Excel Tips and Tricks - Get the RMIT Know-How

AUDIO: Uplifting music                

MATTHEW SPEAKS: Hi. My name's Matthew and I got something really cool to tell you.

VISUAL: He looks at a spreadsheet referring to it at various times during the video.

MATTHEW SPEAKS: Because of my Certificate of Accounting and Bookkeeping, I'm able to take all of this old school textbooks, knowledge, spreadsheets, pen and paper, books that kind of stuff and learn how to apply it with the latest technology, like an Excel Spreadsheet on a laptop.

VISUAL: Title featuring an image of Matthew and title of the video ‘Excel Spreadsheet Tricks with Matthew Lillywhite. Cert IV in Accounting and Bookkeeping’. Cuts back to Matthew in office talking to camera.

MATTHEW SPEAKS: Accountants today need to be equipped to read data, take the right information found in ledgers and accounts and turn it into useful statistics. It's the classic needle in the haystack. It's all these numbers and information and somewhere in there is a piece of gold. What I've learned at RMIT, it's like having a magnet, so you can make decisions based on what you discover. Let's take a closer look.

MATTHEW SPEAKS: Now, what I have here is an Excel Spreadsheet with something that I'm really passionate about and that's property market and trends. What I've done simply, is just imported all this data from real estate companies, from various sources of information that are very easily accessible and then displaying them in a logical sequential way. What I've done is, I've allocated it by year, gathered that information and then looked at it at a simple month by month basis and looking at the trends in the information and I can see there's actually some weird things going on in here.

MATTHEW SPEAKS: If you take an even closer look, trusting that this data is going to be reliable and accurate, you can see that as the trend is increasing gradually, there's a couple of spikes in the data that don't quite seem to fit. When you go to the 2017 sales, about mid-year, you discover that there is in fact not a surge of property, but in fact two properties were purchased at over 1.4 million dollars, which is vastly above what is the expected price of property for that particular time.

MATTHEW SPEAKS: What we're going to do is, we're actually going to remove that information and what you're left with is a liable, accurate spread of data that allows you to predict what's going to happen tomorrow or next week. You can do this for anything, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, even footy tipping. Wait, hang on. Okay, that was me. Hang on. No need to panic. Guess who's winning footy tipping at the moment?

MATTHEW SPEAKS: Because of my certificate, I have been able to land a job at the Australian Tax Office, which is currently undergoing some pretty serious changes and it's the perfect time to be getting a certificate and getting this knowledge to land jobs in places like that. I can read the numbers, because I have RMIT know how.

VISUAL: Matthew smiles and the text on screen reads: ‘I can read the numbers. Because I have RMIT knowhow.’

MATTHEW SPEAKS: I can read the numbers, because I have RMIT know how.

VISUAL: RMIT logo with URL ‘rmit.edu.au/knowhow’ address, CRICOS and RTO code.

MATTHEW SPEAKS: If you're interested in the spreadsheet that I used today, you can find the link in the description below.

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