Microsoft Excel?
I have the opportunity to take a ten hour class to learn to use Microsoft Excel. It costs a minimal fee. Is this worth my time and money? So far, I am just keeping track of my single family houses with a notebook but I will be purchasing some apartment buildings in the summer. I would like to become more adept at using technology to not only manage but also help me to grow my business. Does anybody use this? If so, could you please give me examples of what it is used for. I would appreciate any input. Thank you.
Save yourselve $500 bucks on MSOffice and download OpenOffice for free.
http://www.openoffice.org
It is what we use professionally here at work, and yes it is MS Office compatible.
Also there are plenty of tutorials for OpenOffice on the internet. Google OpenOffice tutorials.
HTH
Thank you to all of you who replied. I think I will take the class as well as buy a landlord software program like real tools. I am still not sure if I will even need to use excel because if I have the Realtools program but I suppose it wont hurt to learn. Thanks again for the info.
Wonderful advice! Thank you very much. It is nice to learn specific examples of what excel is used for. Thanks again.
Excel (or any other spreadsheet software) without any doubts is very important any time calculations are involved. I would also look into Quickbooks. That’s what I use for my accounting and find it pretty useful. Another software you may want to consider is TanantPro. I don’t have personal experience with this program but the demo on their website (tenantpro dot com) looks promising.
Good luck!
The problem with Excel is that it’s hard to track your leads once you have a lot and tie in all the info from web sites, one-to-many relationship between prospects and properties, do you mailing, and also have other people submit leads or edit the data. I would look into Access it’s much more powerful.
Check this site out first before you start:
http://k12ltsp.org/07_Making_a_Spreadsheet.swf
And for other tutorials click here:
http://k12edcom.org/?q=taxonomy/term/3
Every building is different . Make sure you analyze every expense very closely. However 40%-45% is a decent estimate.
for a back of a napkin estimate of NOI, 40-50% is reasonble. If the landlord pays most of the utility expenses, go to the high end.[ Edited by rmdane2000 on Date 10/02/2006 ]
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