News built for finance pros
CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.
The holidays are coming up quickly (pro tip: Start working on that gift list now!). But even as we start to wind down for the year, we can’t sleep on skills development. To help keep you sharp, even if you’re already starting with the gingerbread dreams, we’ve gathered cheat sheets on machine learning operations, Excel shortcuts and tips, and successful presentations for finance professionals.
Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance work, because it can be very difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts.
With that said, take a look at these useful finance cheat sheets CFO Brew found on LinkedIn this month.
- Deepak Bhardwaj’s “Machine learning operations”: AI and machine learning are top of mind for a lot of finance professionals, especially as the tools are beginning to be integrated into finance workflows. Bhardwaj, an enterprise cloud architecture consultant, offers a graphic representation of the end-to-end machine learning process, from data gathering to model building.
He includes a list of detailed steps for “a successful journey from data to machine learning models,” including, among other things, cleaning and curating data, extracting features, writing code, and evaluating models. - Nicolas Boucher’s “100 Excel tips”: All right, hands up, who still loves Excel tips in this AI world? We see a lot of hands up, and Boucher, a corporate finance trainer and keynote speaker, offers 100 Excel shortcuts, formatting tips, and formulas for finance professionals. He includes both a list of tips and a handy one-page guide for quick reference.
Readers can find tips on how to autosum adjacent cells, link cells from different sheets, and create a data validation list. - Soufyan Hamid’s “10/20/30 rule”: Finance professionals are increasingly called upon to be financial storytellers. But storytelling is a skill that takes practice. Hamid, a financial storytelling trainer, provides a shorthand formula for successful presentations for finance professionals, adapted from Guy Kawasaki’s presentation rules, called the “10/20/30 rule.”
Simply, Hamid recommends limiting presentations to 10 slides, 20 minutes, and 30 font size on the slides so your audience can easily read them. He then breaks down each of the components into practical steps, such as making sure your first slide addresses the problem you’re trying to solve, and using font size to keep your key points “short and focused.”