Tutorials

Adobe Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop Tutorial: How to Create a Smoke Effect

In this tutorial we are going to examine one technique for creating smoke effects with Photoshop.  For this exercise I am using CS3, however earlier versions of Photoshop will be able to perform the steps necessary for creating an excellent smoke effect.  This Photoshop tutorial will cover the usage of various Filters and Tools.  A basic knowledge of creating new layers, applying gradients, using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, Dodge Tool, Wave Filter and Liquify Filter will help you in this tutorial.

Microsoft Excel Tutorials

Excel Tutorial: Toolbar Customization

Microsoft Excel 2003 or prior versions come equipped with a decent standard toolbar that is easily customizable.  Customizing your Excel toolbar can reduce time to complete many tasks by making options that normally require navigating several drop-down and pop-up menus available at one click of your mouse.  This certainly does not replace hot keys in terms of speed if you are used to using those, but if you are not, toolbar customization is a great graphic way of making things quicker and easier.

Excel Pivot Table Tutorial: Wizard Usage and Basic Manipulation

Pivot Tables in Excel can be very quick and powerful data analysis tools.  Pivot Tables allow the user to arrange a contiguous range of data in a variety of columns and perform multiple calculations on an aggregate level.  Utilize the power of Pivot Tables to increase your Excel performance and productivity.

Excel Tutorial: Vlookup Tips and Tricks

There are a lot of easy ways to make vlookup functions in Excel more functional.  I find that a fair amount of people have difficulty getting a vlookup function to work in the manner they wanted it to, so I was thinking that first it might help to really understand the purpose and the four basic parts to the function.  The purpose of a vlookup function (vlookup means “vertical lookup”) is to retrieve a piece of data in a table by using a unique identifier as a reference.  The fact that it is vertical means that the unique identifier must be arranged in a column of the data table you are referencing.

Excel Tutorial: Functions for Parsing and Combining Text

Concatenate, Left, Mid, and Right functions allow the user to combine or parse text data across multiple cells.  This tutorial will focus on utilizing these four functions as well as incorporating them into other formulas for efficiency.  Attached is an Excel workbook that includes the necessary raw data to follow along with the exercises below as well as blank columns to facilitate practice.

Investment Tutorials

Stock Market Investing for Beginners

This is an all-in-one guide for those considering investing in the stock market.  Beginning with explaining what the stock market is and how its ebbs and flows impact investors and then moving into explanations of different stock market metrics including a handy commonly used acronym guide, this will be meant for total subject matter coverage while allowing for quick reference.

Mutual Fund Basics

A mutual fund is a collection of cash pooled by investors that is professionally managed and invested according to the philosophy of that mutual fund.  The major advantage to mutual funds is instant diversification of your portfolio without having to manage the investments directly.  Most mutual funds are a collection of many different stocks, bonds, cash and equivalents.  Some mutual finds are based on a stock index, such as the S&P 500.  These mutual funds invest their portfolio in the exact proportion of every stock in that particular index to produce a return identical to the index.  Index funds are becoming popular because their performance is easily ascertained and the management fees are typically very low because there is no art or skill – only ensuring the portfolio is in line perfectly with the index.