Claire's IT Training and Solutions blog

Well, here I sit, a casualty of Brexit.

Squibb is an unusual surname, but there are a couple of big players. There is a big demolition contractor, with plant and equipment just down by the QE2 bridge, and of course Bristol-Myers-Squibb, a major international pharmaceutical company. When my husband and I decided to set up a family-based website, back in the mists of time, we found that all the obvious domain names for Squibb had been taken. No .com, .co.uk, .org and such available. So being happy internationalists, we took the domain squibb.eu. We set up email addresses for family and work, and started with a family website, but after a long period of inactivity on the site, I pinched it to use for my training and Excel solutions work.

Fast forward to BREXIT. It seems that, once the UK is no longer part of the EU, we cannot use the .eu top-level domain any more and it will be withdrawn soon after we leave. Time for a major rethink. For a while, I considered re-registering the domain in the name of a friend or family member with an EU address. I have various friends who live abroad, but they are mostly elderly, technophobic, or only live in the EU for part of the year, so after giving it brief thought, I felt this would be an unwanted burden for anybody who might agree to take it on. And actually it makes sense to bite the bullet and reorganise everything at one time.

So in the near future, there will be a shiny new website, focussed much more on my client base: www.excelstuff.co.uk. I’m not making this link live, as I have not started working on the site yet. I have a couple of months’ grace and would like to launch it in a fit state. The family side of things will be back in its own domain and may even sprout its own website again one day.

Strangely, in the last week two different organisations have asked me to produce material for no payment. The first is a well-known training company in London, where I spent a number of days spread over two weeks delivering Advanced Excel courses to groups of delegates. (I was not directly engaged by this company, but through a third-party agency.) On my first day, I asked for the delegates to be sent the company’s course manuals after the course: I am usually asked what follow-up material will be available, so this is what I like to be able to tell them will happen.

On completing the second week, however, I was quite persistently asked by this training company to supply them with my files, worked examples and course handouts. I have declined to do so: I do not give away my IP for nothing. The company charges significant money (per delegate) for these courses (of which I receive a pretty small day rate) and I don’t see why I should hand over my own material for nothing. I would be quite happy to spend time crafting such material for them to brand and use, but not for free.

As this was all gradually dying away (thanks in large measure to the mediation of my agents), a second request came in. This time it was from a (different) training agency who gives me occasional work. “As a favour”, could I please supply them with a set of Word outlines: Introductory, Intermediate and Advanced. “We don’t want to get them off the Internet – we’d like a trainer’s input”. Hmm, laudable sentiments; I wonder if they were trying to flatter me into taking this on… Well, I don’t normally do my own outlines. Much of my training is on behalf of third-party companies, so I use my own materials but choose carefully each time according to the outlines I am given. I only use my own outlines when I’m working direct, in which case I discuss the course with my client and tailor a unique outline to meet their needs and wishes. So again, if I were to take this on, it would be a significant (though small) job of work. I have quoted them a rate and we will see what happens.

If you want a professional to carry out a job of work, do be prepared to pay for it. Oh, and documentation IS work. It doesn’t magically appear in an instant, with no effort; it takes thought, care and meticulous checking. Above all, it takes time. Or, if you do want my material, book me for training direct and then I wll be happy to let you have whatever files you want!

I have recently had a spate of calls from people who turned on their PC one morning and found it installing Windows 10 without asking. As the deadline for the Free Upgrade approaches, Microsoft has steadily been ramping up the importance level of this upgrade, so that it is now a “Recommended Update”, and many PCs are set up to install these with no further prompting.

A couple of months ago, I decided to take the plunge voluntarily. I had no problem with updating my Windows 8.1 laptop machine, and was very happy with the result. Then I upgraded my desktop PC – a much older machine and one that has been modified so much that I think the only original part is the case! This was not so successful. At first everything seemed fine. There were a couple of pieces of old hardware that no longer worked, as there were no new drivers for them, but I had expected problems of this nature and was prepared to do without them. However, I soon found my PC locking up. The screen froze and would not respond to mouse clicks or even Ctrl-Alt-Delete on the keyboard. The only remedy was to hold down the power button until it powered off. Soon this was happening 3 or 4 times an hour. I make a living from my computer, and have publishing deadlines, course development and client projects to complete, so I need a machine I can rely on. I used the option to roll back to my previous version of Windows, and have so far not been upgraded against my will.

If you find that your PC suddenly decides to install Windows 10 all by itself, don’t panic.The good news is that Windows 10 is actually quite good. It is easy to use – somewhere between Windows 7 and 8.1. It uses less in the way of system resources than earlier versions, and it is more secure. Programs work the same, there are a number of useful tablet-style apps, and your old documents SHOULD be untouched. If you find that you run into difficulties as I did, you can uninstall the upgrade for up to a month – and you will probably spot any issues very quickly.

I wish you good luck if you upgrade – whether it was you or Microsoft who made the decision to do so.

One of my regular clients is expanding his business into a slightly different area of interest. Rather than using his existing spreadsheet to account for the new side of things, he called me in today to help him set up a new spreadsheet to handle this aspect of his business separately. I was happy to do so, and introduced him to some of the newer features of Excel that will make his work easier. After an hour’s work, he has a cleaner sheet that will let him enter the data efficiently and quickly. I showed him how to hide certain columns for printout, and I set up the required formulae correctly.

This lead me to consider small business spreadsheets in general. I imagine that most SMEs use spreadsheets in their businesses, for cashflow, profit/loss, income/expenditure, business plans, quotations, invoicing and so on. But most people running small businesses are not experts in using computer software – they have a business to run and their expertise lies in that field.

Several of my clients have come to me with spreadsheets that they think are “just about good enough”. They have designed them like a paper-based system and can, with a couple of hours’ effort, extract the information they need for various situations. An end-of year report may take longer, perhaps a day or two. They ask me if I can help do a “tidy up” and maybe show them a few tricks. Sometimes it is that simple, but on other occasions I do a fairly radical re-design: my aim in either case is to make the spreadsheet fast and easy to use, both when inputting data and when analysing the results. One of my clients has told me that her data entry now takes about a quarter of the time it used to, and her end-of-year reporting has gone down from two days to under two hours!

If you use spreadsheets in your business, ask yourself “Friend or foe?” If data entry is a chore and you have to fight to extract the information you need, then your spreadsheet is not right for you. Contact me, and I bet you’ll be amazed at the difference I can make!

We’ve come to the end of the tax year so I thought, as I had a little time spare this afternoon, that I would see if my intelligent worklist/invoicing spreadsheet would speed up the preparation of the end-of-year report I send to my accountant.

This job normally takes me a couple of days, and I have just done it in less than an hour.

I made a copy of my work schedule, then deleted those entries that fell before the start or after the end of the tax year. At the ends of the year, I checked a few figures and kept those entries where I had invoiced within the 14-15 year, or where work had taken place then, even though invoiced before or after the year. (I have some clients who buy a block of training lessons, so it is quite common that an invoice will cover work spanning a period of several months.)

Having decided which records I needed, I refreshed my various pivot table reports, including my breakdowns of expenses and mileage claims, then filtered these so that only then entries within the tax year were included.

I copied all the relevant invoices into the same folder, and edited the hyperlinks in my invoice summary to point to these in their new location. So the accountant will have all my invoices as well.

I copied my main data table to its own location, replacing formulae with values, so that I was able to delete my lookup tables sheet.

Finally, I stripped out the code that I use to generate my invoices, and saved the workbook as a macro-free .xlsx file.

Job done!

A friend from my networking group sent me an interesting article from moneyweek.com, entitled “The hidden evils of spreadsheets”. A financial modelling firm has found that in nearly one in five large businesses, spreadsheet errors led to poor business decisions and huge financial losses, with perhaps only a third of users having had any training in using these powerful programs.

The article looks at big businesses, and presumably the proportion of trained users will be even less among small business users.

Spreadsheets are a very powerful tool, but in order to get the best out of them, you need to set them up properly and understand their operation. Many people make the mistake of thinking that, because the computer will do the maths, they don’t need to! But you still need to know what you are doing: the computer may get the answer right, but you need to get the question right in the first place. For example, if you enter a formula to calculate 2+3*4, you may presume the answer to be 20 – and be surprised when your spreadsheet informs you that the correct answer is, in fact, 14! If you get the question wrong, the answer will not be the one you expect.

I have been working with spreadsheets since they first came into existence – I started with VisiCalc in 1979! I know how to set them up neatly and efficiently, with properly constructed formulae. I can work with powerful features like tables, charts, pivot tables, macros and VBA programming in order to automate complex tasks. I can train clients to have a good understanding of how they work, and design spreadsheets that are easy to use, for a variety of different needs – not all maths based!

Contact me if you would like training, or if you would like me to look at your existing spreadsheets with a view to optimising them and ensuring that your business decisions will be based on the right facts!

This morning, I announced the arrival of my new website to members of my local business networking group, Dunmow Business Support Initiative. They are a great group of people, and include an excellent website designer and someone who offers successful site promotion using Google tools. I was therefore a little nervous that they might take offence at me “going it alone”, but they were very supportive and had some useful tips for me. So I thought I would give them a shout here: Thanks, Lisa and Chris!

Well, a new era has dawned – I finally have a website!

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a website designer, but my hosting company runs a decent-ish template service, and I AM an IT bod (and short of funds) so I thought I would give it a go myself. The site is at www.squibb.eu (if you didn’t get here from there). It took me about three months of odd moments, and a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with their (very good) help department – especially when the template wasn’t obeying its own rules and would suddenly throw a section to the bottom of the screen without being asked.

Once I had “finished” it, I put it up online and emailed my kids to review it. My daughter came back with some excellent, constructive tweaks, which I applied, and now it’s all live and shiny. I’m pretty pleased with the result!

But if you do want a website designing and contact me, I will put you in touch with somebody who does an excellent job professionally, and at very reasonable rates – not me!