What is an Independent Contractor?

Having worked as an independent contractor for Excel VBA development for a number of years, I would like to share some useful expereinces for people who drop by my site and prospective clients. Firstly, I define an independent contractor as someone who who offers their time and skill over a limited engagement in exchange for compensation.

There are a number of good reasons you would want to hire someone from the outside to develop your Excel spreadsheets. Mainly to do with reducing overall costs and risks.

Reducing Costs

An independent contractor is hired only for the duration of a project and his engagement will end once the project finishes. Cost wise, you are only paying for his expertise for a limited duration. For small and mid sized projects, this is a very cost effective compared to hiring someone into your employment.

Reducing Risks

When you hire an independent contractor for a project, a well written service contract governs the rules of interaction with contractor and a view to acheive a certain set of visible end objectives. This service contract should have convenient termination clauses that allows both parties to terminate the project in a fair and amicable manner.

From the Global Financial Crisis to Microsoft Excel VBA.

Thomas Friedman a New York Times columnist claimed that he has a theory of everything. In that brilliantly short article, he observed that for decades the middle class had easy credit, easy jobs and easy entitlements. He argued that globalisation and IT have taken these away because brain power became more available and cheaper and people with the right skills gets further ahead.

What he wrote were stuff I learned during the Asian crisis. Jobs were scarce during those years. Competition was tough. University graduates working in coffeeshops made the news. Like what Friedman wrote “employers are finding it easier, cheaper and more necessary than ever to replace labor with machines, computers, robots and talented foreign workers… Good jobs do exist, but they require more education or technical skills.”

I remembered back then, I had the job of automating business reporting with Excel VBA and my colleagues feared that I was taking their work away. Reading these recent events was both nostalgic and foreboding. It is more important than ever before to come up with better ideas, learn more and improve how we work with IT. The rest of the world is increasingly impatient for you to be remarkable.

Learn more about Microsoft Excel VBA programming here.

A new data portal www.data.gov.sg

The Singapore government has launched a new portal last month: www.data.gov.sg. This data treasure trove stores more than 5000 sets of data from 50 ministries and public agencies.

Totally free for everyone, you can see data sets from Finance, Health, Education,Manpower ministries, Monetary Authority of Singapore among many others. This is excellent news for app developers looking for reliable public data to use!

Automate Excel with VBA programming to reduce errors

Having worked as a business analyst I always have this fear of undiscovered errors when I present my Excel reports to my management. Recently, while working on an Excel project, I uncovered about 10 cells of calculation errors in a forecasting spreadsheet. The executive manually compiles this forecast for a logistic oriented company. He needs to manually calculate 30-50 values using pivot tables and copy them into an Excel report template.

Studies have shown that Excel spreadsheet errors are extremely common. Humans appear to have an error rate floor (ERF) that exists even when they are working very carefully. Everyone has a similar error rate floor, and working more carefully can decrease one’s error rate only modestly. Not a very comforting thought when you are working on an important spreadsheet.

My strongest advice to clients is to automate the most tedious and error prone parts of your Excel spreadsheets to reduce such calculation errors. I always argued that such revamped Excel application can be proven to give productivity gains. The calculated savings will be a key decision factor in whether you find it worthwhile to go forward in this project. Key variables in estimating cost of your present reporting process can include: (reporting freq per month) * (time needed) * (no of people involved) * (potential costs in reporting errors). The future gains will certainly exceed the present costs.

About Microsoft Excel VBA Programming

If you are someone who uses Microsoft Excel to generate statistics-based business reports, create forecasts or do alot of routine Excel manipulations, this is why you need to know Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
It makes you work faster. A lot faster.

Here are some more reasons:
1. All versions of Excel support the VBA programming language.
2. The VBA language is able to control every single aspect of Excel. You can write VBA programs to automatically perform Excel tasks on your behalf!
3. In fact, every Office application like Word, Outlook, PowerPoint can be controlled by VBA!
4. Now imagine what VBA can do for you.

Learn more about VBA programming here.

Why IT folks hate Microsoft Excel

Yes they do. Which is why you hardly get any good support when you have a problem with it. Try opening a support ticket when you hit a snag with Excel. It won’t see the light of day.

So why do IT folks hate Microsoft Excel?

1. It’s tough for IT folks to distribute and control Microsoft Excel on your desktops. “Jim, could you upgrade/re-install my Microsoft Excel on my laptop?” You probably see Jim avoiding you for a week.

2. IT do not trust Microsoft Excel. Open up an Excel workbook, notice that you can’t trace anything back to a credible source, or who made any changes since it was created. IT folks hate it when they can’t find anyone to blame.

3. IT can’t do version control on Microsoft Excel files. Any Excel file can be copied, changed and copied again. There is no absolute version that IT can trust and rely.

So as Excel users what are we to do? The only viable way is to to take responsibility of our own Excel files. Business changes quickly, analysis is needed rapidly. We simply can’t wait for IT that is short-staffed or unresponsive.

In short, we need to know our Excel better than IT folks.

Microsoft Excel 2007 VBA programming. Automated IP Address Checker

As a service to the Excel user community, I’ve written a niffy little Excel VBA program. This program checks a valid IP address and it returns Country, City and Organization information in seconds!
It works for Microsoft Excel 2007 or Microsoft Excel 2010.

Download AEternus IP Address Checker

See how it works:

Screen Shot:


Disclaimer:
Aeternus is not responsible for any loss or damage arising from the use of this free program. Source codes are provided “as is”. To ensure that this program is free from maliciouse codes, make sure you obtain this program direct from Aeternus’s website.

Aeternus answers Excel questions on Yahoo Answers!

True to our mission of “Serving the Excel Community”, we have been answering Excel related questions on Yahoo Answers.
Check out some of the questions we have helped answer:

If you got any Excel questions feel free to post them to us here:

General Enquiries

1. Your Name:(required)
2. Tel:(required)
3. Email:(valid email required)
4. Message

 

Excel 2010. A quick review

Just like driving a new car, I will report the new facelifts Microsoft has done to this spreadsheet program!

Zippy startup and the familar Ribbon

The Excel 2010 starts up quickly and I finally saw how Excel 2010 looks like. There were no earth shattering changes to the command layout and colour scheme. Instead of the familiar blue in Excel 2007, the new Excel 2010 has an off-white color scheme.

Mystery of the Refreshing Ribbons

Excel 2010 had a strangely refreshing look thou I can’t put my fingers on the reasons why.  Excel 2010 felt more organized even thou the commands layout was exactly the same as Excel 2007. The ribbon names and command group names seem to leap off the screen. I could scan the entire ribbon with less confusion and less frustration compared to Excel 2007.

I did a careful screen-to-screen lineup with Excel 2007 and I discovered the reason for this mystery. The team at MS actually did a subtle “cleanup” of the ribbons! There is less color junk and useless lines were removed in the new ribbons.

• The commands are no longer “trapped” in boxes. They are now laid out cleanly with a single line separting the command groups.
• A single background color is used in Excel 2010 instead of double color scheme in Excel 2007.
• The box surround the extire ribbon had been removed in Excel 2010.

A new Office Button

There was more eye candy in store when I clicked on the new green Office button in Excel 2010. The Excel 2010 Office menu tries to simplify the Excel 2007 Office menu. The “Send” command in Excel 2007 was gone. Excel 2010 rearranged “Save”, “Save As”, “Open” and “Close” to the top. The “Excel Options” and “Exit” button in Excel 2007 was placed sensibily along the up and down axis of the new Excel 2010 Office menu.

I love the new Office menu for the following reasons:

• You only need to travel up and down along the new menu system. Previously I had to move my eye and mouse all over the menu to perform the same tasks.
• The most frequent commands are place at the top.
• The confusing “Prepare”, “Send” and “Publish” Excel 2007 commands with its 2 level menus were gone.
• The Exel 2010 menu is sleek, easy to understand and really zippy to use.

You can make your own Ribbons (I saved the best for last)!
I was pleasantly surprised to find a new category on the Excel 2010 options menu: “Customize Ribbon”.

Finally some control over the darn ribbons! I can now remove any existing ribbons from the interface and create new ribbons. This means I can throw away the default ribbons and remake them in my own image! No more confusing ribbons. Halleluah!

Excel 2010. A quick look

Excel 2010 is coming in a few months and I am really excited by the new features. I am waiting anxiously for it to be GA.

Some of the exciting improvements in Excel 2010:

Better Excel Charts

• Sparklines, improved data bars, better chart UI, cross-sheet conditional formatting, improved PivotChart interactivity.
• What does it mean: I expect that you can present great looking charts in your business reports. I’ll definately be presenting what new tricks you can do in dashboarding.

Faster & more responsive performance

• Excel 2010 will feature multi-threaded calculations.
• 64-bit version of Excel, which allows Excel to address more memory.
• What does it mean: Workbooks with complex formulas will update much faster. I even expect my macros to work faster since the calculation engine has been souped up to take advantage of multiple processors on my laptop.

More accurate functions

• Improvments to the accuracy of some math, financial, and statistical functions.
• New functions are added to Excel’s rich function library.

Improvements in programmability

• Improved macro recording support.
• Enabling new integration scenarios with High Performance Computing clusters.
• What does it mean: Overall, I think the new Excel 2010 will bring spreadsheet computing to the next level. I can only imagine the impact it will have on financial modelling with the improvements in programmability.

I’ll be taking the new Excel 2010 for a spin and will write a more detailed review over the weekend. Stay tuned.

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