Bear with me and read the information below about these forms -- there are multiple options.
ABOUT SPREADSHEETS: You must have a "spreadsheet" program installed on your computer to run a spreadsheet -- either Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Works, or OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a free program similar to Microsoft Office, but lacks many of the features in Excel. MS Office is available as a Student version, at a reasonable cost which I recommend. It contains Excel, Word, and PowerPoint programs.
The downloadable investment tools on this site call for the inputting of various company data--some tools download the data automatically--taken from the Annual Report, the Stock Selection Guide, etc. By entering minimal data calculations are made and results are compared to selected investing standards. Results are displayed on the screen both in text form and through changing colors in data cells and verbiage.
Each tool contains "help" comments which pop-up when the cursor is held over certain cells. These explain how a result was determined or indicate the importance of the result. Each also contains a page of instructions.
You must download the file on this site which will operate with the spreadsheet installed in your computer -- either Excel, Works, or OpenOffice. Excel has many more features than Works and the free version of OpenOffice. The Works spreadsheet doesn't change colors of text or cells, and lacks other features found in Excel. OpenOffice does not import data from the web. (Please keep reading.)
A free copy of Open Office is available at
www.openoffice.org. Once you've saved it to your Hard Drive and installed it, it will allow you to open an Excel file, make changes and save it -- just as could be done if you were running MS Excel. The coloring of text, and other judgment "helps", including pop-up comments, will function in Open Office but all data must be typed in manually. The program is LARGE -- 100+ MB so it will take a long time on a dial-up modem. (OpenOffice is also available on a CD from OpenOffice (look on their Site) and Amazon.com at a small shipping and handling cost.) Or, if you have a friend who has high speed access to the Internet, ask them to download OpenOffice, put it on a CD for you, then install it on your computer.
However, I strongly recommend you consider buying the student version of MS Office.
ABOUT PDF FILES: Some files are in a PDF format (Portable Document Format). These are mainly informational files containing text. If you are unable to open a file with the PDF extension, download the free Adobe
Acrobat Reader. Once it's installed on your computer, double clicking on a PDF file will open it automatically. The Reader doesn't allow you to make changes to the downloaded file, but printing and saving it to your computer are allowed.
Whew! You made it! Now click on the links on the left and take a look at the descriptions for each tool in each area.
