- Ideas and Suggestions
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Ideas
Make the Financial Statements Sheet of the Valuation Spreadsheet more user-friendly by adopting the Gabelli format.
I had sent an email directly to Jae regarding this a few weeks ago, and I included a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet as an attachment that showed the desired format. It is the format all of the research analysts at Gabelli & Company were required to put their financial data into for each of the companies they followed. The Gabelli format is far superior to the formats used anywhere else, because it allows for very quick analysis of year over year quarterly comparisons, as well as year over year annual comparisons, all on a single sheet. It also allows for the determination of margin trends by quarter and by year. In case you cannot locate the Microsoft Excel attachment I sent to Jae, the spreadsheet is built out as follows. The years go across the top. Gabelli used 13 column accounting paper that allowed for the display of 13 years of data.
In the left hand margin each item of the income statement was listed separately. The first row was reserved for the name of the data item being displayed, for example "Sales". The next row was reserved for quarter 1. The next row was reserved for quarter 2. The next row was reserved for quarter 4. The next row was used for full year. The next row was blank. The next row was reserved for the next data item being displayed, for example "Cost of Goods Sold". This process is continued until each item of the income statement of accounted for. After that, the same process is used to show the Balance Sheet Data, and then the Cash Flow Statement data.
When the data is displayed in this format, it is much easier to identify trends and make Year over Year percentage change calculations. In fact, the spreadsheet I sent to Jae made all of the calculations and displayed them.
P.S. I worked as a junior research analyst for Mario Gabelli at Gabelli & Company. If this format works for him (and it does), I think it just also might work for your Old School Value subscribers.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Thanks Fletcher. I did receive that email and reviewed the file.
At this time, it's just a matter of priorities as we are focusing on trying to get up to speed on the must have features.
Jae, Thanks for your reply. I hope you will keep in mind that Old School Value had its roots as a blog and spreadsheet tools. I think you have a lot of subscribers that still value your Valuation Spreadsheets as a means to look at the raw financial data, from the SEC filings, only presented in a user-friendly format. I know I do. And the more user-friendly the format, the better. Thanks for listening!
I wanted to take a moment and thank Fletcher for the suggestion and Jae for this wonderful service. The reason I joined OSV was to obviate the need to maintain updated data into financial spreadsheets. While I appreciate all the work that has gone & does go into the online app & ratings I hope that the spreadsheets will not be neglected.
Jae I'd appreciate it if you'd seriously give this idea some thought.
@Blue Joseph,
The spreadsheets aren't going away anytime soon. In fact, it's too far ahead of OSV Online at the moment. Need to get the app to catch up and then be able to sync the finer details of layout etc.
Also, including a new financial statement layout that isn't common causes a lot of confusion and re-educating. That's why the spreadsheets are open for you to customize to suit your needs.
Thanks for the quick response. The ability to create new customized sheets within the workbook for analysis is invaluable. For clarification on the "anytime soon comment"...will the spreadsheets eventually be replaced?
Thank you for your time and consideration.
@Blue Joseph,
It will only be replaced with a better version. No plans to discontinue the spreadsheet. as it's a core part of the value we offer.
Can anyone tell me how a customized sheet in an OSV Stock Analyzer workbook is transferred from a current OSV workbook to a new (ie, version update) workbook (example EC05 to EE09)
Please include all the steps - for instance -
I think you must be signed in to the workbook for it to 'open' but it seems you can only have 1 workbook opened at a time.
Updating links to older workbook pages to same links in new pages
Thanks for any help
@Dan
I'll create a different thread for this.