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

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

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

Made for Each Other

It’s no secret: companies large and small are scrambling for growth. And as businesspeople turn over every last stone in that quest, they can’t afford to spend all their time chasing down information. They need their information to catch up to them. Operational agility is key, and it’s rooted in ...

By David W. Owens • June 15, 2012

Keep It Secret

Q: Are hidden rows easily detected by others working with your spreadsheet?A: Hidden rows are more visible than most spreadsheet users realize. For example, anyone receiving your spreadsheet will see column-heading letters jump from F to H, leaving them to wonder what you hid away in column G. If...

By Bill Jelen • May 15, 2012

Putting People First

In 2007, Jim Braun was CFO of OmniTrax, a regional railroad operator that was making a lot of money by leasing and selling the land and buildings it owned around its tracks. The real estate market was on the brink of an historic collapse that year, but “I’d be lying if I told you I knew it would ...

By David Rosenbaum • April 15, 2012

A Global Shift (of Decimals)

Q: I have a column in a spreadsheet that mistakenly has whole numbers instead of percentages — for instance, 123 instead of 1.23. How can I shift the decimal point two positions to the left?A: Follow these steps to turn whole numbers into decimals or percentages:• Go to any blank cell in the spre...

By Bill Jelen • April 15, 2012

The Seductive Promise of Big Data

Between 2005 and 2007, Jim Braun was CFO of OmniTRAX, a privately held railroad, transportation, and real estate management company. OmniTRAX owns shortline railroads (less than $500 million in annual revenue), but a significant percentage of its income in those years came from leveraging the lan...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 24, 2012

The True Meaning of Service

Some of you may have listened to President Obama’s State of the Union address last week. You might have noticed his emphasis on manufacturing and wondered why. David Brooks did. In his New York Times op-ed following the speech, he note that “Ninety percent of American workers work in the service ...

By Timothy Chou • Feb. 3, 2012

How to Search for Cell Comments Using Excel

David H. asks,“Using the ‘Find’ feature in Excel works when you need to locate items quickly, but is there a way to use this, or another function, that will expand the search to include text in any comments within the worksheet?”Cell comments are a great way to document a spreadsheet. But if you ...

By Bill Jelen • Feb. 1, 2012

DIY Technology Projects: Threat or Menace?

Smart people can make stupid decisions. Case in point: business executives who decide they can address their technology needs without involving IT, responding to the IT supply-and-demand crunch that afflicts so many enterprises today.In my experience, nobody wins in these do-it-yourself projects....

By Susan Cramm • Jan. 5, 2012

Best of 2011: Technology

If 2010 was the year when cloud computing first entered the CFO’s consciousness, and its theoretical shortcomings and benefits were debated in something of a vacuum, 2011 was devoted to rolling up sleeves and digging into the cloud’s practical applications. How was cloud computing altering the re...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Dec. 29, 2011

Three Gifts of the IT Magi

’Tis the season of giving and receiving, so I started thinking about what I’d wish for if I were a CFO. While a good solid quarter with no revenue-recognition issues would be high on my list, if I put on my IT hat, there would be three presents I’d like to find under my tree.Application cloud ser...

By Timothy Chou • Dec. 20, 2011

How 3 Big IT Trends Will Affect You and Your CIO in 2012

The IT media machine — jolly journalists, grave analysts, and energetic marketers — is hard at work cranking out technology predictions for the coming year. It’s a traditional part of the holiday season. It’s expected. My holiday gift to you is to spare you the chore of slogging through all those...

By Martha Heller • Dec. 13, 2011

Why IT Couldn’t Save American Airlines

Last week’s announcement that American Airlines (AA) was filing for bankruptcy protection is both personally and professionally disappointing to me. But not surprising. I started my post–Air Force career at AA, and the late Max Hopper — the airline’s former senior vice president of IT, one of the...

By Larry Tieman • Dec. 7, 2011

Cost Surprises Hidden by Clouds

One of the value propositions ballyhooed by vendors for moving from on-premise computing to the public cloud is that the latter will reduce your IT costs. This may or may not be the case.In Why the Cloud Can Be Like a Subprime Mortgage, I touched on the lure of the low-entry cost of public cloud ...

By Rob Livingstone • Dec. 5, 2011

The Gadget Inspector’s Holiday Gift Guide

Take a Bunch of Tablets and Call Me in the MorningThe big player coming out of Camp Amazon this season is the Kindle Fire ($199), its 7-inch color tablet, but Amazon.com also has two very strong e-Reader options in the Kindle Touch ($99) and its base model Kindle ($79).When I finally got my hands...

By Ben Radlinski • Nov. 29, 2011

Is a Perpetual Software License Such a Bad Thing?

ERP giant SAP announced this month the completion of its acquisition of Crossgate, a provider of cloud integration services. Last month, Oracle bought RightNow Technologies, a customer experience cloud company, and IBM purchased Platform Computing, a software company specializing in managing clou...

By David Rosenbaum • Nov. 17, 2011

Is It Safe? The 7 Principles of Cloud Security

Some of you may remember Marathon Man, starring Lawrence Olivier as the evil Nazi dentist Dr. Christian Szell and Dustin Hoffman as a graduate history student nicknamed Babe. Szell has come to New York from his South American jungle hideaway to retrieve a cache of diamonds, but he’s not sure he w...

By Timothy Chou • Nov. 4, 2011

Four Strategies to Get More Out of IT

When it comes to IT, we’re leaving money on the table.The demand for IT (the perceived need for new capabilities to improve the business’s performance and/or its competitive position) far outstrips the available supply (the capacity — including money, staff, and tools — to fulfill IT demand). Exe...

By Susan Cramm • Oct. 19, 2011

Your CIO, Your Problem

Why do CFOs so often wonder if the bang will be worth their IT investment buck?  Why does a visit to IT typically involve hitting the “B” on the elevator or driving to another building?  Why do you have a harder time hiring, managing, and relating to your CIO than to any other executive?   I don’...

By Martha Heller • Oct. 7, 2011

Performance, Location, Security, Business Model: Your Choice

By now, you’ve no doubt heard about public and private clouds.  Are the differences between them the same as those between a public (Pebble Beach) or private (Augusta National) golf course? They’re both pretty nice. Between a public (Berkeley) or private (Stanford) education?  They’re both pretty...

By Timothy Chou • Oct. 5, 2011