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Sunday, May 20, 2012

Do you ever have those moments where Excel lets you down?

It's not your fault. It's that dumb spreadhseet which has let you down. Honestly it is.

Well, you can do something about this, without taking an axe to your PC, and learn how to stop Excel misbehaving and making you look a complete idiot infront of your boss, ever again. (Obviously, only you are responsible for what happens at the Xmas party!)

Take a look around and see what you can learn.

Death by Excel

Details: Category: General; Published on Wednesday, 07 March 2012 20:44; Written by Dave Green

We have all heard of 'Death by PowerPoint' but I think at times we are in danger of dying from Excel.

What I mean by this is that we are not being slowly bored to death by 150 slides about a new marketing initiative that is about as interesting as ditch water, but that we have a tendency to do it all in Excel, regardless of other applications installed on our systems.

The reasons for over reliance on Excel are I am sure wide and varied, but I think a lot of the time it comes down to 2 main reasons.

Functions NOT to use?

Details: Category: General; Published on Sunday, 26 February 2012 20:00; Written by Dave Green

I was surfing around the Webiverse looking for all things Excel and I came across one of the most disturbbing articles I think I have read for a long time.

The premise of the article was to tell finance people the top 10 excel functions they should not use in a spreadsheet. Ok by itself this isnt so worrying, as the general idea that if you use some of the less known or more specialised functions built into excel then this could cause confusion/ mass panic and rioting, however there were a few things about this article that I dont think are acceptable.

1st If you devise a spreadsheet for other people to use then as long as it works does it realy matter what functions you use? If you have concerns that the user will sscrew up the spreadsheet by their actions then you should lock down the relevant parts of the spreadsheet so they cant screw things up, and build in all the relevant validation methods you can.

2nd And this is the bits that made me choke on the cookie I was sneeking (without the wife knowing!) as it suggested some of the functions I think everyone should know, namely VLOOKUP and SUMPRODUCT. OK I understand that the N() function is a long long way down the list of functions to learn about along with all the Cube functions, however this guy, who was blogging on a financial website was actually preaching to his readers that they shouldnt use functions such as PMT() which is a specific finance function, so unless there is something wrong with how the function works (and there is always some debate going on about how accurate excel functions are) why would someone talking to an audiance of finance people say using a function such as PMT() is too complicated to use in a spreadhseet?

Now - we are all allowed our opinion and with some of the functions I agree with not using them in sheets where the user has access to them, however as I stated above I think it is the duty of the spreadsheet designer to protect against this. Also telling people not to use what are quite honestly two of the most useful functions in Excel just seems disrespectful.

More Dashboard Ramblings

Details: Category: General; Published on Saturday, 18 February 2012 15:07; Written by Dave Green

I mentioned dashboards in a previous post and how if you have ever presented a summary of the workbooks contents on single pages then you have basically been using Dashboards for years…

Well, I still stand by this, but I have a few issues with the current trend of Dashboards being pushed at every opportunity, as I think they tend towards data overload, with far too much emphasis on putting nothing but graphs on the page – and lots of them.

The premise for this seems to be that the recipient / reader of this summary is in too much of a hurry to read anything and only wants to look at graphs to get a feel that things are trending in the right direction. To me this is akin to presenting a PowerPoint presentation without actually talking about the information projected on the wall.

Separating Logic from Data

Details: Category: General; Published on Thursday, 09 February 2012 17:26; Written by Dave Green

Keeping you data and calculations on the same spreadsheet can cause problems especially when you add additional data, as if you are not careful you can corrupt the calculations you spent a long time setting up - this is a basic dicussion as to why you should keep data and calculations seperate.