Hye everyone,


as I am new here maybe a quick introduction. I'm in a graduate in financial economics and am currently studying an in depth course concerning fixed income securities. It will come as no surprise to you guys that you need advanced knowledge of Excel to successfully master "every" concept in the book. I am not an internet noob and have tried to find answers to these questions using both the search engine here and google but could not find any satisfying answers.


My first question is whether excel can handle the standard summation sign as we encounter it in mathematics.

For instance, I get to work with a lot of mathematic formulas like in the duration or convexity formulas. But sometimes I also encounter functions such as the Par yield function:

Looks like this \1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par_yield

Now my question is: Say I have this table

k p
1 0.8
2 0.9
3 0.5
4 0.6


is there a formula that allows me to use the summation sign as in the equation and define k and n? so that if I put the formula in the next column I can simply drag the formula?


Also, is there any quick VBA plugin to define the convexity of a bond? I think this is a very FAQ but have not found a satisying answer, if I had the knowledge of VBA programming I think you could easily implement this? However, as I found no really good answer I suppose there isnt :D? At the moment I do this manually but this is quite cumbersome...


Thanks in advance,


unfortunately many questions will follow :D