Archive for the ‘Skills’ Category

I spent the last two weekends among kings and witches, foxes and wolves, dumb men and devious women, visiting castles in Scotland and villages in Africa. Two weekends of great storytelling. One little thing bothered me, though. Explicitly or not, many stories ended with the words “and

What if you love Excel for all the wrong reasons? What if its flexibility creates nothing more than a glorified mess? What if you start neglecting the skills that truly matter? Every formula in Excel is an accident waiting to happen. Sometimes, a parameter is missing, sometimes

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.   Here is a good example of give-a-fish versus teach-to-fish: if you search for “excel dashboard” you’ll get at the top of the

Templates and defaults are very useful when you are not a subject-matter expert. You don’t have to know much, but if you choose the wrong templates you are on the wrong track. Cooking is a good example. I don’t know how to cook and, frankly, I don’t

Some years ago, as part of my (then) new job, I had to maintain a monthly updated Excel dashboard. It was a maintenance hell, I hated it, but I couldn’t change it because of my poor Excel skills. “This is stupid, there must be a better way”,