5g: Function Libraries

5g functions are organized into libraries (also called modules), each focused on a specific topic such as dates or financial calculations. This structure lets us load only the libraries we need. For example, if a model requires date-related logic, we can load the Dates library instead of importing individual functions one at a time.

Libraries simplify function imports by allowing us to load multiple related functions in a single step. While it’s reasonable to worry that loading a full library might add unnecessary functions or affect performance, testing shows no performance impact. File size increases are minimal—the entire Financial library adds less than 11 KB to a model.

For simplicity and maintainability, we recommend loading and keeping complete libraries in models. This approach also makes upgrading to newer versions quick and easy.

This page includes links to each library. Every library page provides a URL that can be used by Microsoft’s free Advanced Formula Environment to import the library directly into an Excel workbook. Each library page also lists all included functions, with links to individual function pages that explain what each function does and how to use it.

Multi-dimensional Modeling Module

This module was inspired by a challenge issued to the word's financial modeling community by Paul Mireault. The traditional modeling approaches struggled to solve his puzzle because spreadsheets are two dimensional. Even so, this problem was solved in databases decades ago with the n-fold cartesian product, which is a way of making all possible distinct combinations of various dimensions. This is best used in table based modeling methodology.