Course details
Discover how to use Microsoft Excel for the bread-and-butter tasks required by corporate finance and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals. In this hands-on course, professor Michael McDonald steps through how to leverage this powerful tool to pick corporate investments, determine your firm’s cost of capital, and perform operational budgeting. Michael steps through how to estimate weighted average cost of capital (WACC), build a budget, perform stress testing and scenario analysis, and more. Throughout the course, Michael includes exercises—together with downloadable exercise files—that can provide you with a practical understanding of these key topics.
Instructor
- Michael McDonaldPartner, Morning InvestmentsMichael McDonald is a researcher and professor of finance at Fairfield University.
He has extensive programming skills in SAS, Stata, Python, R, and SQL, among other programming languages. His past work experience includes using these programming languages to analyze big data sets in finance and economics and develop trading strategies based on data mining. He has done extensive work in investment banking, at tech startups, hedge funds, and on a wide variety of consulting projects. He has a track record of authoring creative and practical course materials for a variety of subject areas across business disciplines.
Michael’s core knowledge is focused on financial markets and investment decision-making. He has helped advise firms on capital investments, valuation issues, and capital allocation to enhance business strategy. He is the author of multiple research studies addressing complex questions across the finance discipline. Michael’s work has been cited by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the CFA Institute, and many others.
Welcome
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– [Michael] Hi, I’m Dr. Michael McDonald. I’m a professor of finance and a financial consultant with experience with more than a dozen major corporations and government groups. In this course, I will show you how to pick investments for your firm, determine your cost capital, and perform basic operational budgeting and scenario analysis. Now, all of this will be done through the lens of Excel, a key tool for corporate finance professionals. We will be using exercise files. If you’d like to follow along and do those with me, please download the exercise folder to your desktop. Those exercise files are labeled based on the chapter number and video number. You’ll start with the Begin Excel file for the chapter that you are working on and that same example will be used throughout the chapter. If you’re ready to be a more effective corporate finance professional, then let’s get started now.