This is actually the third post in the series (the first one was about PowerPoint, while the second one was about MS Word), and it is the most relevant for our little community here.

But first things first: who's Guy Kawasaki?

Oh, just your regular Apple-employee-who-designed-the-first-Macintosh, along with a couple of other things of note. Nobody really special, you know.

Seriously though, if Guy is talking, it usually is worth your while to stop and listen. So when we noticed that he was talking about Excel, we really listened. And haveing listened, we think you should tilt an ear in his direction as well.

The powers that be at Microsoft decided to partner with Guy and get him to talk about three different and disparate activities that entreprenuers need to do - create a pitch, a plan and a financial forecast. It's the financial model that interests us, of course, since the friendly green monster we know and love has been used to create it.

There's a lot to like about the model, the details of which are given in this post, while the actual template itself is here. Guy and his partner Bill Reichert have done a very good job of building the template as well as explaining both the template itself as well as the reasoning that goes behind it, so we won't reinvent the wheel here. What we will reiterate is that going through the post and the model won't hurt you one little bit - quite the opposite, in fact.

Have fun!

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