Once again, the [Ctrl] key is your friend.  To jump to the next tab in the list — say, from Sheet1 to Sheet2 — press Ctrl-Page Down.  To move to the previous tab, press Ctrl-Page Up.  You can do this from anywhere in your workbook, and it will save you a few seconds of poking around with your mouse.

Any time you have more than one person putting content into a spreadsheet, you run into some challenges maintaining the integrity of the data.  How do you make sure people use consistent labels?  How do you prevent users from inputting obviously incorrect data?

Excel’s data validation feature can help with that.  This feature lets you select a group of cells (for example, a column) and specify what kind of data is allowed here.

For example, let’s say I have a simple spreadsheet with some rudimentary employee information on it.  On this spreadsheet, I want to track the employee’s ID number, along with their job function.  If other people are going to maintain this spreadsheet, I want to be sure that they use consistent titles for the job function.

Do do this, I can select those cells that I want to control:

Then, in Excel 2007, I go to Data->Data Validation.

Now I can select what type of data I want to allow in these cells. You can specify a list of values, a specific date range, whole numbers only, and other restrictions. You can also restrict entries based on a formula, using the “Custom” option.

In this case, I’m going to select “List”, because I want my users to choose from a predetermined set of values. You can either type the list into a range of cells on the current worksheet (or use named ranges to point to another worksheet in your workbook), or you can type the list into the “Source” field directly, separated by commas.  I’ll type the list in directly:

The “Ignore blank” function is used when you select a list of cells as the source; if you have blank cells in this selection, Excel will ignore them when this option is checked.  The “In-cell dropdown” checkbox allows you to specify whether a drop-down menu will appear in the cell when clicked, showing users the options available to them, like so:

Now, my users can click the drop-down and select the function as appropriate.  They can also key it in directly, if they prefer.  What’s great about this, though, is that if someone tries to type in a different entry (say “Accounting” or “Finnannce”), Excel will show an error message and reject the entry until it is corrected.  This way, you can maintain the integrity of your data, which is particularly important when you want to use the data to perform analysis like Pivot Tables.

There are a lot of businesses that have the mindset that they need to charge for each and every transaction they possibly can, rather than looking at the overall value they offer and charging for the aspects of that value that make sense.  Mike has another great example of this in a post about train operators who want to shut down helpful services that third parties are offering, because those train operators think they should be making money directly off these additional services.

When you’re running your business, look at the big picture.  If someone is doing something that adds value to your offering, why would you want to stop that?  If you think you can do it better, then compete.  If you can’t, then thank them kindly for their assistance and continue focusing on your core business.

photo credit: erix!

As with many shortcuts, the [Ctrl] key is the magic ticket here.

Let’s say you have a spreadsheet with multiple columns and rows filled with data.  Your spreadsheet is several screens wide and many screens tall.  Using your mouse and the scroll bars to move around this kind of a spreadsheet gets pretty cumbersome, and using the arrow keys to navigate cell by cell is painfully slow.

To quickly jump to the last populated cell in a row or column, you can use Ctrl+[arrow key].  So, if you want to jump to the last column in your title row, just hit Ctrl-[right arrow], and presto.  It’s the same if you want to jump to the last row in a column; use Ctrl-[down arrow].  And if you want to jump to the first row, use Ctrl-[up arrow].

The one caveat with this is that Excel only jumps until it hits the first blank cell — so, for example, if you have column headers in the first three columns, then a blank cell, and then two more column headers (like the image below)…

… then starting in cell A1 and pressing Ctrl-[right arrow] will only jump you to column C, since that’s the last cell Excel finds that isn’t blank.  The same is true with rows, so bear in mind that you might not jump right to the bottom or top of your list if you have blank cells in it.

The Home and End keys can help you work around this; if you press Ctrl-End, then Excel will jump you to the intersection of the outermost row and column that have data.  So, if you have data in columns A through D, and data in rows 1 through 25, Excel will jump to cell D25.  This doesn’t necessarily mean there will be data in that cell; Excel just finds the last column with data, and the last row with data, and then jumps to the intersection of those two.

Ctrl-Home, on the other hand, will always take you back to cell A1, in the top left of your spreadsheet.

If you know a specific cell you want to get to (cell T365, for example), you can press Ctrl-G, and then type in the cell reference.  In this case, we’d hit Ctrl-G, type “T365″, and hit enter.

Finally, if you hold down the [Shift] key while using these combinations, you can select the cells as you move through them.  Ctrl-Shift-[right arrow], for example, will start at your current cursor position and select all the cells to the right of it that have data.  If you start in cell A1, and don’t have any gaps in the data in Row 1 and Column A, you can press Ctrl-Shift-[right arrow] and then Ctrl-Shift-[down arrow] to select all the data in your spreadsheet, like in the image below.

It may not change worlds the way sliced bread did, but keyboard shortcuts will save you a lot of time and nuisance trying to muck about with your mouse to get where you need to go.

Never, ever ask what could go wrong.  You would be amazed at what the answer can turn out to be.

Before I get started, let me say that I think Sony’s video service is passable.  I’ve used it on a few occasions, and the experience is okay.  But it is just okay, and there are some serious issues that keep it from being my first (or second) choice when looking for movie entertainment.

Let’s take a look at those issues, shall we?

1. Download speed.  I want to get this out of the way first, because this isn’t really Sony’s problem.  However, the length of time it takes to pull down a high-definition video takes away from the immediacy of the experience, which means you need to weigh Sony’s offering against other options — and that’s when the rest of the issues start leaping up to kick you in the face.

A high-def movie on the PlayStation Network is about 6 GB (or, in the case of a patience-tester like Australia, 9 GB).  Even with broadband, that’s going to take some time to come through the pipe.  For standard-definition movies, you can start watching them more or less right away, but for HD we’ve found that we need to start the download about 2 hours before we actually plan to watch the movie.  Otherwise, the film catches up to the download, and then you end up sitting and waiting while it buffers.

2. Time restrictions.  This is one of the more frustrating aspects of the PlayStation video store.  When you rent a video, you have 30 days from the time you download it to start watching it.  Fair enough.  But as soon as you begin actually watching the video, you must finish it within 24 hours, or *poof* — it’s gone.

This means that if I get off work one night and want to start watching a movie, then finish it the following night because I don’t have time during the week to watch the whole thing end to end… I can’t.  Sony won’t let me.

This makes absolutely no sense.  The whole concept of rental deadlines and late fees was built around the knowledge that, if I had a DVD in my possession, the store couldn’t rent that DVD out to someone else.  Therefore, if I kept a movie longer than I was supposed to, I was costing the store potential revenue.  In a digital environment, that goes completely out the window.  If everybody on the network decides they want to watch “Kung Fu Panda” at the same time, they can.  There is no physical media to restrict access.  But now, in the face of infinite goods, Sony actually tightens the restrictions around rentals .  It’s like what they did with the arcade games in Home, and it makes about as much sense as billing people for the air they breathe when they’re in your house.

3. Sound quality.  The PS3 is a next-generation platform.  It supports high definition video and full surround sound.  It plays Blu-ray media, which is high-definition media with (you guessed it) surround sound.

So why are some of the videos on the store only offered in stereo?  What’s worse, you can’t tell whether it’s in surround or just stereo before you actually pay for it, so the fancy schmancy sound system you have just sits there forlornly blaring out of two speakers while wonderful surround-sound things happen for the people who are watching the movie on anything other than a PS3.

4. Interface.  I’ll grant you that working within the confines of a TV screen gives you less flexibility than a computer monitor, particularly when you need to keep in mind that some users may be looking at the store on a standard def television.  But still, the interface needs a lot of work.  The default layout shows you scads of box art, laid out in a grid, which you then need to wade through to see what each movie actually is since the resolution isn’t high enough for you to read the titles on most of them.  You can’t just scroll through this grid, either; when you get to the end of one row, you need to cursor down, and then cursor back the other direction, all while keeping your eye on the left-had side of the screen which has a description of the movie that is actually readable.

You can change this view, so that you now have lists of movies with the box art on the left hand side and the description on the right, though then you’re scrolling endlessly up and down lists.

The most grievous offense, though, lies in Sony’s filtering technology.  Want to look at only HD movies?  Sure thing, there’s a category for that.  The problem is, you’ll still find lots of standard def movies show up in that list — many of which are proudly have “SD” stamped right in their title.  In the mood for a comedy?  Head on over to the comedy section, where you’ll find that Sony’s definition of a comedy can range from “Cinderella” to “Schindler’s List”.  Either they need to give the people in charge of categorization a good smack, or there is something seriously wrong with the database running this thing.

5. Price.  Sure, it’s easy to pick on price and say that everything’s too expensive.  But look at this in relative terms: there is no physical media here to procure, store, or ship.  It’s a purely digital store.  That means that the incremental cost associated with each rental rapidly approaches zero.  And yet Sony still charges you more for a rental than competitors like Netflix, Blockbuster, or the on demand service through your cable provider.  It’s like nobody there has come to the realization that they aren’t dealing with little plastic discs anymore.

I initially chose Sony’s movie rental store over the on demand service provided by Comcast, because the movie quality was better through Sony, but when you start factoring all the other nuisances into it I just don’t think Sony’s service warrants a premium.

6. Delayed content.  When a movie is released on DVD and/or Blu-ray, I’ve grown accustomed to being able to rent it shortly thereafter.  And by “shortly thereafter”, I mean right away.  Blockbuster carries it.  Netflix carries it.  I can walk to the nearest Wal-Mart and get it.  But Sony, for whatever reason, seems to feel that they operate in an entirely different universe, and that nobody will notice if movies are available on their store weeks or months after they are available everywhere else.

There have been a number of occasions where I’ve seen that a movie has recently come out on DVD, and gone to the PlayStation video store in the hopes of renting it, only to find that Sony is has been too preoccupied with posting decade-old movies that nobody’s ever heard of to bother with a new release that people might actually want to watch.

And on those occasions where a new(ish) release is available, it is usually hampered by the issues described in #7 and #8.

7. Purchase only.  Perhaps some people are interested in buying a movie in a digital format that they will then only be able to play on the PS3.  I am not one of those people.  If I’m going to buy a movie, I want to be able to watch it wherever I want.  I want to be able to take it with me, and if I upgrade playback devices I still want to be able to play that movie.

This wouldn’t be so bad, except that when new movies are introduced on the store, they are often only available for purchase.  I don’t want to buy it; I want to rent it.  If I’m going to buy it, I’m going to get it in a format that I can play on any of the devices in our home.

8. Lack of HD content.  Coupled with the “purchase only” issue above, this is what really drives me nuts about Sony’s video store.  It’s like the issue with stereo sound; the PS3 was obviously designed with high definition video and audio in mind, so why does Sony seem to feel that stereo sound and standard definition are all the rage when it comes to movies?  When new releases first hit the Sony store (Kung Fu Panda?  Iron Man?  Practically any movie that’s been released in the last six months in which you might actually have had a modicum of interest?) they are typically only available in standard definition — and only for purchase.

Why on earth would I pay $15 for a standard definition movie that I am only ever going to be able to play from the PS3?  I want to rent movies, Sony.  I want to rent high-definition movies with surround sound, and I want to rent them when the rest of the planet does. These last three points are what really killed the store for me.  Offering SD movies, in stereo sound, that you have to pay $15 for, after everyone else in the known universe has already seen it, is not a competitive advantage.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there.  I think it’s something like, “Just because you’re doing things differently, doesn’t mean you’re doing them better.”

All right, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

photo credit: kanonn

Take ooVoo, for example.  I was on their site the other day, researching some of the features of their VOIP offering.  I looked at their available plans, and saw that their “ooVoo Super” plan offered “unlimited phone calls”.

Then I saw the disclaimer at the bottom: “unlimited is 3000 minutes”.

*blink*

Did I miss something here?  Has the English language undergone a complete restructuring and nobody saw fit to alert me?  Un-limited means “without limits”.  It does not mean “an arbitrarily defined number as decreed by us, at our whimsy”.  You cannot simply state that a word has a brand new meaning — no matter how hard you squeeze your eyes shut and how many times you click your heels together — and expect it to be true.

You see, I’m a teleworker.  The phone is the primary way I communicate with people, and I’m on it quite a lot.  If we assume that the average month has four weeks, and each week has five workdays, that’s 20 days a month when I’m on the horn for business (and I’m being conservative in ooVoo’s favour here).  With ooVoo’s plan, my 3,000 minutes (or 50 hours) works out to about 2.5 hours a day.

I can crank out 2.5 hours of calls before lunch.  ooVoo’s “unlimited” plan is not only limited, it’s not even generous enough to meet my needs.

My problem is not that ooVoo restricts their plan to 3,000 minutes.  That’s fine; that’s their decision.  My problem is that they falsely call it “unlimited”, when it’s actually anything but.  It’s not just ooVoo doing this, either; wireless carriers have become notorious for such a practice.

Be careful about what you promise.  At best, you risk drawing the ire and outrage of your customers.  At worst, you face legal repercussions for false advertising.

photo credit: whatleydude

There is a lesson here for us all.  Diversification doesn’t just apply to the mix of equity and fixed-income in your portfolio — the percentage of your savings that are invested in stocks versus bonds, treasury bills, or the like.  The concept of diversification also applies to the people who manage your money.  Just as you wouldn’t (I would hope) take all of your money and use it to buy shares in one single company, you also shouldn’t hand all of your money to just one person to control.

The vast majority of investment managers out there are honest and capable, but you can’t know for certain.  I’m sure most of the people who invested with Uncle Bernie thought he was going to take good care of their money.  Diversification is key, both in terms of what you invest in and who you invest with.

photo credit: ArtemFinland

If you’re running a relatively (<1 year old) PC, there’s a good chance that the manufacturer packaged antivirus software with it, and you likely either get the first 30 days or the first year free.  After that, though, it will be up to you to make sure you’re protecting your system.

There are quite a few alternatives available to you: AVG, McAfee, Symantec/Norton, avast!, Kaspersky, TrendMicro… you get the idea.  I’m not going to go into all of them, since most any of the reputable virus scanners will keep you protected.  I will share my thoughts on three of them: a free one I like, a paid one I like, and a paid one I don’t like at all.

Let’s start with free.  I’ve been running the free version of AVG on my personal machines for a couple of years and have been happy with it.  Virus scan software is kind of like a sewer system: I want it to do its job, stay out of sight, and not let anything slip through the cracks.  AVG is good this way, and I’d recommend it as an excellent free alternative.

McAfee is a paid service that I’ve also used for years, and been happy with.  It is also unobtrusive and does its job - though I would have a hard time providing you with a compelling reason to buy it over the free software provided by AVG.  Note that I’m just talking about virus scanning here, not the entire suite of services.

Norton has just left a bad taste in my mouth.  When I’ve used it, I’ve found it intrusive and annoying.  It seems to constantly want to remind me of just how very hard it’s working, and all the mighty things it’s doing.  Norton constantly cries, “Look at me!  Look at me!  Look at me!”

I don’t want to look.  Remember the sewer analogy?

Get whichever one works for you, but remember to have some form of antivirus running on your machine.

Also remember that many of these programs do not play nice together, so if you want to install a new antivirus package, you’ll want to uninstall your existing one first.  Having several antivirus programs running on your PC does not help you be any more protected, and will mostly likely just end up ticking one of them off.

photo credit: Andres Rueda

Today, let’s look at the example of FreeCreditReport.com.  If you live in the US, you have probably been assaulted by their advertising campaign which has, I must admit, a catchy jingle.

The problem, as pointed out by Mark Frauenfelder (via Get Rich Slowly), is that the “free” credit report is not actually free at all.  When you request your “free” credit report from this service, you are automatically enrolled in a credit monitoring service at $15 a month that you must opt out of within a certain number of days.

As you read the comments on the various blog posts about FreeCreditReport.com, you start to sense a consistent theme of animosity.  What the company is doing may technically be legal (though the lawsuits swirling around them could indicate otherwise), but it sure doesn’t sit well with customers who are feeling duped and swindled.

What’s worse is that you can actually get a free credit report through the AnnualCreditReport.com website.  It’s mandated by the government.

FreeCreditReport.com is a division of Experian, one of the big three credit bureaus.  Prior to looking into FreeCreditReport.com, I had never really made much distinction between them in terms of which one I would choose if I wanted to see my credit score (which, unlike your credit report, you do have to pay for).  Having seen what this company is willing to do, however, I will do anything and everything to avoid dealing with Experian in the future.

So we have here an example of a company that is making short term gains — by getting people to sign up for a credit monitoring service they don’t want in order to get a credit report that they are legally entitled to receive for free anyway — at the expense of their long-term brand image.  This is one of my pet peeves in business, this willingness to make a buck now and ignore the future consequences.  Don’t do it.

photo credit: Wootang01

That being said, her Valentine’s Day show left me absolutely flummoxed.  Suze came back from a commercial and announced that she was going to share four key financial benefits of marriage.  My wife and I perked up and sat forward on the couch.  We’re already married; we might as well capitalize on some of the monetary perks, right?  I prepared to take notes.

Suze began to speak.

If you’ve been married for 10 years, she said, and get divorced, you qualify for each other’s social security.

I paused.  That didn’t sound so much like a benefit of marriage as a description of things going horribly, horribly wrong.  No matter, I figured, we still have three left.  Let’s see what other perks there are to marriage, financially speaking.

When one of you dies, Suze continued, the surviving spouse gets to inherit the estate tax-free.

I tilted my head to the side a little and scratched my dome.  Dying was a benefit of marriage?  This wasn’t really filling me with hope.

Advantage number three, Suze stated: when one of you dies, the other can take over the retirement account.

“Suze is obsessed with death,” I muttered.  “Are there any advantages to being married and actually being alive?”

The fourth advantage, Suze declared, is…

I waited on tenterhooks.  Here it comes, I thought, that gold nugget of insight that we can take away and use to set ourselves on the road to marital bliss and financial freedom.

When you die, you have an advantage in terms of  the estate tax limits on what you can leave to your kids.

The segment was over.  I blinked.  Quite a few times, actually.  Then I turned to my wife and asked bemusedly, “What the heck was that?!?”

The advantages of marriage are, apparently, only realized when you terminate your marriage, willfully or otherwise.  Talk about a major Valentine’s Day buzz-kill.

photo credit: klynslis