Better Together

Question: Would you like to access hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional staff time to advance your mission? The answer is volunteers! Volunteers in Canada currently contribute billions of dollars of value to organizations. What is needed to tap into that value is addressed in the next four articles about designing, implementing, and sustaining an effective volunteer program.

A volunteer is a person who does something, especially helping other people, willingly and without being forced or paid to do it
– Cambridge English Dictionary

• Better Together: Introduction
  What motivates people to volunteer? …often volunteering on a regular basis fulfills a desire for significance; to be part of something bigger…
• Better Together: Part 1 – Designing
  Design an effective volunteer program drawing on the deep resources available though Volunteer Canada.
• Better Together: Part 2 – Implementing
  Volunteers… from the hockey mom down the street, the senior who serves at a homeless shelter or the saintly Mother Teresa…they truly are valuable!  In the previous blog we discussed…
• Better Together: Part 3 – Sustaining
  As we discussed in the previous blogs, volunteers are a human resources treasure! Volunteering benefits both organizations and individuals. Managing human resources has always been important, but is more important…

Excel Re-Imagined

There are many sophisticated reporting and budgeting, forecasting and analysis tools on the market. Much of the marketing messaging around that software challenges us to ditch Excel in favor of their tool. They tell us Excel workbooks are prone to errors, don’t scale well, don’t handle succession well, and are subject to file corruption. It may all be true. But when everybody has left for the day, we still check the numbers in Excel.

Let’s learn to use this tool well to reduce the chance of errors and to make our workbooks scalable and understandable to other users.

Recent updates to Excel provide us with an even more flexible and powerful application. In this series of posts with accompanying demo workbooks for download, we explore some of the recent improvements. Read on….

• Excel Re-Imagined
  An intro to the new functions and capabilities of Excel’s updated calculation engine.
• Excel FILTER Function
  FILTER is used to return a subset from a larger set of data based on specific criteria.
• Excel SORT Function
  SORT does exactly what its name suggests. However, because it updates automatically, it is often a superior choice than a pivot table.
• Excel UNIQUE Function
  One of the most useful dynamic array functions, UNIQUE returns a list of unique values from a longer list. Used in combination with SORT and FILTER, it is useful in a wide variety of situaitons.
• Excel SEQUENCE Funciton
  SEQUENCE provides the ability to create dynamic sequences of numbers or dates. This function is helpful with setting up amortization tables or forecasting models. It can even be used at the core of a dynamic calendar.
• Excel XLOOKUP Function
  XLOOKUP brings numerous improvements over VLOOKUP: Returning values without regard to column relative position, predictable error handling and the ability to return an array of results.
• Excel LET Function
  Released for Office 365 recently, the new LET function brings clarity and transparency to spreadsheets by assigning names to the results of calculations.