Over the past few weeks my concern over “continuing professional development” had been growing – this being the first year that I am required formally to complete 40 hours-worth with a deadline of the 1st of January. I reasoned that over the next few days I could find some on-line courses or spend time reading about the more recent FRS’s – not something that I would actually relish but at least my CPD requirements could be met.
I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to come across the following concept:
Having finished the online ‘CPD Starter Course’ from the ACCA website, I chose to take the test at the end – but annoyingly got one answer wrong. To the question that asks whether playing golf could be counted towards time spent doing CPD I said “no”. It seemed natural to me, obvious even, but the surprising truth is that the answer is “yes”!
Just think about that… if playing golf can be counted as continuing professional development then not much is ruled out. I guess their line of reasoning is that not all qualified accountants work as actual accountants. Qualified accountants should be professional in whatever they do and CPD needs to be relevant to the individual’s career.
Needless to say, I completed my CPD without too much further difficulty and filed the return well within the deadline. Hooray for the ACCA.
Published on
7 December, 2006 in
Business.
In the near future MoVerve will begin sending out newsletters by email – an action that for some people is inextricably related to spam! Nonetheless, spam mail and newsletters are clearly distinguishable from each other* and, to a business such as MoVerve, sending newsletters to all who subscribe is a useful activity.
I choose that MoVerve is trustworthy as an organisation and operates with integrity. These principles have clear implications for newsletter distribution, such as being sure that all recipients have chosen to receive the newsletter and providing easy means of unsubscribing at any time. Good practices on newsletter distribution are not hard to follow, but do I have other obligations?
My first step in newsletter preparation has been to look into the UK Data Protection Act and the website of the Information Commissioner provided what I needed to know. I found out that, although I will use computers to process personal data, I am exempt from notifying the Information Commissioner of this since the data is only for MoVerve’s own business processes. Nonetheless, I am required to meet certain standards in processing any personal information and also must provide a copy of the information that I hold about an individual on their request.
The good news is that the principles for personal data protection required by law coincide closely with good newsletter distribution practice. I need no changes to my plans in order to comply with the law. As examples:
- the requirement to keep only relevant and not excessive personal data is very much in line with presenting as few barriers as possible to people wanting to subscribe. If I ask potential recipients for all sorts of addresses, telephone numbers, preferences, etc. merely to send them a newsletter then I wouldn’t be surprised if very few bother to subscribe
- the requirement to keep personal data accurate and up to date is precisely what is necessary to ensure I treat subscribers’ wishes with respect. If someone requests to unsubscribe but my data is out of date or inaccurate then I might continue to send a newsletter to that person in error. Subjecting correspondents to such a poor level of service would break a lot of trust
- the requirement to keep personal data secure is, again, a major factor in the trust that I would like correspondents to place in me. If email addresses entrusted to me are passed on or otherwise leak out of my systems then I deserve no trust from potential customers and shouldn’t be surprised if they look elsewhere.
It seems that UK Data Protection Act is positively business-friendly – it encourages practices that are actually good for business!
* – apart from by spam filtering software, of course
Published on
2 December, 2006 in
Business.
Just a quick note on a mini-milestone. After much wrinkling of brows and a couple of false starts, I think I finally have a name for my new business that might stick – “MoVerve”.
Does it strike the right tone? Does it avoid sounding unduly staid or unduly casual? Can it carry a marketed brand? Is it memorable? Is it easy to say? Does it look good on paper? Is it available as a .com? (NB, although these questions have been horribly practical to me over the last month, they are rhetorical to you!)
Honestly, I found choosing a good name really hard. In fact, I’m not going to claim for myself that I have succeeded, but I’m reasonably content. I found the notes provided by Igor fascinating. I also see why an industry exists to serve the problem of finding names.
More business items looming on my task list include logo and website designs, which should spruce up these pages nicely over the next few weeks…
Published on
29 November, 2006 in
Excel.
Ugliness as Standard
I’m going to get straight to the point here: in my opinion, standard Excel charts are plain ugly. Why this should be, when Microsoft puts astounding effort into other design elements, is beyond me. Take for instance the care devoted to fonts used for different purposes. I’m astonished to think that they employ a whole team of people simply to make sure that letters and numbers look good on the screen and on paper.
But look at this:
Your reaction to the above chart might be one of these:
- You agree with me, the above is unnecessarily ugly
- You think the above is actually pretty fair
- You don’t care about whether it looks good or not, “it’s only a chart, for goodness’ sake!”
- I wish I had that much revenue / I’m pleased my revenue is not that low / How did you get hold of my revenue numbers?*
*- not really the point of this post
Going on the available data (the majority of charts that I see, even in prefessional reports, use exactly the formatting shown above) I guess many people would react with point 2 or 3 above.
The Importance of Being Fairest
Is it important whether the charts you produce look agreeable or ugly? My answer is definitley yes:
- pleasing appearance is likely to coincide with good design, which we should be concerned about
- why not sieze the opportunity to enhance your reputation as a producer of quality work
Don’t spend too much time on aesthetics; the Excel chart system doesn’t offer enough flexibility to reward more than a few minutes of beautification. However, please do consider the design aspects of the charts you produce.
Good Design
The Visual Display of Quantitive Information, an often recommended book, inspires a healthy concern for design of charts. After reading it, I have always aimed for the following features (or lack of features!) in my Excel charts:
- Remember the primary purpose of a chart is communication, not art. Don’t use 3D, embedded pictures, zany colour schemes, etc.
- Remove all unnecessary ink – e.g. the solid black lines that surround everything in Excel’s default formats
- Tone down the elements that have supporting roles (e.g. gridlines) by colouring them gray or using dotted lines
- Colours are clearer than shading patterns or shaped markers at distinguishing data series – unless you need to print in black and white
- Choose more interesting colours than the default, but keep tones in proportion
- Resize all labels and titles to allow the data itself to take centre-stage
- Resize the plot area so that it properly fills the chart area
Here is the result of about 3 minutes work on the chart above:
What do you think – worth the time invested?
Published on
24 November, 2006 in
Excel.
Every so often, I need to reverse the sign of a range of numbers. This might be required, for example, when a downloaded trial balance shows the P&L account values as the negative of their normal selves because credits have been represented as negatives.
If the number of cells is very small then I might simply edit each cell individually and add or remove a minus sign. Of course, this does not scale well to handling alot of numbers. I really wouldn’t want to edit hundreds of cells individually. Fortunately, I found a very simple and quick way to make the change all at once and here it is:
Find a blank cell anywhere and enter into it the value of -1- Copy that cell to the clipboard
- Select the range of cells having values that need to be reversed
- Choose Edit | Paste Special. In the Paste Special dialog box, select Paste Values and Operation Multiply before clicking OK.
- Delete the cell containing the -1.
That does the trick! A nice thing about the Multiply operation of Paste Special is that it is non-destructive on formulae: a target cell containing a formula is not replaced by a value, instead the formula is extended with the required factor. So, a cell originally containing “=SUM(C2:C16)” results in “=(SUM(C2:C16))*-1” after the Paste Special – Multiply.