Calculating duration and convexity of bonds using excel

To analyze interest rate risk of coupon bearing bonds and to immunize bond portfolios against this risk excel spreadsheets are developed using only plain vanilla excel, i.e. its basic functions and some additional functions from the Excel Analysis Toolpak Add-In. The reason for not using complicated macros nor Visual Basic for Application is that especially students at the University level have already all the necessary skills to use Excel efficiently and VBA applications of different MS Excel versions are not always compatible and have to be reprogrammed to run smoothly on newer versions of Excel.