A New Method to Teach Financial Modeling Using Excel

When applying Excel to finance, there exist many issues, such as how to focus on hands-on experience, how to inspire students to learn Excel, how to teach macros and how to get data into our spreadsheets in the first place. This paper offers a brand new approach with the following features. First, during each lecture, students do at least none hands-on exercise. Second, students are given many explanations and formulae that they could access instantly. Thus, they could learn Excel by themselves. Third, students access a huge amount of data such as US GDP (Gross Domestic Product), US national debt, unemployment rate, CPI (Consumer Price Index), Fama-French factors, risk-free rate, historical stock prices, latest several years' financial statements for several thousand public firms in the US. Fourth, students could apply an efficient way to download data, about 3 second for each time series. Fifth, all supporting materials are written in a text format. Thus, instructors could modify them easily. The setup is trivial for both students and instructors: one-page instruction on R installation plus one-line R codes