Periodic Rate Functions in Excel. Microsoft Excel 2010 can be a huge help for a business when it comes to crunching the businesses numbers. Excel has a number of financial functions revolving ...

Excel provides several options for calculating financial values, including functions and operators. You can access a variety of functions from the Functions Library on the Formulas tab of the ...

But, doing this calculation manually or even with a calculator can be cumbersome. Here’s where the RATE function in MS Excel can be useful — it gives the answer in a jiffy.

You can calculate this with the RATE function by filling its five fields — Nper (number of periods - 12), Pmt (periodic investment – 5000 with a minus sign), Pv (present value – 0), Fv ...