International experts in Excel

To all Excel users,

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Would you accept documents that read from right to left? Why do you accept spreadsheets that follow no standard conventions? If it's because there have been no spreadsheet standards to adopt, you no longer have any excuse. Now there are AbleOwl ESP standards ... and the benefits in increased productivity for you and your organization are enormous.

The cost of staff time working in Excel is probably in the range of a few perfect to over fifty percent of organisation's total costs. Even if it is only 3%, a doubling of productivity is going to add more than 1% to the profit margin, say, increase it from 8% to 9%. If your business is a big user of Excel, the gains are even more substantial. For many businesses, such low-risk opportunities for productivity enhancement are rare.

The productivity gains come from different areas as depicted left. Standardization impacts all these areas.

ESP incorporates rules for spreadsheet construction, standard component, an Excel add-in to apply the rules and components and training.

ESP increases user productivity in building, using and maintaining applications.

A typical profile of Excel build, use and maintenance time appears left. You often spend more time building than using. But over the life of a spreadsheet, you spend more time maintaining, that is, altering the spreadsheet.

Why does maintenance take so much time? It's not the making of the changes that typically takes time, but the comprehending of what changes need to be made, where.

By standardizing, you build applications faster through use of standard components, usage time reduces, particularly navigation, and maintenance time decreases because comprehension time shrinks.

Automate tasks. Some tasks may involve dozens of steps. If so, automation is likely to reduce hours of work to minutes. Some tasks involve only a few steps, but you repeat the steps several times a day. The time saved by automating those few steps may add up to a few minutes per day.

You can automate many common tasks with the ESP add-in. Some tasks, though, may need a custom macro written. If you have the ability to write macros, you can add your own macro into the overall automation process. If you don’t have the ability, you can use AbleOwl’s efficient service.

There is a reduction in errors through building with standard components and techniques. The ESP add-in makes it easy to add crosschecks.

If you have ever inherited another person’s workbook and needed to make changes, you might have struggled because it was hard to understand; you may even have scrapped it. Standardisation makes spreadsheets much easier to understand. And difficulty of comprehension is not only a problem with others’ spreadsheets, but also with your own.

 So what does AbleOwl have to offer you? Surely, you might say, the application of standards is just common sense – all that’s needed is to think up some standards and start to use them. Considering that the benefits of standardisation are so great, why does nobody apply standards? The answer is that it is not obvious what the standards should be.

The business expertise needed to devise the standards is hard-won from many years of spreadsheet experience that we believe only AbleOwl have. That expertise has come through addressing spreadsheet users’ needs in hotline support, bespoke development, training, add-in development and publications. It is a comprehensive combination that no other company in the world offers. Spreadsheets are our speciality and have been since spreadsheets first appeared.

AbleOwl offers you that most-valuable expertise distilled in this Excel Standardisation Programme (ESP). Here, we offer you three separate days of courses in the AbleOwl ESP standards. Everyone should do the first day. Almost everyone, except the most basic Excel users, should do the second day. The third day is for advanced Excel users.

Each delegate attending ESP Essentials receives the ESP add-in to help apply the standards and build applications from standard components.

Excel provides many of an organisation’s IT systems, although this fact is seldom realised. For many organisations, the manpower cost in using Excel exceeds the rest of the IT budget. Better management of Excel usage can make overall IT deployment much more successful.

IT projects are notoriously late, well over budget or scrapped. ROI is often negative. What is the biggest reason for that? It is that the systems don’t provide what the users require. Excel is effectively the only software development tool users have available. Excel empowers users to create and make continuous improvements to their own systems. Proposers of alternative solutions target Excel’s weaknesses, but these are user weaknesses that can be fixed.

Furthermore, the downside of alternative solutions is not so well known. Consider the analogous idea that typists type everyone’s documents. Typists are faster, make fewer spelling mistakes and correct poor grammar, but the downside (time-delays, misunderstandings, etc.) outweighs the upside. Improved software (including spelling and grammar checkers) and training users in the software overcome the weaknesses.

Excel is a key part of successful IT. Standardisation with ESP is a vital part in that success.

So, reserve your place now. Three months of unlimited email hotline support are included in all course fees, so you can get help with all your Excel questions following the course. In addition, delegates attending the ESP Essentials course automatically receive the ESP add-in (a single-user license).

Frequently-asked questions:

Q: ‘Will standardisation cramp my style?’
A: Do the rules of writing cramp your style?

Q: ‘Would I be better off learning new features of Excel?’
A: Is it better to learn more words from the dictionary, or learn how to string them together into lucid sentences? Occasionally, one new word can take the place of several, but, in general, the ability to create lucid sentences is far more valuable. Most spreadsheets don’t need or use any special features, but they are still hard to understand.

Q: ‘As my spreadsheets are small and simple, aren’t standards unnecessary?’
A: You might say that your spreadsheets are the equivalent of scribblings in a notepad. Even so, you follow numerous rules: you write left to right and down, order words with grammar rules, punctuate, capitalise and so on. And, can you always understand your scribbles when you look at them some time later?

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P.S. The benefits of standardisation multiply when you apply it to a whole department or company. To discuss having ESP run privately, email admin@ableowl.com.

P.P.S. Though attendance at training courses has its benefits, most of what is learnt is soon forgotten, and hurdles faced in practice can thwart implementation. Short mentoring sessions on a regular basis are a major part of the solution. The full solution to doubling Excel productivity is our Excel Productivity Enhancement Programme (EPeP). For more details, email admin@ableowl.com.