Real Estate Analysis Help

[Rahmon Chapoteau]

Greetings forum members!

I recently joined the BiggerPockets community. I am a complete novice, and really want to learn as much as I can about real estate investing; I plan to start investing within the next 1-3 years. 

I tried to read this article: https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2010/06/3...

I got confused with some of the the financial terms used in here, like the closing cost, vacancy rate, etc. 

If someone could explain the spreadsheets in this article and summarize/simplify the analysis, that would be really helpful!