The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India’s (IBBI) valuation examination is conducted as an online examination of 2 hours consisting of multiple-choice questions. The exam is administered by National Institute of Securities Markets (NISM) at their various centres across the country.

While most of us have experienced using Microsoft Office products either at home or office, the NISM centres don’t own this rather expensive product. Instead, they use free license software such as LibreOffice Calc or OpenOffice. These are easily available and close substitutes of the popular and omnipresent MS Excel. Yet, there are several differences which you experience only when you use it under time constraints.

If you are a pro at Excel in office, and you are the go-to guy for Excel-anything problems, then there is news for you. Apache Open Office is not the same as Excel. If your fingers carry the memory of Excel shortcuts over the years, you have to be very careful while giving the IBBI Registered Valuer exam at the designated NISM Examination Centres. Rather I would suggest that don’t over-rely on Excel type short cuts when using Apache Open Office.

This is a good reason for you to get acquainted with Apache Open Office and/or OpenOffice before appearing for the valuer examination. For instance, click and drag is slightly different between Excel and Open Office. Another example is absolute referencing ($A$1) and the way one copies cells don’t work the same way. Here is a detailed list of differences between Open Office and Excel (https://tinyurl.com/yc66bzjg).

In the exam center you shouldn’t be worrying about knowing how to use Apache Open Office. In the IBBI valuation examination, especially the case studies requires one to calculate cash flows across few years and discounting them back to present value. While you may be an Excel pro and could possibly tackle a DCF problem in under two minutes, the same would cost you five to seven minutes in Open Office. This is both annoying and a major source for distraction while taking the exam. Perhaps, 20 minutes a day during the last week of the examination would be more than sufficient to gain enough familiarity with open-source products.

The point which is worth noting that NISM does not offer you a choice of software. Also it is not the situation that you have in public domain, an exhaustive list of software’s at every NISM center. There are few incidences where aspirants actually MS Excel at their respective NISM Exam centres. But it cannot be surely said whether you will get excel at your near by centre or not. It is highly likely that you would be given a free, open-source software such as Libre or Apache OpenOffice. So, get acquainted with these so that all your mental energies are focused on the valuation problems than anything else.

Whether you agree or not sudden encounter with Apache Open Office or any other excel imitation programme on which you have never worked before would definitely hamper your speed of working and would eventually impact your performance for clearing the exam. So, I would recommend one of the following ways to be comfortable with any software you get in exam: –

• Visit your nearest NISM center which you have opted for exam and enquire about the availability of excel or any other open office program,
• Secondly you should download and practise few case studies on that program itself which you are going to use in your exam, that would help you to work comfortably on the same in exam environment. 

In case you consider yourself to be exam ready with working on Apache oprn office software and ready with all the concepts etc, then RVMOCKTEST.ONLINE is the correct platform which will help you to check your preparedness and identify your mistakes, increases your chances of clearing in one single shot!!

Best wishes from RVMOCKTEST.ONLINE