I am a fan of Bill Gates. But the reason I bring his name up in here is because he just demonstrated the power of logical thinking, something very important in Excel modeling.

First of all, let’s watch this short video:

In the video, Bill first asked an intriguing question: How much gasoline do we American consumers buy each week?

Then he proceeded with just a few lines of logical steps, and obtained a number that is remarkably close to the actual number. This kind of logical thinking is exactly what we are after in Excel Modeling.

I put his thinking into an Excel model, and made some minor improvement to his model and was able to get a number even close to the actual.

You can download the Excel file here.

Lastly, as an energy research, I would like to bring to your attention the main point of Bill’s video:  We spend way too little on energy research.  More needs to be done to make a bigger difference in cleaning up our environment and reversing climate change.