6 Quiet Habits for Working with Data & Excel
There are no fancy Excel stunts here. These are 6 simple pointers that escape the Excel tutorials. Like anything that's done well, there are personal habits that quietly develop to keep you focused or avoid traps. I wasn't aware of my own habits until I saw a...
Holy [expletive!]: Embedded Excel Dashboard with ExcelWebApp
This is so exciting, I almost put a cuss word in the subject line! This deserves a cigar so, please join me. For the past few months I've explored possibilities with Excel and the internet. I even took a PHP/MySQL course and what I discovered is that being in the...
Comparing Spreadsheets: Excel, Mac & Google
2 years ago I was converting my life over to Apple. Their users boast of the Mac processing speed and resistance to malware. I'd spent enough time and money cleaning up my PCs in spite of the firewalls, ad-blockers, malware detectors, and other counter-measures. So, I...
Nonprofit Fundraising: Tracking the Details
NONPROFIT FUNDRAISING: PART 2 In my previous blogpost, Nonprofit Fundraising: The Cost of $1, we looked at a fundraising campaign that generated $2026.02 after laying out $1099 in expenses for a net gain of $927.02; and we determined that it cost 54¢ to raise every...
Nonprofit Fundraising: The cost of $1
Nonprofits, by their definition, are primarily funded by the public. That means they're always fundraising. It helps a nonprofit to know: How much did it cost to raise $1? Nonprofit fundraising can get complex, time-consuming and expensive, sometimes unnecessarily so....
Nonprofit Data Management & Empowerment
Steve, the nonprofit Volunteer Coordinator, has a meeting with the Executive Director and a major donor in 3 hours, and Steve needs data! The canned reports in the cloud-based CRM aren't formatted for details on volunteers, but Steve believes he can manually compile...
What Does It Cost To Clean My Data? (Capturing Cerberus)
Data Cleansing (Data Scrubbing) the process of amending or removing data that is incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted, or duplicated. WARNING Hold on to your hat. This can get ugly. The cost of cleaning data is tough to get at. I used to charge $150 to...
3 Benefits of Good Data Management
Data Management: Process by which required data is acquired, validated, stored, protected, and processed, and by which its accessibility, reliability, and timeliness are ensured to satisfy the needs of the data users. (BusinessDirectory.com) In my previous...
The Best Dump Is A Data Dump: Get At It!
LEARN TO LOVE YOUR DATA DUMPS I am hearing more and more that people don't know what's in their data, what to ask of their data, especially "how do I get at what I do know I'm looking for?" Here's a story: THE INFORMATION IS THERE, IT'S JUST NOT ON A SILVER...
Excel Data Validation: The Thin Line Between Truth and Disaster
WHY SO MUCH ATTENTION ON VALIDATION? Embarrassment is what got me thinking about Excel data validation and general data quality. Let me describe 2 situations from years ago when I first started working with data: #1 My boss regularly had me run reports, and he'd catch...
Controlling Fire: Excel Training & Custom Workshops
There was a steel smelter in my hometown. He was a tall, solid block of quiet energy. When asked about his occupation he'd hiss with deliberate bravado: "I work with fire" The way he emphasized "fire" conveyed his passion and respect for fire's...
Excel: The Most Dangerous Software on the Planet
Fantastic article today from Forbes and author Tim Worstall. Microsoft's Excel Might Be The Most Dangerous Software On The Planet The author points to aspects of the financial markets that would have been impossible without Excel. However, because it's the global #1...