Recommended Reading
Below is a short list of books I find helpful in investing and developing spreadsheets
BOOKS I recommend:
Online Investment Hacks
-- Bonnie Biofore (This the Bible of using spreadsheets, with examples of how to do most anything financial using the spreadsheet as a tool)
Personal Investing-the missing manual
--Bonnie Biofore (Bonnie is a very talented writer and is understandable) A great book for the beginner investor and serves to confirm what the experienced investor should know.
Excel 2010--the missing manual
--Matthew MacDonald (871 pages of how to get along with Excel.)
Decoding Financial Statements
-- Tom Taulli (A great text if you want to learn about financial statements)
The Little Book of COMMON SENSE INVESTING
-- John Bogle (It is about common sense investing. Very revealing information on index funds. This is a "must read" for investors--beginners and experienced.)
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.
Using it will allow all the automatic features of the spreadsheets to function, saving you considerable time.
The downloadable investment tools on this site call for the inputting of various company data--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. Most tools also contain a page of step by step 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 OpenOffice. The Works spreadsheet doesn't change colors of text or cells, and lacks other features found in Excel. Neither Works nor OpenOffice import data from the Internet.
Again, I recommend the purchase of the Student version of Microsoft Office. If you are a serious investor, the cost is reasonable, considering the ease of use and time saved. 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.
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 click on a PDF file and it will open automatically. The Reader doesn't allow changes to be made to the downloaded file, but printing and saving it to your computer are allowed.
Whew! You made it! Now click on the tabs at the upper left of this page and take a look at the descriptions for each tool in each area.
