New book shop

I have been a bit underwhelmed by Amazons price competitiveness for a while. Exacerbated by the sweeping 30% price increase on my pending basket a few months ago.

So now I have found a new book supplier (via Amazon ironically)

Its here the Book Depository.

Its not all peaches and cream but it did work out a good few quid cheaper for my last order. Slight scam though if you buy their books via Amazon they are 2.80 cheaper in the basket. But then they hammer you for postage at the end. On their site they are more expensive with ‘free delivery’. Works out about the same I think. It would be nice to get charged postage once, not per book. Especially if like me you have an insatiable book buying (and sometimes reading) habit.

I got paper ones rather than kindle as the thought of trying to make sense of a technical book on a kindle didn’t appeal. That and the fact Mrs Smurf is still happily using her kindle and hasn’t given it to me yet.

I only just ordered so I could well be back on here in a few days ranting about their crap delivery or summat.

Have you got any recommended book shops?

Or are you one of those ‘read it on-line’ types? (I really prefer working through a book to get to grips with new stuff, on-line is great for specifics and reference etc, but I’m not a fan of reading screens and screens of text. And videos make me drowsy!)

cheers

simon

Amazon Wiley price scam

You might have noticed I havent been blogging much recently. Sorry about that.

I am currently busy reskilling in new areas.

Hence a bit of Amazon shopping for relevant reading material. I put a few relevant books in my basket a week or two ago, or maybe less. Imagine my surprise when I came to it today to buy and saw all the prices had shot up.

I don’t know if its just a money grab from Wiley or Amazon  ‘incentivising’ Kindle purchasing but the price rises are eye watering, Perhaps they are anticipating a new 30% book vat rate in the budget.

Looks like I will have to rely on other info sources. Or hope for a price pull back…

did they not hear about the recession?

did paper just triple in price?

Anyone else seen this? Anyone seen other publishers or topic areas (this is finance/trading)? or got an explanation?

Cheers

simon

XL Dev Conf Resources

I finally found a few quiet minutes to upload the speaker presentations from the recent xl dev conf.

Full details are here

Many thanks to the speakers for their hard work.

Thanks too to conference sponsors F1F9, if ever you need additional financial modelling fire power or many other related activities, give them a shout.

And a big thank you to all the attendees, I was delighted by both the number of people and the willingness to question and discuss.

In order to improve future events I would like to ask to feedback, both from attendees and non attendees, so here are a few questions, please copy and paste them into an email and fill in your answers and send to me.

If you didn’t attend I would be interested to know why. If you are going to suggest location as a reason for not attending please say how near to your house the event would need to be for you to attend, or what the agenda would need to include for you to be prepared to travel. And also if you would be willing to join in if it had been live on-line instead.

Questions

1. Where did you hear about the event?
2. What did you think of the venue?
3. please rate and comment on the presenters on presentation skill and usefulness of presentation content
4. What do you feel was missing from the event either logistics or content
5. would you come again?
6. anything else you would like to share with the conference organisers or speakers.

Thanks

I am now in the process of organising an event in Manchester in July, along similar lines but perhaps targeted at intermediate to advanced users rather than developers. more on that later.

cheers

simon

Excel developer conference thanks

Thanks to everyone who came to the event last week.

And thanks to everyone that helped out, and a special big thanks to our magnificent presenters.

I hope everyone enjoyed themselves and found something useful.

The on the ball presenters have already sent me links to their stuff, the rest of us aren’t there yet. I will give it a few days and try and publish them altogether, this week at some point.

Bad news for those of you hoping for video – it was the one thing that got dropped due to too much other stuff going on. I think our excellent sponsors F1F9 may share some of their stuff but that’s more interviews and atmosphere stuff.

I’ll try harder next time I promise. Sorry.

And next time may well be in Manchester in July, unless the pub talk of a US event actually comes off. If you would have seen us carrying all our presenter kit and conference goodies for everyone on the way to the event, you would understand.

Anyway never mind all the grovelling apologies, we have the next event to look forward to. I am thinking we should do something Eusprig week (July) in Manchester. Partly to give potential delegates more justification to attend one or both events, and partly to encourage the two crowds to connect more.

We will have a tug of war to decide once and for all if spreadsheet errors are important, or usually resolved by other parts of the info system. If the tug of war is inconclusive we can have tag team wrestling about whether lots of names is a good thing or a bad thing. I’ll definitely video this as underpants over trousers is a classic comedy hit.

cheers

simon

 

 

Excel Dev Conf Presenter Bob Phillips

Well known Excel MVP Bob Phillips is presenting a session on Self Service BI at our Excel Conference, his profile is here.

I am really looking forward to this session as the Excel BI story is getting better and better. Eventually people will actually start using the stuff and stop some of the current poor working approaches. Bob has been doing this stuff for a living for years so I am keen to hear how it actually works, rather than the Microsoft/Contoso fantasy stuff.

Conference bookings have been better than expected, but there are still a few spaces left. Booking will be open for another week or so if you don’t want to miss this excellent event.

cheers

simon

Last few hours of conference discount

The Early bird discount for the 2012 Excel Developer conference expires tonight at midnight (ish). (European time, CET not GMT) (11pm for the Brits).

Please visit the booking page here ASAP and get yourself booked on.

After tonight, the price goes up to 250 GBP, still a staggering bargain actually.

Hope to see you there,

cheers

Simon

LinkedIn comedy

I don’t really use LinkedIn, but I happened to be on there today and saw something that made me laugh.

Recently I was approached about doing some work for a potential client. After a brief discussion and issues with my availability (I didnt have any), the project went to someone else. No problem (for me), but lets just say the work was quite specific, oh I don’t know let just say taking some data from Excel and creating a drawing.

I skipped over one of the Excel groups on linkedIn and lo, a question from ‘recently’ : ‘How do you create a [specific type of] drawing from [a very particular type of] Excel data?’ Made me laugh…

No idea if it is exactly the same project, but its a pretty damn close coincidence. (I didn’t bother to look if it had been solved.)

At least they didn’t wait until I had scoped it out and incurred time and costs then blow me out on rate. Although I guess if the forum approach fails badly they could be back in touch. With even less budget having blown half of it on the failed hobbyist version.

This sort of thing always makes me wonder if I should move over to a server based tech so I am not always in competition with hobbyists? No disrespect at all, I got into VBA as a hobby because it was more interesting than my proper job. But I am not sure how many people would get into the nitty gritty of Oracle, or Sharepoint just for fun?

Any of you passed up some work only to see it hawked around the forums shortly after?

cheers

simon

Excel Dev conf presenters

In the run up to the magnificent, exciting, exclusive, once in a lifetime Excel Developer conference, I thought it would be interesting to get to know the presenters a little more.

First up on the conf blog is Stephen Allen. Stephen will be taking us through some tools and techniques for reviewing real world spreadsheets. And dealing with the review findings.

If you haven’t booked yet you risk missing out on THE hottest event in the 2012 Excel calendar. The organisers are generously offering a full 50 quid early bird discount for those folks organised enough to book before Friday 6th Jan 2012. This isn’t just to punish those people who don’t know who they are or where they will be from one day to the next, it’s also so Mike knows how many custard creams to bring.

I can confirm that there will be a prize for whoever brings the nicest biscuits (hint: custard creams won’t win – even if they are the only entry).

Get over to Codematic now to book, then you can relax and just worry about the biscuits.

cheers

simon

Conference Bookings Update

We have some…

A big thank you to those people who have already booked for the Excel Developer conference in January.

I have tidied up the bookings page so its slightly less cowboyish here.

And I have updated the Excel dev conf blog site, to reflect the Jan 2012 event rather than the Jun 2008 one ;-).

The sooner people book, the sooner we can decide if we need the Albert hall or a telephone box (both available at Skills Matter). And more importantly the sooner we can sort out the pub lunch. (and the curry).

And of course we are offering a 50 quid discount for people booking before 6th Jan to help you to help us. 200 now, 250 for johnny come latelies in Jan.

The ouline plan is:

• Drinks Tue evening somewhere near the venue
• Conf all day Wednesday
• Drinks and curry, (or some other native British cuisine) Wed evening

If you have suggestions for pubs or can remember the best of the ones we visited last time then leave a comment.

cheers

simon

The moment of truth

Laydeees and Gintelmen….

Drum roll please…….

The…January…2012…Excel…Developer…Conference…Booking…and …payment…page…is…online.

finally. phew.

I know I promised to get it up earlier, but hey, I’m a busy boy…

I was away all last week in busy meetings and drinkings with limited internet access and typing ability.

please don’t all book at once and kill the intarwebs.

cheers

simon