Selected work / Excel & financial analysis
Building fluency in Excel
I’m building speed and confidence in Excel while developing a deeper understanding of the financial data behind the formulas.
The project in context
What I worked on, and why it matters.
Situation
The lab uses historical stock data to connect spreadsheet lookup techniques with financial concepts such as dividends, market capitalization, and valuation.
Task
Across five exercises, I needed to retrieve stock characteristics, find values above or below a threshold, classify companies by size, and calculate stock prices and dividend-discount model values.
Action
I used INDEX and MATCH for approximate lookups and XLOOKUP to retrieve and classify financial data. The workbook also contains price calculations based on market value and share count, plus the lab’s supplied dividend-discount formula. Repeated timed attempts gave me practice working efficiently with changing inputs.
Result
The saved workbook shows 94 of 94 answers marked correct and eight recorded completed attempts. Those results provide evidence of completed practice and accuracy. My next goal is to carry that accuracy into faster, more independent spreadsheet work.
What this demonstrates
Understanding the number behind the formula.
Finding a value is only part of the task. This lab also asks me to understand what the value represents: a fund’s holding, a company’s market capitalization, a dividend, or an implied price under a set of assumptions.
For example, Exercise 4 calculates a price of $69.87 from market value divided by shares. Its supplied dividend-discount formula returns $3.33 using a $0.30 dividend, a 13% required return, and a 4% growth assumption. The difference gives me a reason to examine the model’s inputs and assumptions.
Practicing both the spreadsheet process and the financial reasoning is how I want to become more useful in analytical work.
Explore the actual work
Inside the completed lab.
Source and scope: My completed Approximate Matching Exercises workbook, with recorded attempts dated October 23, 2026. The excerpts reproduce selected saved values and formulas; they are not screenshots of Excel. The 94 / 94 result is the workbook’s own answer check, separate from a D2L course grade.
The classroom dataset contains SPY holdings as of May 31, 2021 and 2020 dividends, sourced in the original workbook from CRSP through WRDS. These are historical exercise values.
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