Technology and Online Tools – Cometdocs Blog

One of the best things about working with the Microsoft Office suite is that Microsoft’s own website offers free templates for each of their programs that people are welcome to download. The templates available for Excel are numerous and incredibly diverse, considering the fact that people use MS Excel for so many different reasons.

Of course, Excel is perfect for keeping records of personal finances and getting your bookkeeping and accounting activities in order. If you are an Excel novice or simply do not have the time to create your own spreadsheet designs, here are six fantastic and completely free Excel templates that can really help you out in your efforts to be your own accountant.

Year-end tax plan

When it comes to filing your taxes, planning ahead is essential. This is especially true if you are planning to do them on your own. Use this Excel template to keep your finances in order all year round and successfully prepare yourself for the year-end tax filing process.

Loan calculator with extra payments

If you have a lot of loans that you are trying to keep up with, this Excel template can be of great help. The template allows you to input details that will enable you to generate a loan amortization schedule for yourself. Simply input all of the important data – such as loan amounts, interest rates, and loan periods – and see where you stand. If you are looking to pay back your loans quickly and effectively, this template will enable you to plan your goals out effectively.

401(k) retirement account planner

Planning your retirement doesn’t have to be a hassle if you have a quality way of keeping track of everything. Set your goals and meet them using this template that will enable you to calculate your needed monthly retirement income for meeting your retirement goals. You can also use the template to see what your expected monthly income after retirement age so that you can plan accordingly.

General ledger

Here is a basic ledger that will help you to keep up with all of your personal and family accounting needs. If you are looking for an easy to use template to map out your family budget and document your expenses, this is a great one made for exactly that purpose.

Detailed revenue plan

More and more people who run their own businesses tend to want to do everything themselves – even the bookkeeping. This template can help you to easily forecast revenue during the fiscal year. Knowing how your revenue is coming in over the year and being able to forecast its ends results can give you a better understanding of the entire process and enable you to pick out trends that could help your business improve over time.

Start-up capital estimate

Do you want to start your own business? Check out this Excel template that can help you get your financials in order if you are looking to go out on your own in the business world. Use the template to add up all of your expected expenses in order to create a plan for putting your personal business plans into motion.

These six are only the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft offers many more useful spreadsheet templates at their site for a variety of uses. To browse them, visit their official site at this address.

Losing your contacts or not having access to your account is something that can potentially happen to anyone on social networks, whether erasing your account knowingly, getting hacked, banned or any other type of situation that revokes access from you.

This could leave you without much of the information you shared on these social networks and the contacts that you have built. That’s why it is always a good idea to make copies or backups of all your important information from these websites so that you will not be completely left in the dark if you ever lose access to this information unexpectedly.

Contacts from the popular business-centric LinkedIn are especially important, because here you would probably be storing the contacts of co-workers and important clients. Losing access to these contacts can definitely have negative effects on your job and your business practices in general.

Thankfully, LinkedIn enables you to make a backup copy of all of your contacts. Contacts on this social network are saved by clicking on Contacts in the upper menu and then selecting the Export Connections option in the lower corner of the window.

The contacts will be exported as a CSV file. Even though the options listed are Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail and others, this format can be opened in Microsoft Excel, just like Google Contacts can be exported and opened in Excel.

For importing CSV data into Excel go to Data – From Text and the import process will start.

The exported contacts will contain the names and the email addresses of all of your LinkedIn contacts, which you can then safely store so that you do not run the risk of losing these important names and numbers.

The CSV format is very versatile and can be opened in LibreOffice as well. Import is done automatically with LibreOffice as soon as you open .csv format in LibreCalc.