have four writers working on a project. Each week, I need to report how many pages they have written toward their goal. How can I add a formula to my tracking sheet that will allow me to rank them in high-to-low order (Figure 1)?A: If you are not concerned about ties, you can use the RANK or...

By Bill Jelen • Oct. 8, 2012

An Average Solution

Q: I have 36 months of sales data and need to create a prediction of sales. How can I calculate a 3-month moving average and a trend line based on that average?A: You need 2 months of history before you can begin calculating a 3-month moving average. When you have a data set similar to Figure 1, ...

By Bill Jelen • Sept. 1, 2012

LinkedIn Aims to Diversify New Mobile Revenue Stream

During LinkedIn’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday, chief executive officer Jeff Weiner announced that new-member registration via mobile devices was up 5% over last quarter and accounted for 15% of all new-member registrations, up from 10% the prior quarter. The increase, Weiner suggested, ...

By Taylor Provost • Aug. 3, 2012

A Refreshing Change

Q: I’ve discovered that some of the underlying data in my pivot table is wrong. After I correct a number, the pivot table does not appear to include the change. Why does this happen, and how do I hold on to my updates?A: There is an important concept to understand about pivot tables: When you cre...

By Bill Jelen • Aug. 1, 2012

Putting Social Networks to Work

For some time now, executives have been touting teamwork as a competitive tool. The complexity brought on by globalization, they argue, creates challenges so grand they can be addressed only by multiple minds. And the rise of internal networks and social-media tools makes far-flung collaboration ...

By Josh Hyatt • Aug. 1, 2012

Five Big Ways Your ERP Could Go Right

All of you smart CFOs who read my last column, “Five Big Ways Your ERP Can Go Wrong,” have probably solved your enterprise resource planning problems and are presently luxuriating in its new-found benefits and positive ROI.  Missed it? Well then, you better read this column as well as checking ou...

By Martha Heller • July 20, 2012