Excel: do you use it?

Microsoft Excel is an extremely powerful tool for C/Os, yet it's friendly and forgiving. A number of Excel applications have been donated to the Bankers Tools collection, but I'd like to know the many other ways that C/Os use Excel.

For starters, how about a poll about Excel itself.

Do you use MS Excel?
Yes, I use it daily.
Yes, I use it, but not very often.
No, I don't use it.

I used it regularly as a NBE with the OCC, and am now using the same spreadsheets for my compliance reviews (esp. Fair Lending). It is a great tool for doing sorts, to see if there is any potential disparate treatment when comparing any differences between the control group and the prohibited basis group.

I use it to track my CRA Services, Investments and Community Development loans. I also complete my HMDA audit with an Excel spreadsheet.

I have used it to create initial escrow account disclosures and ARM program disclosures in the past. Couldn't imagine working without it.

In our small, rural bank, I use Excel to track currency transactions over $3000 for suspicious activity, to retrieve wire transfer info by name or account number, to sort loan denials by gender, income, zip & reason, to track our interbank liability limits, to record Reg D excess transactions over time, and to track a variety of deposit and loan measures.

Knowing about the XL basics, graphing, functions and database features allows one to truly work smarter, not harder.

I use Excel worksheets for my review monitoring. I have also created macros that take those worksheets and generate reports that show the weaknesses and strengths for ever branch we have and is rolled up into an overall report and chart that is presented to the Board of Directors every quarter. This gives us the opportunity to isolate the problems in each branch and do target training. I am constantly working on this to make it better for the next time. Eventually, the goal is to be able to determine the specific person who is having troubles.

I sometimes use excel, but I use Lotus everyday...started with it in college and continue to use it. I couldn't live without my lotus spreadsheets. I think every audit I do I have worksheet templetes.

How could we live without it? I would be interested in scoulte's response about the excell spreadsheets that generate reports.....would you be willing to share? My email is bwilliams@austinbank.com

I don't use it, but that is because I never learned how. In September I am going to take a class in using computers in a legal setting, and I know Excel spread sheets are included as part of the class. Maybe once I get the hang of it, I'll use it.
Leslie

I love Excel and use it almost everyday. I prepare a large currency transaction report everyweek to aggregate large cash transactions and make sure we have filed all of our CTRs (that's right we do not have an automated system). The spreadsheet also lets me sort a weeks worth of transactions several different ways to check for suspicous activity.

I used to be more of a "power" excel user when I worked in loan review. I created some awesome spreadsheets, graphs, and reports that are still being used today (I know because when someone messes one up they ask me to fix it!). Once you get the hang of how to create formulas and link cells it can save you a lot of work.

Besides what everyone else has said, I use it in conjunction with databases as a report writer. I also will load whole databases in there and use the pivot table to do some easy analysis. I can't imagine doing a compliance review without it as I reguarly throw bits and pieces in Word. I also think it's Microsoft's best and most stable product. I still have one of the early promotion videos on it -"The Soul of the New Machine" which is still exciting to look at.

I would recommend a relatively new book on Excel- "Excel 2002 Formulas" by John Walkenbach. No, I don't have Excel 2002 but the section on using financial formulas is great as well as most of other parts of the book. He has one on charts and graphs coming out in the Fall

In fact I would suggest BOL have a section on favorite books - compliance books and otherwise -by the BOL users.

We have just recently revised our Loan Review Program. I would be interested in viewing the spreadsheets and graphs mentioned by ThomasJ if willing to share.

If you are willing to share, could BOL post on the tools page along with the other spreadsheet mentioned in an earlier posting?

Thanks

Here is a link to Barnes and Nobles and the book that Ben recommends.

My fav Excel feature is "Filter." It is extremely useful if a bank provides me with a custom report (that I import to Excel) of all loans originated over a specified period of time. Once I enable filter, I can easily get the number of each loan type without having to sort and count.

Pivot tables are also useful for the same type of analysis. You can get a quick recap of # and $ amt of each class code, collateral code or however you want it.

I use Excel daily. I have a couple of spreadsheets that I use as loan review checklists. I set up macros to tally the results of each file into totals for the month. I also set up drop down boxes to easily fill in cells with repetitive responses (like loan officer, type of app, purpose of loan, etc.)

All these glowing testimonials! So when is Bill sending us our referral checks (or is that a violation of RESPA?)?!?!?

Bill's doing moderately well with or without our endorsements, and I'm really not a MS groupie (just ask anyone who's advocated MSIE on this or other banker forums during the past 7 years); BUT; Excel is a killer application that has earned the admiration of its loyal users. I can't imagine being a 21st century banker without it.

I just remembered a funny story. My old boss in loan review used to keep track of our loan portfolio totals on a huge sheet of paper that I nicknamed "the dead sea scrolls". It was a tatered document made of about twenty sheets of yellow legal pad paper and about a half a mile of scotch tape. He was very impressed when I took all of the info from the scrolls and put it into excel, I made him all kinds of neat graphs and stuff. But I could never get him to part with the original scrolls and to this day, I think he is still taping on new sheets of legal paper and making his quarterly entries!

test

This is a test poll since we moved to the new server:




Happy 4th!

Personally, I prefer the color of a good Cabernet Sauvignon or Zinfandel. Do you want my favorite or which of these three I prefer?

It is Friday, Al. My hats off to you. Its all I can do to spell Bud Lite.