Hi, Remember me?

I used to post here quite regularly.

Last week was mad busy.

I took 4 easyjet flights in the week. the combined travel time was about 6 hrs of flight. The combined delay time was closer to 10 – each flight was at least an hour late, the worst (the one that did an emergency stop on the runway) was 4 hrs late by the time they had flown us a replacement plane over from Scandinavia instead of our smoking one. Its not easy being an international jet setter you know…

Anyway Monday was the International UK Excel Developer Conference in London.

It was an excellent event, just over 20 of us altogether, about half a dozen in the pub before and dozen after.

The day went fairly close to schedule and the feedback has been very positive.

I did a session on general extending Excel technologies, Ross did a more indepth session on Excel DNA. Then I opened the kimono on the realities of being an Excel Add-in entrepreneur, as did Charles. I combined mine with a little look at OLAP data sources, because Roger agreed to show us some of the new features in 2010, in particular the pivoting improvements and slicers.

Then we went to the pub for dinner which many delegates washed down with their own body weight in beer so the afternoon was a bit drowsy for some.

In the afternoon I looked into xlls in some more details and covered some of the other tools such as Keith Lewis’ XLL library, XLW and XLL plus, and some of the criteria for choosing between them. Charles then took us through some of the other considerations for FastExcel and I showed VSTO and Addin Express.

We ended the day with a full and frank discussion about where we see the future of Office development going. With great participation from everyone there. some really interesting views were expressed and I picked up a few things I hadn’t considered before. More on this later though as I picked up even more insight towards the end of the week – more in a future post.

We kind of combined the panel sessions with a big free for all, and the prize giving was cancelled due to a logistics blunder which meant the prizes our friends at Microsoft had sent from the US (some time ago in fairness) did not arrive in Carlisle until the day after the conf. they probably passed us in lndn on the Mon. Luckily all my sessions had overrun so much we had run out of time anyway. The pub after the event was great – in many ways this informal socialising with others operating in the same areas is the highlight for me personally.

The venue I thought was superb and I would definitely use them again. The aircon was most welcome, as anyone who was at the very first Lndn excel user conf will remember.

Thanks to everyone who attended, I hope you found it useful. Any feedback or suggestions for improvements or future sessions or speakers are very welcome.

The current plan is to do another similar event perhaps next May time, or possibly hold it the day before Eusprig on a Wednesday in July. Your thoughts are welcome.

cheers

Simon