#excel geek

[laughingpunk]

The excel geek in me loves this.

By @brianbilston and posted on his Insta

[chrisv73-blog]

Formula challenged today.

[musingsonsearch-blog]

Event Idea: Excel Jam

Event suggestion - "An Excel Jam" to raise money for victims of religious extremism.

11 teams of 3

shed loads of data

54 infographics

If the idea of distilling conceptual stories into literal and data-driven infographics makes you feel... inappropriately good, then read on. 

The bible can be broken into 54 parts. Each one tells a conceptual story which is designed for us to interpret through the lens of our ever changing realities on the ground - regardless of which era we live in, where we live or who we are.  Every week, people around the world discuss and debate the same story and compare notes with the interpretations of previous generations - I don't do it, but I think it is very cool.  

I propose the creation of 54 infographics, made by 11 teams, each made up of a graphic designer, a data geek and a social researcher. 

Each team would be allocated 5 stories. They would pick out a theme of interest - either something tangible like "Abraham getting circumcized at 99" or something intangible like "work and rest". They would define a research question, find/create a relevant data sets and make an infographic. It could be as serious/unserious/literal/unliteral as anyone wanted.

The output could be celebrated in an exhibition - "The bible in 54 infographics" to raise cash for people being persecuted by religious extremists. 

Ideas:

Adam and Eve: Top 10 psychological reasons why people break rules

Benjamin stealing silver goblet: What would happen to you in 10 countries if you stole a silver goblet.

Jews fleeing Egypt: Political refugees in the middle east - where are they now? 

If anyone is interested in setting it up, let me know as I would want to take part :-)

afterthought: could be a nice interfaith project?

[musingsonsearch-blog]

Revision tool : Project for an Excel geek

When I started in SEO, I made up a Pneumonic I was quite chuffed with - LEMON CURD - which represented the most important SEO factors a webmaster to consider on his site.

However, the world has evolved and 9 letters no longer cuts it. To do it justice, the pneumonic would need more like 15, just as the starting point. This is too many for people to remember - even in a nonsense sequence of real words. 

This must happen all the time - doctors revising, students memorizing quotes, religious scholars learning tractates (?).

It would be great if I could to tap into existing linguistic structures in my memory to pin new information onto - namely - song lyrics.

It would be awesome to have a website where I say:

I need a pneumonic with the letters "LEMONCURDIPORIDHLS" in that order. And by the way, I know mariah carey's number 1s and everything prince ever wrote back to front and as if by magic, it could pull up a sequence of Mariah lyrics starting with those letters... for me to create a meaningful mental checklist that I almost already know.

[excelmate]

The Reluctant Geek - My Journey to the Dark Side

The 1980s....for those of us who were there, despite recession, miners’ strikes, shoulder pads and strange haircuts it was a great decade for a number of things – music (I bet you just started doing the actions to YMCA or Oops upside your head!), the arrival of the first mobile phones, CDs  and one event that left me totally non-plussed: the PC.

Remember those unsightly boxes that basically did very little and relied on huge floppy discs or tapes to transfer data. People would try to get me to be excited over the new technology, but adding numbers or playing space invaders on a tiny greyscale screen was in my eyes hardly worth getting excited over.

And so my avoidance of PCs continued, right through university, two years working in the Far Eastand even four years into my first job.  It was not until 1996 (yes...you did read that right) that I was forcibly led to a PC to enter data into a spreadsheet to print off lists of shipments heading back toJapan every night. I could have done the work quicker manually but change was coming.

Realising that I couldn’t escape, the best strategy was to learn how to use it properly. I invested in an Excel for Dummies book and read it from cover to cover trying everything out.  And so here began my route to the dark side to become an Excel geek!

With my next job I was introduced to Office 95 and ever increasing amounts of data analysis. Once again, I invested in a book. This time it was the Microsoft Excel manual – over 900 pages if I remember correctly, and as before I started at page 1 and worked my way through the entire book trying out as much as possible. As the data amounts increased and the type of analysis became more complex I wasn’t prepared to spend hours manipulating data before I could actually make a start on analysing it which pushed me to learn more functions and work out what each and every bit of the menu could do. The final part of the jigsaw was automation and it was not until several jobs later that I managed to get some formal training on VBA. My journey to the dark side was complete! I was now officially the office Excel geek.

Fifteen years after that first reluctant use of Excel, here I am teaching people how to use it. I wish I had had the opportunity to go on training in my early years but the school of hard knocks does sometimes have its advantages. I struggled for hours and even days on what turned out to be simple jobs but I believe that this gives me a better understanding of what delegates either have experienced, or are currently experiencing every day whilst working with Excel, and who knows….perhaps one day they too might be turned to the dark side and experience the full power of Excel.