Claire's IT Training and Solutions blog

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!

This morning I was having a leisurely start to the day (I was in the bath, actually) when the phone rang. “Where are you?” I was supposed to be in Basildon, delivering an Excel Intermediate course. I had accepted the booking last month, but somehow failed to enter it into my diary, and I had completely forgotten about it. This is a trainer’s worst nightmare – even worse than the one where you’re completely naked and trying to deliver a course but haven’t been told what it is! I have let down my agency, the client and the delegates. Absolutely horrible.

The agent has spoken to the end client, and they agreed that it would be better to cancel the course, rather than have me arrive totally flustered and two hours late. Presumably they will reschedule, but I somehow doubt that I’ll be offered the replacement.

All I can do is apologise profusely and put steps in place to ensure that this never happens again.

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!

Well, the Mac spreadsheet problem is sorted – but it turns out that I was on the wrong track when I first tried to fix it. When opening the spreadsheet to try and print invoices, we had noticed that sometimes, though not always, it complained about broken links. When I brought the client’s version of the sheet home, this turned out to be the case on my machine too. I tracked these down on my machine and found that a couple of (unused) range names were pointing to non-existent locations. Borrowing my client’s Mac so as to be able to work on the problem at my leisure, I fixed these – and lo and behold, the problem went away!

I find it difficult to see what the problem could have been exactly, but presumably it affected the internal structure of the PDF somehow and thus prevented its successful export. Anyway, it’s not best practice to have old, unused range names or references in a workbook – especially if they are no longer valid – so it was a good opportunity to carry out some essential housekeeping.

Today I worked with two clients who use Excel 2011 on a Mac computer. Personally, I use version 2010 on my Windows 7 desktop PC and version 2013 on my Windows 8 laptop, so it’s always a bit of a challenge for me to get my head around the way the Mac handles things differently, such as menus.

The first client was one for whom I had created a simplified spreadsheet for keeping track of income and expenditure on a number of different bank accounts, with entries analysed by account and category. The sheet was based on her original “account book” style sheet, but I made the entries a lot tighter and set up Pivot Tables to analyse the transactions in the way she required. I originally built this workbook for her back in January, but there wasn’t time for her to put all her 2013-14 tax year information in before the deadline on 31st, so she decided to leave the bulk of the data transfer till the new tax year – which brings us to now.

In the end, there was little for me to do. I just reminded her how to add new entries and also that if she wants to add new income and expenditure categories, these have to go into a separate lookup table, as I have used data validation to limit the entries that can be added to her main table. She is now happy to add her own entries and bring her financial record-keeping up to date.

The second client had a rather more serious problem. For some months, he has been very happily running a workbook I created for him with a macro-driven automated invoicing system. He simply clicks on a command button and Excel spits out all due invoices in PDF format. For some reason, this has suddenly stopped working. He has not changed anything, but there was an operating system update, which may have triggered this. It’s difficult for me to test, as the macro runs fine on my Windows PCs, so I have to go to his premises and use his computer.

Sadly, I was not able to fix it fully today. I quickly identified that the problem was in the part of the macro that saves the invoice into PDF format, but have not been able to get this to behave properly. I have left him with a work-around that uses an alternative method of producing the invoices, but this creates a separate PDF for each sheet in the workbook – so each time he creates an invoice he gets three or four unwanted PDF files as well and has to delete them. I am currently researching the problem and hope to fix it properly next week, but I will be delivering a new training course on Monday, so will need to spend some time preparing for that first!

The other day, a client needed me to install an automatic backup system. He had bought some software to do the job, but was unsure about installing it himself. He has a new PC, and at first I was not sure whether or not he had copies of what had been on his old laptop. It turned out that all his old emails and files had been copied across onto the new PC by the chap who built the machine, saving me that job. Backup copies of these were on a passport drive already, but my client told me that this wasn’t working either.

Fortunately the problem with the passport drive turned out to be a faulty USB connection (something he will need to take up with the supplier of the PC) and it worked fine in a different socket. The installation and setup of his backup software was a breeze. First, I checked that his old data was really on the passport drive and fully up-to-date. I renamed the files so that they would be distinct from new backups – we wouldn’t want him to restore his old laptop’s settings onto his new PC by mistake! Once that was done, I installed the backup software and ran a full system backup, mirroring his PC’s operating system as well as backing up all his files again. After that, I set up and ran an incremental backup, so that every day all changes are backed up and once a week he gets a replacement full backup. The backups run at 1am (he generally goes to bed around midnight) and the computer closes down when the backup is complete.

One very happy customer, secure in the knowledge that he is protected against system failure.

Last week, I had three days of training booked through a training organisation that I work for regularly. First up was an Introductory Excel course on the Tuesday – a welcome, gentle, start to the week (the later days were tailor-made to a customer’s requirements and would involve some quite advanced work).

On Tuesday, then, I merrily set off and soon found myself at a very prestigious site in Piccadilly. Taking the lift to the third floor, I had to pass over the full-height central atrium on a slender white bridge in order to report to reception – fortunately I don’t suffer from acrophobia! I plugged in my laptop and copied across my beginner files, and then the delegates arrived. Four out of the eight or so expected, as some had found the pressures of work too demanding, and of those four, two popped in and out during the day in order to catch up with “urgent work” – the perils of training on-site! We started to discuss the programme for the day, and it was immediately apparent that they did not need an introductory course at all – on the contrary, they needed some highly specific text handling functions and probably macro programming as well! After only a few minutes, I decided that the only way forward was to drop the original plan and files, and workshop their own requirements. In the end, it was a really good day and we all enjoyed it thoroughly, but it was hardly the “gentle introduction” I had planned to set me up for later in the week.

The latter part of the week was two days’ training (Thursday and Friday) for a client in Basildon, again booked through my regular supplier. The boss of that company used to train there herself, and they had wanted her to do it, but she has moved away from the area and it was no longer possible. So I was asked to stand in and “be her”. No pressure, then!

We discussed the clients and their requirements, and I suggested the topics that I thought would meet their needs. My training outline was approved, and we split the delegates by prior knowledge into two groups. I used the same outline for each group but, as I had planned, the more advanced group sailed through the early stages and focussed on the more complex topics, while I ensured that those with less prior knowledge gained a solid understanding of the earlier topics before touching more lightly on some of the later items.

In the end, both sets of clients were very happy with their training and I hope to be invited there again, when they roll out a company-wide upgrade to Microsoft Office 2013. The easy start to the week that I had planned was anything but, and the scary customised training was received with enthusiasm and appreciation. You never can tell in this business!