Who Needs This Book?

[SlideRule]

An excerpt from Mastering Financial Modelling in Microsoft Excel, Pearson Education, 2001. - 391 p. - ISBN: 9780273643104

                                 Who Needs This Book?

  More than 25 years ago I used an early Hewlett Packard 38C to calculate late interest rates and analyze cash flows and then progressed to the 'state of the art' programmable HP 41C with a printer, magnetic strip reader and plug-in finance and mathematics packs. This was an early alphanumeric calculator, which gave me the opportunity to program lease versus purchase or lessor lease evaluation cash flows and structure more complex lease transactions. This was before IBM launched the personal computer in the 1980s.
  Since that time I have used and programmed other calculators, such as the HP 12C, HP 17BII, HP 19B and TI BAII Plus, which all provide dedicated user screens and allow you to undertake financial mathematics. While calculators are much easier to use than tables or earlier morels they can be difficult to use without making simple errors. When I run training courses on the basic financial calculations the main drawback is only too obvious: you cannot see your inputs or check the interim calculations, and therefore delegates always want to see a map of the variables to understand the answer.
  While I have continued to use financial calculators, which have now been augmented with applications on …

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SlideRule

[byoung]

I have the 2nd edition of this book published in 2007 (ISBN 978-0-273-70806-3). The author has removed most of the calculator references. After discussing the history of the spreadsheets he has used (VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3), the only mention of calculators is the following:

"The author once needed to analyse lease profitability and wrote models in Basic or using HP41 calculators to review different portfolio funding strategies. After great time and effort, the models worked and provided an answer, but they were unclear and difficult for others to understand. There was no design methodology and indeed the models 'just happened' or 'emerged'."