Excel Modeling in Investments Book and CD-ROM (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: A Good Supplement for Investments Classes
Review: This book is not an end unto itself, but it is an excellent companion to the leading investment finance texts.

The book is oriented toward the graduate student (MBA), and the texts it parallels are the most popular MBA texts on the market. Whether you are using texts by any of the major publishers, the author Craig Holden has created these spreadsheeting materials to work directly with the text. It paralles directly the most popular text, but then it also comes with outlines and notation changes to fit with the other major texts.

The update (this is the second edition) is useful, but the first edition(s) were actually separate books. I preferred the separate book for each major author, but Holden is very succinct in his ability to tie this book to them all without the need for two or three different versions.

Holden also wrote, and Prentice Hall published, versions that tie to undergraduate investments texts, as well as both graduate and undergraduate corporate finance books.

In the first edition, the accompanying CD had an interactive version of the book. Unlike that first edition, the CD with this second edition does not carry the entire contents of the book; but that is OK, since it is easier to read the book than watch the CD on a computer screen. However, Holden makes very few actual spreadsheets available on the CD. So, except for print versions in the text, if you want to see the models, you have to build the models.

The book supports ONLY Excel. Personally, I always thought Lotus 1-2-3 was a better product and I would love to see such a book to support Lotus, but the world has gone Microsoft, and Excel is ubiquitous.