Any Excel gurus out there?

[Sockpuppet]

Out of all of the skills that I know excel has to be one of the skills that has earnt me the most dough. Not becuase excel is a particularly hard skill set to learn or in much demand but the ability to analyse numbers is such a under represented skill set.

[Pondlife]

Out of all of the skills that I know excel has to be one of the skills that has earnt me the most dough. Not becuase excel is a particularly hard skill set to learn or in much demand but the ability to analyse numbers is such a under represented skill set.

WHS.

Many a project has been saved from the brink by being able to analyse and fix master data before it gets loaded.

[Olly]

hear hear....
On a good contract I can get 450 a day...seldom less than 350 and whilst I've got a computer science degree and programming experience all I really need is Excel and Access. It's not the tools, it's what you do with them and in 8 or so years of doing roles often focussed around data I can tell you now there are a lot of people who may know their way round access or a spreadheet but far far fewer who know where to look for bits that need fixing or investigating and how to go about that.

Having said all that I get very very nervous when it comes to look for a new contract and I realise the only skills I can really remember are front end use of excel and access and when you search for that on Jobserve you get a load of £140 a day numbers!

[Sysman]

This was the same guy who made me install Office 4.3 extra bits, Professional instead of Standard was it? Anyway - 32 floppy disks cos he 'needed' Access. Installed it for him, we fired it up and he says 'Right, what does it do?'

Does Office 2007 / 2010 still come with Extras which aren't installed by default? Back in Office 1997 days* you needed to load the Extras stuff to get better options for import/export of text files. Those aren't there on my locked down work PC (and to boot some clown has set it to output CSV files using semicolon as the delimiter, which isn't exactly useful when you are dealing with AD import/export tools).

* believe it or not, Office 1997 was the last version I bought myself

[Sysman]

hear hear....
On a good contract I can get 450 a day...seldom less than 350 and whilst I've got a computer science degree and programming experience all I really need is Excel and Access. It's not the tools, it's what you do with them and in 8 or so years of doing roles often focussed around data I can tell you now there are a lot of people who may know their way round access or a spreadheet but far far fewer who know where to look for bits that need fixing or investigating and how to go about that.

The last time I had a huge pile of software licences to check against systems, Access was an invaluable tool.

Having said all that I get very very nervous when it comes to look for a new contract and I realise the only skills I can really remember are front end use of excel and access and when you search for that on Jobserve you get a load of £140 a day numbers!

At one client they had a policy of paying everyone the same rate, whether they were a VB code monkey or sysadmin or webpage wallah. It actually worked well and people were free to move between projects, pick up new skills etc.

I suspect the Oracle DBAs escaped that rule, but they kept their traps shut.