Richard Kraneis Blog

Excel for People Who Hate Numbers

People need Microsoft Excel skills desperately in their jobs yet so many are Excel phobic.

Is it learning Excel as software that’s so hard or is it the almost genetic hatred some people have for numbers? I think it’s the fear of numbers.

I remember one young lady in particular from one of my Excel classes. She was in her mid 20’s and had glided easily through my Excel I, II, and III sequence that lasted a total of 9 hours. She was the classic interface queen. If there was a software technique in Excel, she could pick it up with ease.

Then she decided to enroll for my 3 hour Power Excel class which was really an advanced Excel tutorial for aspiring power users. It was a large class that day, perhaps 14 people. To warm the class up I began with some simple formulas. What my kids called “word problems” when they were in grade school.

For example, “You want to hire someone on staff for $60,000. Your human resource colleagues tell you that you should always multiply someone’s salary by 30% to get the cost of the benefits for this person. If someone’s salary is $60,000, what will be the cost of their benefits to the company?”

When I posed that question to the class, the nice young lady, the “interface queen”, froze up and a look of classroom fear came upon her face. It’s the look you had in school when you realized you were in a class over your head.

She loved software, Excel software was easy for her, but she never had to perform a formula on her own. Her inability to Excel with Excel was seriously impaired by her math phobias. She probably could have done the math computation easily if I had given her the formula. $60,000 multiplied by 30% is of course $18,000. But the class wasn’t about simple math, it was about problem solving.

It was for her and people like her that I wrote an e-book that serves as an advanced Excel tutorial. If you just go to my advanced Excel tutorial and listen to the “Secret to Excel” lesson, you’ll learn more about Excel in 3 minutes than you could possibly imagine.

So if you “hate numbers” or have a fear of numbers but like software, please visit my Excel tutorial today, grab a cup of coffee, and play my “Secret to Excel” Camtasia video today.

The “Secret to Excel” lesson is free, honest.

The Excel Bug

The recent reports about the Excel Bug of September 2007 have me a bit perplexed.  (If you’d like a thorough discussion of the Excel Bug, see Joel Spolsky’s blog at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/26b.html .  Joel once worked for Microsoft on the Excel programming team.)

I’ve seen Internet articles on this with people asking questions like, “Have you been affected?”  I believe that people and companies are affected every day by Excel errors so I find it curious that all of a sudden we’re concerned about Microsoft’s error in making a buggy Excel 2007.

Let’s say someone sells you a hammer.  But you discover if you really try to whack  something the head of  the hammer flies off.  It’s a faulty tool, what were the tool makers thinking?  So yes, Microsoft built a faulty tool.  Now they are trying to fix it.

But how do you use that hammer every day.  How good are you, the user of the hammer?  You see a nail, you hammer it.  A screw doesn’t go in the way you’d like, you hammer it.  You use the claw of the hammer to open a can of paint.  How many ways do you mis-use that hammer on a daily basis?

How many ways do you butcher Excel every day, and don’t even know it?

1.      When’s the last time you used File - Properties to describe the purpose of your spreadsheet?

2.      Have you ever used Insert – Comments to explain a complex formula or the source of numbers copied into a spreadsheet.

3.      When’s the last time you used Tools – Formula Auditing to analyze the logic of your spreadsheets?

Or worse still, are you the manager or “wordsmith” of a project.  You delegate numerical accuracy to a sub-ordinate and never discuss quality control with him or her?  You delegate because you really don’t like numbers.

Let’s back up for a moment.

Yes, Excel made a mistake with 2007 and you might get burned on it.  Now that you know you might have an Excel error how are you checking your Excel 2007 spreadsheets to avoid that mistake?

While you’re doing quality control to clean up Microsoft’s programming mistake in Excel 2007, perhaps it’s time to rigorously look at your Excel spreadsheets for human errors by you and your company.  If you look closely, you’ll find the errors.

Consultant Billing Spreadsheet – 7 Minutes a Day is over $3000 per Year

If I showed you how to increase your revenues by $3000 per year (U.S.) would you be interested?  It’s for anyone who bills out their time on an hourly basis.  If you’re a consultant, lawyer, accountant, programmer, business owner, construction contractor, you need a stopwatch and my spreadsheet.

A lot of consultants or self employed hourly workers round up or round down to the nearest quarter hour.  For example, an online marketing consultant like me might begin work at 1 PM and then stop work at 2:04 PM.  That would be 64 minutes of billable time.

Years ago I would round down to the nearest quarter hour.  So if I worked from 1 PM to 2:04 PM I would bill for only 60 minutes (1 hour).  I always thought that was a fair practice.  I couldn’t round up to 1:15 billable time (rounding up is cheating the client, not a good thing) so I would round down.  But it wasn’t really fair to me.  If I don’t bill for 4 minutes I’ve just denied myself $ 7 of income.  Over a year, rounding down is costly to me as a consultant.

So here’s how you resolve the rounding down consultant problem.

You need just two things:

1)      Watch - A watch with a chronograph feature (if that sounds too fancy, just call it a stop watch).  Last year I used an inexpensive Timex with a chronograph/stopwatch.  It looked a bit ugly but it “made” me a thousand dollars or more in improved billing last year.  This year I am using the XG-55 watch by www.lacrossetechnology.com and it’s terrific (chronograph, compass, alarms, and more).  It lists for $99.95 but cost $54 on www.ebay.com plus shipping.

2)      Billing Spreadsheet – You need an Excel spreadsheet that lets you do minutes to hourly conversions and helps you accumulate your billable time for an invoice.  Here, you can Download consultant_billing_spreadsheet.xls

You accumulate your billing time for a client during the day.  If you have 2 or more clients you will need to write down the billable times in minutes so you don’t intermingle the billing.  Preferably, once a day, you update your Consultant Billing Spreadsheet.

So if you take the train like I do every day, and you focus on some client work, you turn on your stopwatch and keep track of time.  It adds up.

How does 7 minutes a day of “lost time” amount to over $2900 of extra income per year?  Here’s the math.

If you bill as a consultant and never round up but always round down, you’re cheating yourself out of 7.5 minutes of billing every billable event.  (The spreadsheet to the left shows 7 minutes but it’s really 7.5 minutes.)  This equals .13 hours per day.

If you work Monday through Friday, 50 weeks a year, you’re “rounding down” for 7.5 minutes every working day.  You are “rounding down” 31.25 hours per year.  That’s really ¾ of a normal work week.

What’s your billing rate?  If it’s $100 per  hour you are losing out on $3125 per year in lost billing revenue.

And by the way, if you have at least 2 billable events per day where you once “rounded down”, change the Events per Day to 2.  That means the total revenue increase due to smarter billing is $6250 per year.

Not bad for an inexpensive stopwatch and a handy, simple Consultant Billing Spreadsheet.