Life Update

Happy January!

I am looking forward to getting back into doing instructional posts as well as the launch of several more Excel templates. I will be doing more vlogs soon and will post links to them here.

Since my last post my 4th son was born. Ezra was born at home with the help of our midwife.  It was a wonderful delivery and my wife did a tremendous job. The other 3 boys are growing up fast. Before long wrestling with my kids will be a losing proposition.

The family also went through a big move and now we are living in the country and have moved the company to this location as well. It was a great first year for our second generation construction business. If you would like more information about that you can find it at www.brasbyconstruction.com

I have reworked several of my Excel templates for the business. My overtime calculator instead of being straight prorated now takes into account how many days were worked during the week and prioritizes giving each day an equal amount of regular time. This way of calculating does a better job giving longer days the proper amount of overtime. The calculator still can handle multiple jobs in a day, short days, as well as Work Comp splits.

I am also working on adding work comp premiums to my Job Profit and Loss template.  Since my company has multiple rates that can apply to the same job I will be able to calculate the cost of these premiums in the Job P&L. At this time I am not planning on selling this template, but I may feature it in an upcoming vlog.

This year I also purchased Office 365 so my blogs and templates will no longer be in Excel 2010. I used Excel 2013 for a couple months and just recently updated to Excel 2016. The biggest differences seem to be in appearance to mirror the updates in Windows 8 and 10. I have enjoyed the little box at the top that allows you to enter the name of a tool you are trying to find and have the link to it pop up. I also noticed that in PivotTables and PivotCharts they added a Timeline feature that is much like a slicer, but gives lots of options with filtering by date.

Once Quick Books comes out with patches for Windows 10 I will consider getting a laptop with touchscreen tech. It would be handy to be able to scroll left to right easily by touching the screen. I am currently taking financial analysis classes at my local community college. This has been fantastic because it is not a traditional class. The professor comes to my place of business and helps me with my set of books while expanding my capabilities. I am about to start my 3rd semester in this certificate.

I am currently building an activity tracker. It will allow the user to track how they spend their time and will generate reports that include trends based on weekdays and months. I am working on adding a goals feature to it that should allow the user to set goals based on day, week, month, or the entire year and know how to set short-term goals to reach their long-term ones. It should also be able to track progress toward each goal.

As always I am open to ideas for new templates as well as any feedback on any of my content. Until next time, utilize the tools that you have and remember that every cell = a calculator.

Nathan
-ExcelHelpsYou