Any analyst who doesn’t know about Pivot Tables in Excel is either wasting time or charging their customer for useless time. Pivot tables are essential to quickly summarize data in Excel. They are the reporting equivalent of “back-of-the-envelope” calculations, but can also be used for long-term reports. Microsoft offers various tutorials on Pivot Tables, I recommend this one.
October, 2006
24
Oct 06
Live from User Experience 2006 – Don Norman
Don Norman’s address yesterday redeemed a slow day. He delivered an entertaining list of challenges along the lines of his pre-released chapter on “Cautions Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens”. In typical college professor style, he offered more questions than answers, but he won the crowd over.
23
Oct 06
Live from: User Experience 2006, Seattle – John Boyd
(this is a review of just one of many sessions of User Experience 2006 in Seattle)
As Smorgasbord-design noted, “with NN/g you have to pay for the privilege of dealing with the (experts)”. After almost a day with John Boyd of Yahoo!, there’s no doubt he is an expert, but he seems constrained by how he interpreted his topic. Boyd followed his outline faithfully, even contributed a last-minute “application” addendum to the handout, but nevertheless failed to practically tie social pyschology experiments with Web experiments. There was a glimpse of hope from 11.45 to noon when he really had the audience engaged, but the momentum was lost after lunch and never regained. The handout itself was a dissapointment, never reflecting the richness of the talk. It lacked sentences and verbs and made few lasting points beyond the referenced outline.
powered by performancing firefox
9
Oct 06
Looking forward to Unbox International
Amazon’s Unbox offering is a step in the right direction: offering border-free tv show / movie rental, world-wide. I can’t wait to watch (and pay for) downloads of the orginal “Vidocq” and “Les Brigades du Tigre“
9
Oct 06
50% attainment on Google Prediction
In December of last year, I predicted a unified approach to RSS subscriptions for Google. Although that hasn’t happened yet, the underlying issue of a lack of focus has been acknowledged by Google.
9
Oct 06
Analyzing folder contents using Firefox and Excel
When a quick analysis of the contents of a Windows folder is necessary, navigate to that folder using Firefox. Firefox will show an html page with a directory index.
Copy the page content into Excel, and the data can then be manipulated, for instance sorted by date or included in a Pivot Table.
The same can be done from a list of e-mails in Outlook to Excel.
9
Oct 06
Quick process modeling reference
http://www.agilemodeling.com
Provides a great simple reference to process modeling with key themes and examples. The specialist can dig deeper into UML, and the beginner can quickly grasp essential concepts.