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Author Archives: Patrick O'Beirne, spreadsheet auditor
UK Covid-19 Track & Trace Excel snafu: Uncontrolled spreadsheets lead to data loss
The story broke around October 5th that Public Health England temporarily lost 16,000 Covid test results because they did not notice that the XLS data format they were using was insufficient to process the number of results they were getting. … Continue reading
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Nested JSON to flat data tables
Have you ever had to convert a file of JSON text to Excel tables? Not simple JSON, but one with a collection of dictionaries inside a dictionary inside a collection of dictionary records inside another collection of records inside a … Continue reading
VBA Read Unicode file contents in various encodings
To read a text file, you need to be able to handle more character sets than just ANSI. Not just in the contents but also in the file and folder names.The classic article on this is by Joel Spolsky:https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/ Misinterpreting … Continue reading
A look back to Eusprig 2019
The 20th conference of the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group was held in Browns of Covent Garden, London on 11-12 July 2019, Thursday 11 July 2019 Developing Excel Thought Leadership David Lyford-Smith, ICAEW, Chartered Accountants’ Hall This described the development … Continue reading
A look ahead to Eusprig 2019
The 20th annual conference of the European Spreadsheet Risk Special Interest Group (http://www.eusprig.org) will be held on July 11 & 12 at The Barrister’s Court, Browns, 82-84 St Martin’s Ln, Covent Garden, London WC2N 4AG, UK. David Lyford-Smith of the … Continue reading
Posted in eusprig, Excel/VBA, Research, Software Quality, Software Testing
Tagged Excel tutorials, Spreadsheet management, spreadsheet risk
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UK HMRC MTD OAuth2 Excel/VBA demo
I’m making available as open source my VBA routines for the “Hello World” tests on the UK HMRC “Making Tax Digital” (MTD) web service which use oAuth2 and JSON. Thanks to posts from Bruce McPherson (Excel Ramblings), Tim Hall (Excel-REST), … Continue reading
MS Azure Cognitive Services V3 API Translator VBA
I have now updated my free open-source VBA code for the MS Translator API V3, which uses JSON data formats rather than the previous XML. There is no change in your subscription method, you can continue to use the same … Continue reading
Extend Excel: London 18 Oct
Charles Williams is organising a conference in London on October 18th, 2018. I’ll be there! This is a rare chance to meet leading developers from all over the world and hear directly from MS on Excel Extensibility. Expect to be … Continue reading
Posted in Excel/VBA, ExcelDna, Open Source, Productivity, Research, Software Quality, Software Testing, Uncategorized
Tagged Conference, Excel Developers
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Excel and PowerPoint 2016 for Mac gripes
I’ve been trying to maintain compatibility between Mac and Windows versions of Excel/VBA apps for a while now, and it’s a pain. These notes refer to versions 16.14 of both Excel and Powerpoint. Here are some of my recent threads … Continue reading
Posted in Excel/VBA, Mac, powerpoint, Uncategorized
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Dublin Tech Summit 18-19 Apr 2018
#DTS18 @dubtechsummit Dublin Tech Summit is a two day (Wed 18 and Thu 19 April 2018) meetup of startups and business people intended to connect investors to tech companies, and to highlight emerging tech trends. I attended as a guest … Continue reading
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