Let me preface this review by stating that, despite how I scored things herein, I did not inherently hate this course. If you want to learn some basic Excel, I guess this course is fine. But even then, the bulk of your time will probably be spent slowing down and pausing videos, then cross-referencing the presented content against the homework instructions. In general, very little thought is needed to succeed here; the course could be better marketed as "can you follow directions?", in my opinion. A plus is that a lot of the content can be completed weeks in advance, at least during Summer 2026.

Note that the instructor provides the solutions (albeit sans formulae, generally) for ease of cross-referencing that whatever Excel updates the student ("learner") makes to their solution file ultimately align with what is presented in the videos. That's it.

Filter out the Ed Discussion thread. As is typical in OMSCS, you'll invariably see multitudes of students asking pretty obvious questions or requesting clarifications that are otherwise provided in the supplied material (i.e., the course videos, slides, and/or homework instructions).

However, the organization of material for this course is depressing. The instructions and/or Ed will often have addendums which supplement or otherwise correct course material. I consider most of the documentation disorganized, sometimes error-prone (as noted), and composed in a way that feels very stream-of-conscious and reckless. And in some later modules, the videos themselves are annoyingly outdated relative to required data sources and whatever associated processes thereof.

What you'll learn: how to transcribe video content into Excel cells. Maybe you'll pick up a few Excel tricks, but at this point as a graduate student in a CS program, you probably already know most of them.

What you won't learn: actual CS. This course also barely touches on actual economic theory in any meaningful depth, in my opinion. Instead, you'll find yourself "coding" in Excel cells, making sure not to change ANYTHING you're not supposed to, lest whatever grading macros shall fail. Economics are reduced to simply saying things like "X + Y = Z" and so on.

This course likely should be completely revamped to leverage Python or some method more sophisticated than Excel. At the very least, it should please, please, please, correct all the errors upon errors in the course material, including the videos and whatever written content. Integrating actual economic theory in any substantial depth would also be appreciated.

Nevertheless, if you can stomach the amateur course administration, grade school-level financial theory, and frequently-flawed content delivery, while entering this course with exceptionally low expectations, it's probably fine as an elective that should bolster your GPA.

But will you come out as an economics expert or even an upskilled programmer (Excel or otherwise)? No, not at all. And maybe that's OK, especially juxtaposed against the more rigorous and mature courses in this program.

This course teaches the following:

1. Firm valuation - DCF and Comparable
2. Option Pricing
3. Excel - Lots of it

At the end of the course, you will have one comprehensive excel file that starts with financial statements downloaded from the internet and ends with a full valuation.

There are a lot of topics that are covered. These topics are what you would typically learn in an MBA program, as part of core finance. However, in this course, you will actually implement it.

I liked the course because it reinforced what I had learned in my MBA program.

The assignments are a cake walk because you are actually given the exact instructions that you need to follow and then there is another file that serves as your North Star, so when you compute the numbers, you know what the answer must look like.

There is a ton of Excel use in this course. You will learn a lot of formulae and some cool things like Data Tables and Solve.

The presentation material is really light, since 95%+ focus is on using excel to actually do the valuation.

I wish the course delved into the theory a bit more, so that students develop a strong intuition. For instance, Valuation is both an art and a science (Prof. Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern). We learnt mostly the science part, but the more important part around assumptions and the rationale behind the assumptions is missing.

You would like this course if you want to actually see how the different finance formulae work together. You will not like this course, if you are looking for a typical analytics or computer science course.

I also feel that given that Python is used in Finance more commonly that the professor considers redoing the lectures in Python. I know that will be a complete re-write, but it will make the course more relevant.

Absolute waste of money and time. Not sure how this course was allowed to be part of masters program. All you do is spend hours every week filling blanks on Excel worksheet, blindly following the lecture videos from 2017. Most of the questions on the class forum is answered by TA saying "just follow the lecture video step by step."

They really should rename the course to "Typing accounting numbers on Excel sheet."

If you enjoy filing tax return, by entering numbers into a form one by one, copying W2 form, then you will love this course.

The worst part is they force 4 mandatory group projects, for which 60% of your grade depends on. You have to complete many pages of massive Excel worksheet as a team. There is no automation, no coding, nothing. Just everybody typing in numbers to several hundred Excel cells. But those cells depend on each other. So if your team mate made a mistake, your cells get messed up.

There is no curve. The professor went on a rant to say how she does not believe in a curve. So if you must get your team projects done tightly. Overall so much stress from tedious work with no learning.

It is "easy" in that you do not have to think but a huge waste of time. You will spend 10+ hours on some of the worksheets and they don't align with the videos. If you are going to spend the time you might as well take something useful.

Easy class with garbage contents. Just waste time to find what excel part went wrong. Unnecessary work could be eliminated. TA's aren't good at giving hints for formulas.

Pair this course with another more challenging one. For the group assignments, I recommend just having one group member inputting everything, and the others just do the conceptual quiz and verify the excel sheets. There are enough assignments for you to take turns.

There are even some weeks that you can do nothing and focus on other courses. After all being said, avoid this course if you don't want an easy A.

Tedious videos. Everything is done on Excel. No creativity or intelligence required. You are expected to mindlessly copy paste each cell formula for every assignment which takes a long time and any tiny mistake will cost you points. Easy A still. But no learning happens in this class. Honestly, this class really should be removed from OMSCS program.

I got 98% (A). This course is the easiest and the stupidest course at the same time. Essentially you waste the whole semester spending hours every week filling blanks on Excel worksheets. The content is ridiculously shallow that I didn't learn anything beyond what 5 minutes of google would offer. Also the group project is stressful because you and three other people collectively have to complete a massive Excel sheet with several hundred empty cells that depend on each other in a complicated way, such as circular reference. So if your team mate made a tiny mistake, then all your cells can be corrupt and you have no way of verifying your answer. It's still an easy A but it's just so wasteful of time and money to spend a whole semester on this silly Excel exercise.

1 put in may 2-3 hours a week. Sometimes less than an hour. Perfect to pair with ML/DL/NLP or other advanced classes. It takes more time to verify all the work than it takes to actually do the homework. You can follow along the lectures easily to finish the homework. The quizzes mostly were easy. The group project is a hit or a miss, my group was excellent. I will say they are strict in terms of the excel sheets, they want everything EXACTLY the way they write down in the explanation. Which is why I said most of my time in finishing the homeworks actually went into reviewing my work 2-3 times just to make sure I didn't leave anything out. Would recommend if you can get in. Its hella easy.

While I fully agree with other reviews that say this course is just an Excel exercise course, I actually want to highlight another stressful aspect of the course, that is the group project.

The substantial portion (60%) of the entire course grade comes from 4 group projects. Because this course has established a reputation of "useless content but super easy A", it attracts the least motivated students on average. I had a team mate who was taking this course along with other course and had no time at all for this course. I had another team mate who didn't wanna start working on his part until the very day of the project due date. Another team mate disappeared and eventually dropped out of the course without notifying the team.

Half of your group project grade comes from peer review. So there is prisoner's dilemma. It's still easy to score overall 90% for the course to secure A, but it's stressful because you may have to constantly chase your team mates or you have to do it all by yourself. It's indeed boring to have to keep typing into Excel cells exactly following the hours of video. The professor explicitly says she never applies grading curve. So 90% is a hard cutoff for A. Depending on how unlucky you get with team members, you may get a B.

If I could go back in time, I would've have taken this course.

The easiest A ever. Learned a few Excel functions and that's it. All the lecture videos are from around late 2017 and a lot of the contents are stale. Like they show you how to get financial statements data from SEC website whose interface changed a lot since then. They show you how to use Excel functions which are now obsolete. This is especially annoying because every assignment is "type exactly as is, following the videos" and any deviation will be penalized. And 90% of TA response on Ed forum to student questions asking for clarification is "just follow the lecture videos exactly as is" -- they really should re-record and update the lecture videos then. duh. I learned a few Excel functions and nothing else.

Seriously, I don't know why this is offered as part of OMSCS, or even allowed as a graduate course.

There are 15 weekly lessons in total, 5 of which are dedicated to nothing but pretty basic Excel tutorials. For the other 10 lessons, 90% of lecture videos is literally yet another Excel tutorial where the professor tirelessly keeps tying in accounting numbers. So this class is just an Excel exercise class.

The syllabus advertises many fancy cool things like company valuation, bond pricing, portfolio optimization, so on. But each of these topics is only touched on an extremely shallow level. You will not learn more than the first paragraph of wikipedia articles on any of those topics unfortunately.

I did my undergrad in CS with a minor in accounting, and honestly I was shocked how shallow the content of this class was. Instead of learning financial modeling, you will get to spend ~100 hours on typing in Excel across 5 homeworks and 4 projects. Every assignment is essentially "watch this 3-hour video of the professor typing in Excel and copy every cell exactly as is."

I wish they made this class more about learning concepts and details of finance than forcing you to spend hours copy-pasting Excel cells from lecture videos.

On a positive note, it is an easy A class.

This is my last semester in OMSCS. I never wrote a review on OMS Central, but felt compelled to write one for this course for future students.

Some of the earlier reviews on this course are

"This is the dumbest course I ever took in my life, the course is like teaching the stupidest students"

"The course is so torturing because the stupidest professor made it in an extremely dry, boring and time-wasting way. I regret my life to have selected it"

"PAINFUL. Dr Gardner bless her heart is a nice person but her organization and instruction are extremely lacking."

I really wanted to believe this could be a fun and educational course, but am afraid I have to agree with the above reviewers. The first time I read the professor's homework instruction document, I already had a bad feeling. This is someone who doesn't know how to write... repeats the same information over and over across paragraphs. And frequently uses ALL CAPS SENTENCES.. What could be a 2-page concise instruction turns into a messy 12-page redundant document which, sadly, still doesn't address some of the important details.

It is an easy course, but just so boring. I agree the course shouldn't be called "Financial Modeling" but "Practice typing accounting numbers into Excel Files, exactly following hours of videos"

Another valid criticism of this course is that it has so little content. To makes the matter worse, of little content the course offers, it doesn't teach well. I regret taking the course. Waste of time and money.

PAINFUL. Dr Gardner bless her heart is a nice person but her organization and instruction are extremely lacking. The information she conveys is multiple hours of content which leaves you confused, searching through the video frame by frame to see what her excel formula was. I spend more time ignoring her words and just trying to copy and paste the correct cells.

This class could be 1/4 or less the time which it is now whilst conveying much more information in an efficient way. For example, her homework instructions accompanying the homeworks randomly jump around and multiple times add things like "DO NOT TYPE IT IN THIS BOX, INSTEAD SAVE IT FOR THAT BOX WHEN YOU ARE READY TO START YOUR OTHER SHEET". A simple usage of bullet points would avoid the need for color-coded messy instructions.

This class could be so much less painful if we were just given an excel file example and taught the philosophy of the course. Instead, we need to pour over the videos and just hear her yap on and on in a disorganized fashion (often shooting off into other, quasi-relevant points) about a topic I really went from finding interesting to hating.

A missed opportunity and a LOT of busy work.

Not as easy in my opinion as some make it out to be; Took me more than 5 hour average; To be fair, Dr. Garner really tries very hard during office hours to explain content, course just went over my head

I don't understand the hate for this course. Sure it is not a programming class and it never pretended to be. Some may dislike Garner's approach to handholding of going through step by step in every Excel cell but I don't think this was the point of it.

Learning how to read and understand financial statements requires a different modality of thinking to learning a programming language, library, or framework. As such, it requires a different approach to learning the content and I think Garner did an amazing work with this.

The material itself is dry, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the class but rather the subject matter in itself. Having this understanding will be helpful in the long run of your career.

Awesome course to take a break from relentless study. The course is a cake walk and is much better than digital marketing.

This is the dumbest course I ever took in my life, the course is like teaching the stupidest students, because everything required to do is 100% follow every step in the video, cope every same formula from the video, paste on Excel. The course is so torturing because the stupidest professor made it in an extreamly dry, boring and time-wasting way. I regret my life to have selected it, but what can I do, the summer courses offered are so limited. No choice!

There is a lot of very useful content in this course about discounted cash flow analysis, stock/bond valuation, capital budgeting, etc... The lecture videos are very good, the professor knows her stuff and is very clear in the videos.

For the homeworks you can simply follow the videos, fill out the spread sheets, and get it done, it is not that bad but tedious sometimes, some little bugs getting fixed but fine nbd.

If you want to actually understand what the spread sheet is doing and all the nuances of the different pots of money for a business you may need to invest a little more effort. Honestly this is all extremely useful information to know in career (capital budgeting, net present value, depreciation expense, you want 1 Million dollars worth of new servers for the company how does that effect the cashflows of the business?..) and life (loan amortization, stock evaluation, how bonds work....). This is a nice course and a good break from getting slammed by harder grind it out coding courses.

Super easy. Even easier if you get chill group mates.

This class should be renamed Financial Modeling for Insurance Agents instead.

Even an 8-year old kid who dreams to be in the insurance industry can come to take this class and score an A.

Easiest course I have taken at all of OMSCS. I got 99.55% (A)

The material is interesting.

Can pair with any other course.

• This class forces you to blindly confirm by watching the jarring and naggy videos and replicate them in the Excel Spreadsheet. No creative juices needed.
• Video errors are strewn all over the place; The teaching team makes no commitment to edit them. This, admittedly, gives Prof Garner the impression that she's lazy.
• Grade nitpicking for even putting your results one column/row away. Then again I can't blame the TAs because this course is so bloody easy they need to find an artificial A/B differentiator.

Prof. Joyner, why on earth are you offering this to OMSCS?

tl;dr - Business track is "low-effort low-commitment". This is an example of why.

No one bothers to put a review for Fall 2021.

Not sure if this class is worth a rigor of a Master's degree in Georgia Tech, or a class that I could get out as an Accountancy course from a community college. There is totally no critical thinking needed in this class. Just follow the steps and you get your A. Any deviation would be deemed wrong and you will get a B.

If you like something in which you prefer a huge commanderie, consider the Analytical Tools Track courses like ISYE 6740 Computational Data Analysis.

If you expect more of a stock market/investment focus, then ironically you should consider Computational Track courses like CS 7646 Machine Learning for Trading instead.

It is exactly such courses like this that make this track that disparaging.

As other reviews have stated this is an easy course. The HWs are mostly filling in the blanks in excel sheets, in most cases the formulas are exactly the same as in the demo so you just need to copy and paste.

The project is essentially a bigger version of the HWs and again very easy but can be fiddily just because of the amount manual calcs there are in balance sheets and forecasts

I needed an easy course to pair with a harder course and this satisfied that. It's an easy A whether you decide to try and learn the material or not, I think there are some useful things in here like learning to read balance sheets and Statement of Cashflows etc. but the easy format of the class means you'll only retain the info if you really are interested it, which i wasnt

This course is ridiculous. As someone earlier pointed out, it should be called "how to fill in the blanks on a spreadsheet". However, if you deviate from the videos in your approach to the homework (because God forbid you have some preexisting knowledge or have learned something) you will be gigged by an army of script-wielding trolls who have no knowledge of finance.

If you need a class to pad your GPA, this is a #1 candidate. However, don't expect to learn much or have to engage your brain in any way.

This course is a great example of "what you get out of this course is what you want to get out of this course". Basically you can go in without any financial modeling experience and leave without learning anything while scoring an A. 80-90 percent of this course is basically following step by step instructions on how to fill up an excel model. That being said, I think it was a well designed course with a superb teaching team. They are superb. Their response time on piazza is insane and they hold themselves to super high standards. Kudos. I would recommend this course to anyone who is interested in the subject or who just wants to get an easy A.

The assignments were great as I had zero experience with financial modelling and this was a very good introduction to what is involved.

Professor offers comprehensive lectures and is very responsive on Piazza.

The only downside is how easy it was. The content of the assignments was genuinely insightful but I didnt figure anything out myself. It doesn't foster curiosity or develop problem solving skills.

I don't mind an easy class, and I surely am not insisting on taking only classes that take 20+ hours/week, so my complaint about this class not that it is "easy" like most reviews imply this is the problem. My problem with this class is that it forces you to watch lectures and follow them blindly on excel, and if you even dare to think and do things slightly differently, even if you end up with the same answer, then you will be penalized. Any class in this program, even DVA or CDA or BDFHC will seem "easy" if you are given a tutorial video and all you have to do is to follow it blindly, and although this makes it easier not only for the students, but also for the instructor and the TAs, still this will usually results in students learning nothing.

The slack channel for this class is dead, and the few posts on Piazza are mostly asking for how to name their files, and there is barely any useful discussion, and I guess it is because everything is spoon-fed to the extent that you loose the desire to learn. Yes, the instructor and the TAs are professional and responsive, but why wouldn't they when it seems that they are required to do the least effort compared to any other class in the program.

So how to improve this class? Give assignments that require the students to think and learn. It will require more effort from the TAs because students will then be asking questions and the assignments will not be auto-evaluated anymore, but at least then the students will graduate from the class learning something!!!!

I am on the OMSA analytics track and was using this class as a sub for MGT 8803 I opted out of. If you are on the business track, you might enjoy this more than I did!

I went in expected something different. I was expected more of a stock market/investment focus (that’s my fault). (I did enjoy the HW’s on portfolio optimization and options pricing!) When you think financial modeling though, think financial statements (which I don't enjoy!). At times, felt a lot like an undergrad accounting course.

PROS

• Great professor. She is very sharp, knowledgeable, and passionate about finance and just cool

• Professor is very engaged, which is rare in OMSA program!

• For what the class teaches, I think she does a great job and clearly put in a lot of time. Very thorough.

• Learned some tricks in Excel

• This could be good or bad, but the professor is very thorough

CONS

• Weekly lectures for HW and cases can be quite long. Many times, 2-4 hours. (But, when I think about it, a 3-credit on-campus course has ~3-hours of lectures per week, so I suppose this is inline.)

• The cases were VERY painful for me. Not hard, but VERY tedious, take a long time (videos), and not topics I enjoyed (mainly, creating different financial statements).

• A lot of following the leader (i.e., you mimic what the teacher does). This might work well for some people.

This class is very easy to get an A. The homeworks and cases closely mirror the examples in the lecture videos. Overall, you get out of this class what you put in. If you're looking to pair this with another hard class, it's easy to get by with little time commitment although you won't learn much. On the contrary, if you take the time to understand the lecture concepts, go to office hours, and engage on piazza then you can learn a lot. Professor Garner is very kind and responsive. Her lectures are clear, and she's good at explaining things in a simple manner.

I came into the course highly knowledgeable in Microsoft Excel. Generally, I find Excel to be overly utilized. This course reinforces ways to use Excel when better tools exist. For example, I can now do matrix multiplication in Excel when these operations should be in a tool like R.

That said, Excel is still heavily used in many companies globally. The assignments were incredibly easy video examples walked thru every step cell by cell. You just have to copy and paste into the actual homework or project assignments. Also, many of examples provided were very manual compared to more efficient methods. For example, depreciation values were looked up using a nested IF statement with cell by cell reference rather than a simple vlookup. Because of the macro grading, using a more advanced formula was discouraged. Marcro grading also required following steps exactly even if you could achieve the right end result.

The professor is very knowledgeable and helpful. Her office hours were fun but not really necessary to attend.

In summary, the course is very easy but tedious (long videos) but I did enjoy the professor.

This class is extremely easy, but the material still reinforces concepts taught in the intro business class. You can do the homeworks and cases while you watch the videos.

As some of the previous posters mentioned, the lecture videos are a little tedious and don't require any thinking, just copy the formulas into your own Excel sheet. I would have liked a little more depth to the actual financial modeling part and less of the videos spent on Excel tutorials and walking through the formulas.

For the cases, she does provide numbers-only solutions so that you can verify that your formulas produce the right answers.

The entire course is following the teacher's long, dull videos where she walks through financial statements and models in Excel. All you do is copy the formulas. There is very little depth, discussion, or thought when you complete the homework. The only positive is that it helps you learn more about accounting statements.

I marked this class as 'easy' in the difficulty ranking, but in reality I would call it - low stress. It will probably take 5 hours per week in a regular (Fall/Spring) semester. Some weeks took more, and a few weeks took less. Most of the time I spent watching the lecture videos and following along with a spreadsheet. At first I thought that might be boring, but I did learn a few things with optimization and VBA. Also learned some techniques to use Excel to perform some matrix math. I found many times, I could watch the videos at 1.5x speed. But then sometimes I'd go back and rewatch sections.

I think I understand the financial formulas better after taking Financial Modeling, than when I took the Business Fundamentals course - where they give a bunch of terms and formulas to memorize. In addition to financial formulas, I have a better understanding of some of the math concepts behind them. Maybe it's just me, but how Covariance works and what it can be used for makes more sense after this course.

Dr. Garner was active in Piazza and on every Office Hour that I attended (I attended most of them). The TA's were responsive as well. Office hours were not a required attendance, but I attended many because I enjoyed them.

I'm not sure if this is true of the other Business electives, but this class had less than 100 students, so the forums and office hours felt more personal. Another plus to FM - there are no exams. There are 4 or 5 individual homework assignments and 4 group case studies (analyzing a company using different methods).

I liked the way groups are done in this class. We were allowed to reach out to form our own groups during the first week or so, then anybody who couldn't find groups were assigned. She encourages us to come to agreement as a group to find a workload balance. She has a nice spreadsheet which each group member submits to help keep grading proportional to each member's effort.

If you are looking for a Business Track elective, then I would recommend Financial Modeling. You may even think about taking this before the Business Fundamentals course, as some of the concepts are explained in easier to understand format - at least for me.

I liked this class overall. It's a bit of a GPA pad like most of the MGT courses in OMSA, but there's still good information to learn from the class.

I'd recommend it for someone in the Business track who wants to learn more about Financial models and Excel. If you're looking for hard-core "analytics modeling", this isn't the class for you.

The good:

• Upping your Excel skills in a significant way even if you're well versed in Excel
• Learning to analyze company financial statements
• Understanding different methods of company valuation

What's to improve:

• The content is a bit spoon fed. The professor basically shows you 100% of what to do to make the calculations. I think she could have left more for you to discover and figure out on your own.
• Some of the lectures are quite long and tedious (see above)
• The class is good at teaching you the mechanics of the various Excel models, but doesn't focus as much on the WHY.

This isn't the "financial modeling" class I thought it'd be with analyzing investments, forecasting economic trends, etc. In fact there's practically no modeling at all. It's more like MGT 8803's finance portion, except an entire semester's worth. Reviewing various financial statements and doing very simple math.

The only software we use is Excel. I learned a few new tricks there (like did you know you can do Matrix multiplication?? I didn't!) but generally didn't gain the type of knowledge I wouldn't have wanted. Not to say it had no use at all - I learned how to build a loan amortization table and figure out what would happen to my mortgage under various scenarios, as well as the aforementioned Excel skills.

There are a few individual homeworks, most of which can be completed by watching the lectures and copying what the instructor puts in the cell, letter-by-letter. There are also four group projects, which are like the homeworks but more involved. They're still fairly simple, you could probably do all four by yourself, but they're group projects. You also grade your group-mates' effort to ensure nobody slacks off. Lectures are pretty long but easy to follow, unlike other courses you won't need to watch them twice or look to outside resources.

Overall quite easy, both in terms of difficulty and time involved. Also, the instructor Jacqueline is very kind and accommodating - if you want to pad your GPA without much effort or really want to learn more about balance sheets and statements of cash flows take this course. But if you want to do some in-depth analysis of different types of investments, learn how to predict how stock portfolios will behave, etc. you'll be disappointed by this.

This was an interesting class, almost completely based on excel, and primarily covering the three statement model as well as some capital budgeting and structure stuff.

I have almost no experience in finance, but DO have extensive excel experience, so I found this class to be pretty easy. And even if you are an excel beginner, the professor more or less walks you through just about everything anyway.

Speaking of the professor. I liked her.

The videos can run a little longer than what I've seen so far in other courses. And, you will have a team project (I hate team projects). Our team basically just all the the whole project and then compared notes. Then one of us would submit.

Most interesting subject to me was the portfolio stuff where you try to optimize a portfolio to minimize risk free return using matrix algebra. I have never studied MPT or any of that, but I suspect this touched on the very basics of it. More of that, would be what I'd want to see.

Good course, of the three business analytics track electives, this would probably be the most "work" but even still it's light compared to the omsa courses, let alone the cse ones.