XL Loan payments

You can use Excel to compute a loan payment whether you need to save the results in your worksheet or not. If you do not need to record the results, you can select any cell to start the operation. To compute a loan payment, do this:

1. Select the cell where you want the result.
2. Click the Paste Function button.
3. Select PMT from the Financial category.
4. In Rate, enter percentage, slash and period.
5. In Nper, enter total number of months.
6. In Pv, enter value of loan.
7. View monthly payment at bottom.

Paste Function Button

Loan Payment Dialog

Be sure to put the percentage followed by a slash (for division) and the rate period, which in this example is an annual (12 months) interest rate of 7.5%. This example uses the function as a loan payment calculator, letting you plug in numbers to find monthly payments.

Saving the Loan Payment

In this example, the data are already on the worksheet (column H), so all you do is click in each input field and then click the worksheet cell that contains the data. You still have to put the /12 in the Rate field to show yearly interest.