Upgrade your Excel Skills - MMM #22

Hi there,

This week I want to show you a free course I’ve been taking in my spare time that’s focused on reducing the friction of modelling in Excel. It comes with a cool macro pack that’s really useful if you’re working on large models, but more on that later.

I’ve also published the second part of the semiconductor supply chain research: the pandemic isn’t the root cause of the chip shortage - Here’s why.

📃 In this week’s mashup:

Have a great week!

I’m very passionate about productivity & efficiency. That translates to the world of Excel too. I’ve recently been interested in getting into the FAST modelling standard and in my Reddit research I came across the perfect tool: a macro pack created by Gridlines that focuses on reducing the friction from financial modelling. It pushes you to adhere to the FAST standard by automating a large part of the formatting/structuring that comes with the standard.

If you’re looking to upgrade your modelling skills, Gridlines has an excellent free course to introduce you to the tool. I’ve talked about it before.

But that’s not all. They’ve recently been working on a Financial Modelling Handbook which is available online for free while it’s being written. Unlike the course, this really starts from the absolute beginning of financial modelling and is therefore much more accessible. I think it’ll turn into a very valuable resource later on so read it while you can:

In the second largest proposed merger of the year, Broadcom seeks to acquire software maker VMware. Virtualization is essentially turning a single machine into many, which has been crucial in the growth and affordability of “the cloud”. With the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom seeks to establish a dominant position in both the hardware and software side of enterprise computing.

As Russia starts to cut gas supplies to European countries, and the EU moves to embargo Russian gas and oil entirely, fuel costs are expected to keep on rising. Germany introduced a new experiment this week: unlimited public transport for a month for €9, or the equivalent of a coffee at Starbucks.

The scheme will run for the months of June, July, and August, with tickets valid for any mode of transport anywhere in the country. It will be interesting to see how it influences usage of public transport and whether the services can meet demand.

Last week I published a broad overview of the semiconductor industry. This week that’s been followed up by a more concrete look at the chip shortage. In the article below I argue that the semiconductor industry has been on the road to shortages long before the pandemic.

Have a great week!