If you use Excel to model businesses, business processes, or business transactions, this course will change your life. You’ll learn how to create tools for yourself that will amaze even you. Unrestricted use of this material is available in two ways.
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To use the course software you’ll need some other applications, which you very probably already have. By placing your order, you’re confirming that you have the software you need, as described on this site.
Convolution | 4/5 Session Links |
Demonstration
Think of a system as a complex business process, such as the process that handles a new hire. Now, in most companies, this process isn’t controlled by a single department. For example, the HR department handles some of it — badging, sign-up for retirement plans, health plan enrollment, etc. And some of the process is handled by the hiring manager’s department — request for office door nameplate, phone request, etc. And other processes are triggered by all these processes — telephone installation, furniture moves, and so on. It’s all pretty complex, but in terms of person-hours, it’s possible to compute the hours expended each day in support of the hiring process for the first year. One hopes that it trails off to zero before the first month ends. It might not, but in most organizations, it probably does. This curve we’re imagining is the base response — the response of the system to a single hire.
To compute the load resulting from a hiring stream — two hires today, one tomorrow, 13 the next, and so on — you just add up scaled copies of the base response, delayed appropriately for each start date.
Adding up those scaled and delayed copies of the base response gives the same result as convolving the hiring stream with the base response.
Last Modified: Wednesday, 27-Apr-2016 04:15:26 EDT
The space character, in many cases, doesn’t change the value of a formula. For instance, these two formulas return the same value:
Some people think that well-placed spaces make formulas easier to read. Although that might be true, the practice is both inconvenient and extremely dangerous. More
Excel’s online help, and many of the how-to books you can buy, provide long lists of keystroke shortcuts for carrying out specific operations, such as inserting rows, selecting regions, or deleting columns. And they are useful.
But the true power of the keyboard comes not from using these particular commands. Rather, it comes from learning combinations that are useful for particular situations that you encounter frequently.
For instance, there’s no command for deleting the rows that contain the selected cells, but there is a combination:
And so, Shift+Space Ctrl+- deletes the rows containing the selection.
Learning a vast array of keystroke commands is probably less useful than learning the keystroke combinations that do exactly what you need to do most often.