An interview hosted by Mia Quagliarello with David Lyford-Smith, a UK based accountant and a spreadsheet warrior. We talked with David about channeling an eager community’s enthusiasm in productive ways.
“The question is ‘how do I keep my volunteers on track?’ because they're hugely motivated.” - David Lyford-Smith
If you spend a lot of time working with spreadsheets, you know they have a special power to rule the world. You can do almost anything with them from creating a shopping list to financial planning and analysis. Spreadsheets' powers lie in the fact they are accessible to people who aren’t programmers and coders. But if even just one cell is wrong, it can wreak terrible havoc.
David Lyford-Smith works for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. In the 1990s, ICAEW started a tech faculty to serve as internal experts researching matters of technology and automation affecting accountants. In 2013, it was apparent that the excel content was the most popular, and a collective of “excel warriors” was spun up into its own community.
David raised his hand to help steer the direction of the work and joined several thousands of chartered accountants and others seeking to mitigate spreadsheet risk in workplaces around the world. They’ve created accessible materials like twenty principles for good spreadsheet practice as a guide for those who use spreadsheets daily and for those without special spreadsheet skills.
We talked with David about the power of spreadsheets and the way in which he is channeling the enthusiasm of excel warriors to help each other and to help the public mitigate spreadsheet risk.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
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Note: This transcript is automatically generated and there may be some errors. Timestamps may vary slightly based on episode announcement & commercial placement.
Bailey (00:02):
Welcome to Get Together. I'm your host Bailey Richardson. I'm a partner at people in company and a co-author of gets together how to build a community with your people.
Mia (00:17):
And I'm Mia, relo get together correspondent and the VP of content and community for matter. M T T R a new media and community platform. Launching later this year,
Bailey (00:30):
In each episode of this podcast, we interview everyday people who have built extraordinary communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to hundreds, maybe even thousands more members today we're talking to David Lifford Smith, a UK based accountant with a special skill. He's a spreadsheet warrior. It's hard to see, but spreadsheets can rule the world. And when things go wrong, when even one cell is off, it can wreak terrible habits. David works for the Institute of chartered accountants in England and Wales, and is a key member of an Excel spreadsheet community with several thousands of chartered accountants and others who seek to mitigate spreadsheet risk and create accessible materials so that the rest of us read me, don't become spreadsheet Dunces with disastrous effects for our projects, our workplaces, and even the world. Mia, tell me what stood out to you from your conversations with David?
Mia (01:31):
Well, I had no idea that spreadsheets were so important and could be so dangerous.
Bailey (01:36):
I, I, now that you say it, I get it.
Mia (01:40):
So I learned about the importance of having like a really solid content strategy when you're building attracting and maintaining a community centered around knowledge sharing.
Bailey (01:50):
So dad's unexpected insight, I must say, but please go on
Mia (01:54):
Important, very important to have good information out there. And David and his team used tips of the week blog post to kind of get people into the door. And from there, they get higher level, but essential resources, such as 20 principles for good spreadsheet, practice and webinars and things like that. So that's related to another question. I asked him about how he keeps his volunteers motivated. He said, actually that motivation, isn't the problem. This is an endearingly geeky community. It's more about how he can channel that enthusiasm in productive ways. And again, that came back to content. So that list of 20 principles, it was winnowed down from 120 that came from the community. So it was a great example, right?
Mia (02:41):
So it was a great example of not only creating content for a community, but with it as well. And then from there, David said, most of the work is convincing people that they need to listen and then getting them to really listen to you. So you don't mess up your spreadsheets.
Bailey (02:59):
I am a total spreadsheet dunce, and because of that intro and because of the curiosity that you've peaked, I will listen and I will take my spreadsheeting more seriously. So let's do it. Let's jump in fellow spreadsheet. Dunces of the world. I hope that you're tuning in. Let's go. Yeah, you're ready.
Mia (03:19):
I'm ready, David. Welcome to the get together podcast.
David (03:25):
Thank you very much for having me.
Mia (03:27):
So for those of us who are blind to the power of spreadsheets, what are some examples that we may not be able to see on the surface of how they roll the world?
David (03:37):
So the thing about spreadsheets is that you can do almost anything with them. And particularly they're very accessible for people who aren't programmers and coders, or have a lot of expertise. So people might be used to using spreadsheets for organizing their shopping lists or doing little bits of personal finance, but actually they get used for an awful lot of analysis behind the scenes in banking and finance, for example, and there's a loss of information, ends up getting stored in spreadsheets in a lot of financial planning and actuarial work. There's also a lot of it there. So really anywhere that people are needing to organize and analyze data, it tends to creep in. It's also a great piece of middleware. You know, it's, it's a really brilliant program for plugging the gaps. When you've got data in one piece of software, that's not quite the right shape and you want to have it look a different way for some reporting somewhere else. So while you slap it into Excel and you move things around a bit and you get it looking the way you want, and that's kind of how Xcel has come to fill in loads of nodes of gaps in the, in the world.
Mia (04:40):
Yeah. Can you talk to me a little bit about the spreadsheet universe? Like it does seem like XL is the King here. How do you think about all the different platforms and where is the most activity?
David (04:52):
Yeah, Excel, microsites Excel is by far the largest. They did at one point have something like in 97, 98% market share of, of the spreadsheet platform. They weren't the first there was several other spreadsheet packages in the kind of eighties and nineties that were all kind of competing, but Excel really came to completely dominate. In more recent years, it has started to creep down a little bit. They probably still have, you know, 80, 90% maybe higher, but Google sheets in particular has really made a big difference partly by being free and easily accessible to lots of people. And then there are a couple of open source options as well that people use Apple has their own version called numbers. There's a couple of different free versions of very similar functionality out there as well. For most business users. I think Excel is still the standard, partly because of the prevalence of office and Microsoft three 65 more generally the kind of a whole office suite, but also because I think it's the probably the most fully featured the different spreadsheet packages. If you're trying to do any sort of more complicated analysis, there's there's a lot more options there.
Mia (06:05):
So we learned about you from a wired UK article that called you one of several leaders of this movement of XL warriors. What is it exactly that you guys do?
David (06:16):
So I think what's really happened is that there's a lot of research that's been done over the years into spreadsheet errors and in particular because Excel and spreadsheets are so widely used in business. They very often go wrong. Part of that is because they are widely used. And so there are lots of use going out there that could go wrong, partly it's because the people don't take them that seriously. Don't think of them as like a significant real engineering project for a real kind of software program. And it's not kind of controlled or looked after. And part of it's because people don't necessarily have the right training and experience. People just kind of pick stuff up on the job and learn as they go along. And so I, and many others kind of recognize that there is this very real aspect of spreadsheet risk, and that spreadsheets do actually play a big part in a lot of business and a lot of how the world works and they do go wrong.
David (07:09):
And if people continue to not take them seriously, they will keep on going wrong. And, and those, those errors have caused some pretty significant errors in the past and pretty significant effects on people too. So there was, for example, a spreadsheet error at the heart of one of the biggest collapses in the financial crisis where one of the big companies really badly underestimated their exposure to risk because somewhere there was a spreadsheet that was averaging two numbers, instead of adding them together, you know, just one formula that was just a little bit different, but that, you know, completely changed the picture of what they thought their risk situation was and led to something being, you know, being a very different world than what they thought they were. And there's, there's lots and lots of examples of these kinds of things.
David (07:57):
And every time one of these comes up, what happens in the presses? People derived them for saying, Oh, they shouldn't be doing this something that's important in a spreadsheet. This was never the right thing to do in the first place. You should never touch Excel if you're trying to do anything serious, that's all points and laugh at them and then not learn any of the lessons and go back to using the same risky spreadsheets we will. We'll use it. We all use ourselves anyway. And that's the problem I think, is that people constantly say that the mistake is using Excel rather than using Excel badly. And I think that's where where I definitely comes in.
Mia (08:29):
Yeah, I really enjoyed, well, not enjoyed, but I found it fascinating to read some of the horror stories on the European spreadsheet, risk interest group. It was everything from, you know, 16,000 COVID cases, going unreported to hospitals, delayed opening to a payment of over half a million dollars. Are these errors human-based or can we blame the spreadsheets?
David (08:51):
It's a little bit of both. I think a lot of them are errrors, either planning. So not having kind of thoughts about how processed and how it's going to be done or they are kind of systematic errors. Yeah.
Mia (09:04):
What are some of the most common errors that you see that cause things to be
David (09:07):
Dates and sort of formatting. Likewise, if you've got a phone number or something like that, that begins with a zero. If you put that in a cell in Excel, it will think, Oh, that's a number numbers. Don't need to have zeros on the myth on the beginning and it will drop them off. But if it's a phone number it's got a zero on the front, then that's important. So just things like that, where it's you know, most most software cares about type. If you say that this is a text type of data, it will keep it as text. If you say it's a number, it will treat it like a number. Xcel will automatically guess what kind of data you have. And when it gets is that wrong, you get things like, you know, thinking that your gene is a date, thinking that your phone number is a numeral and dropping information, that's actually important or changing things that are actually matter. And that's where I think the the kind of areas come in,
Mia (09:55):
What are some of them are surprising errors you've seen in? How long did it take you to solve them?
David (10:00):
When I say remind background, we used to be a pretty much full-time spreadsheet, support person and trainer for a large accounting firm. And so all the time, what I would be going to do is going out and helping people and showing them tools. And I would see things like what people if I had a big, long list of numbers, they would be typing them into a calculator. So add them up and then putting the total in at the bottom, not often, but like that's the sort of thing where you would see, which is hugely error, prone, and impossible to review. And of course, XL will, you will, you can write a formula that's 10, 20 characters long that will do that addition for you. Or even if they knew how to write the formula they were doing equals this cell, plus that cell plus that one, plus that one, plus that one, plus that one, you know, selecting them one at a time.
David (10:46):
Whereas again, you can just make us some formula that will take a whole column over a hundred items and add in one go. So it would be things like that that really stick out in my memory, but also things where somebody who was not familiar with Xcel would probably not notice a problem. I had a case, I talked about it in that article where we were doing some payroll for our clients. So the client had sent us a change log with, you know, information about people's, you know, if they got a pay rise or whatever. And we sent this on to a Bureau that was going to calculate the payroll taxes for France. And one of the things in this sheet was new employee. Here's their name? Here's the tax information, here's their salary. And then here's this other number. And it just said like 38,452 or something like that.
David (11:38):
And it was just a number. And so the payroll Bureau went, Oh, we don't know what this is. I guess it's a joining bonus and put in with like 38, 40,000 Euro, but joining bonus on the draft payslips. And then I, it, I was like, I think that's a date. And it was XL stores dates as numbers. And if you don't format it correctly, it doesn't come out looking like a nice date. It'll just come out as a number in the 30, 40 thousands. And that's what it was, it was their joining dates, but just badly formatted.
Mia (12:09):
That's so fascinating. It sounds really fun. It sounds like you're kind of like a detective.
David (12:15):
There's definitely an element of that. And I mean, the times I got saddest in my career would always been when somebody would come to me and say, Oh, a former colleague of ours made this amazing whizzy spreadsheet that, you know, logs into the tax authority portal and automatically find lots of information for us and then puts it all in a spreadsheet or does whatever clever thing, but they left six months ago and now it's broken and we can't figure out why. And my problem, you know, my job would be to trying to get in there and figure out what they'd done. And, you know, I want to say that bad spreadsheet use is definitely not contained to inexperienced users. Experienced users are terrible at doing really complicated things and not explaining how anything works. And then you get this problem where as soon as that person is on holiday or moves on to another job, it all just falls over.
David (13:00):
It doesn't work anymore. And sometimes I was able to patch it together and figure out what they'd been doing and get it working again. And sometimes it was just completely undocumented and way too complicated, but I just wasn't able to fix it. And that's the stuff that I found really frustrating. And that's why I've always tried to do when I've been building templates or tools for other people is to document things, to explain them, to make sure that it will last beyond my involvement with it. And it isn't just reliant on me being there to drive it. And the other people will be able to use it even after me.
Mia (13:31):
And maybe this is a good segue to talk about like the larger community that you've built around this, this passion and this process. How big is this community of XL warriors?
David (13:43):
So the XL community of ICW has several thousand members who are primarily UK based because we're a UK accountancy body, but we do actually have pretty significant membership across Europe and Southeast Asia as well. We have then got a few dozen active members who actually come and speak on an income to take part in our committees and are kind of directly involved in helping us steer the direction that we're taking with me entity and produce the publications that we make. And that's the kind of the two audiences that we work with.
Mia (14:21):
And where does the community primarily congregate?
David (14:26):
Well in a pre 2020 Wells we would mostly be meeting and discussing with committee meetings in London's. So chartered accountants hole is the building where I would normally be working, which is in the city of London. And these days, of course we are primarily a remote based community and it's actually because our members are based all over the world. You know, we do blogs or we do webinars. We do kind of a lot of remote work anyway, and this year we've really done a lot more. So we've been doing more presentations and we're kind of hosting of our publications and trying to be digital first of course, through necessity, but also just to make sure that we're reaching as many people as we can. So yeah, when you first got this group going, how did you help the community gain traction?
David (15:14):
So the group that I actually, but we sit within is called the tech faculty as ICW. So this was actually started in the 1990s as a kind of internal expert group within the institutes looking at matters of technology and automation and how they were affecting accountants. And then over the course of many years, it was very clear that the XL content, the spreadsheet related content was the most popular. And so in 2013, it was kind of spun up into its own XL community. At that time I wasn't actually working at ICW. I was working in practice at one of the accountancy firms and when they first created it my kind of former colleague Richard Anning, who set it, the whole thing up, put out a message to the, kind of, any of, any of the members just after it had been created, saying, what was anyone interested in becoming you know, representative of a volunteer on one of these committees that we're setting up to steer the work that we're doing?
David (16:11):
And I was interested. So I, I got in touch and I was myself only just qualified as an accountant at the time. And I'd just finished my ACA qualification, which is pretty similar to the U S CPA. And so I wasn't sure if they would be interested in having somebody that you know, was fairly early on in their career kind of involved in that. So I got in touch and asked and he nearly bit my pan off and said, yes, absolutely. And what I've since learned actually is that getting attention to people who are very senior in their career is actually a little bit easier for the institutes professional bodies, generally than people who are early on. Cause they tend to be really busy and have not very much control over their own diaries. So I was then kind of involved in that for a few years as a volunteer.
David (16:58):
And I was always trying to bring the voice of you know, the perspective of somebody who was early on in their career and who was recently qualified and had been a student very recently trying to sell, talk about what was most relevant to that audience and how we could make the most of it. And then when Paul Booth, who's the guy that was running it prior to me, then retired Richard approached and asked if I would be interested in coming to work for the Institute full time which I did five and a bit years ago. And so since that time, my, my role has been about building up these communities, all these active volunteers who help kind of steer on the committees, what we're doing, and then equally getting the message out there to all of the chartered accountants that we represent as ICW, we've got about 175,000 chartered accountants who are a member of our Institute and all pretty much all of them are spreadsheet users to some extent. And then for the four or 5,000 to have specifically signed up for the XL community as a specific area of interest for them, making sure that we are helping them to think about the small questions of how they can write this formula that they want to do, that it will send a bit questions of what part spreadsheets really have to play in their business, their organization, and how they can make sure that they're not opening themselves up to spreadsheet risk. How do you keep your volunteers motivated?
David (18:23):
I think actually almost the question is how do I keep my volunteers on track because they're hugely motivated. I think it's because people who get really into Excel, it's one of those things that people get can get really into. It's a very geeky pursuits in many respects and people are often very passionate about it. And particularly when you have volunteers, you know, Excel or spreadsheets, some of their professional career, they are financial modeling experts, or they are people who do training courses and spreadsheets for a living. And I think that many of them have seen the same things that I see in terms of the same mistakes coming up, time and time, again, the same kind of errors causing problems for people time and again, and they want things to be better. You know, they want people to be happier and having an easier time.
David (19:12):
And so actually I find that there's a huge wellspring of, of enthusiasm for trying to spread the word and get get good practice onto people's minds and talk about these things. And my job has, I think been a lot more about trying to direct that into, into useful directions, you know, actually getting publications put together because I think there's a huge amount of interest in doing that. And so trying to get all of that energy contained and directed in a useful direction, I think is much more the problem than the motivation.
Mia (19:43):
What is the business model behind your community?
David (19:46):
So we are part of a wider professional body that has of course, subscription membership from people maintaining their professional qualification, but we're a sort of optional add on so people can choose to subscribe to the tech faculty and then they get their Excel community with that or they can just subscribe to the XL community as a standalone unit. And then they get some online training modules and some webinars and blogs that we produce. But then we also we're not exactly a company and we're not exactly a nonprofit as the ICW we're founded by Royal charter in the late 19th century. So we have a sort of official documents signed by queen Victoria, somewhere that's tested, we should exist. We should further the practice and theory of accounting. And we should also look to the public interest. And so when I talk about things like the 20 principles we could spreadsheet practice or any of these other things we've done, those are then freely available to the public because those are things that we think are in the public interest and things which should be disseminated, not just our counselors, but for anybody that's interested in them. And so we kind of match trying to serve the needs of our community subscribers and the people who actually, you know, foot LaBelle of us doing the work with the wider public interest aspects of our work in terms of providing some expert insight on how to make spreadsheets work.
Mia (21:14):
Is there anyone in the community we call them hand raisers on this podcast that really stands out to you in terms of their personal story and the ways they help push this purpose forward? Maybe, maybe even a young David, if you will.
David (21:28):
Yeah. I mean, I guess I probably was one of those at some point. The person that's probably the most active at the moment is a guy called Simon Hearst. And he's very, very passionate, I think about what makes spreadsheets tech. And I think also he's somebody that's, you know, probably closer to retirement, but in thinking about trying to make a difference with things, and he's hugely passionate about making sure that we do the best work that we can with the XL community, that we reach as many people as we can. And from, from his perspective, you know, he's always somebody that feels that maybe the world doesn't take spreadsheets seriously enough. And maybe even ICW the XL community, doesn't take them seriously enough. And he's always someone that's very willing to challenge me on, you know, are we doing enough? Are we getting enough traction?
David (22:15):
Have we gotten the message out to enough people? Could we be doing more? And that's something that, you know, as a, somebody that sort of running the community professionally, I really appreciate having that that kind of passion to, you know, to constantly be pushing me, to try and make sure that I'm thinking about how best I can do, you know, the best I can do with it whilst juggling, you know, the XL community is a big part of my job and I do have other responsibilities. So I'm always trying to make sure that I'm doing the best I can with the time I have for it.
Mia (22:44):
Shout out to Simon. Thanks Simon. Thank you for doing good work there. David, what were some of the things you learned the hard way when building this community?
David (22:55):
I would say really that the hardest thing for me has been that you have to acknowledge that no matter how much thought and effort and passion you put into building something that doesn't, that alone will not make people listen and make people read it and think about it. So, but I'm, I'm doing my best to make sure that, you know, all of the tens of thousands of accounting students that go through our qualification are exposed to these ideas early on while they're picking up their first kind of spreadsheets as they get into the working world. And hoping that we can get to a point where we don't need to have a new spring anymore and we won't have to, we will, you know, we'll find it difficult to fill that horror stories page. That would be wonderful.
Mia (23:40):
Yeah. We don't want to see those anymore. Well, how has COVID changed work or the demand for it?
David (23:48):
So the first thing that came for us, I think very quickly, obviously there was the general point of, you know, move to remote working the fact that we were having to do our own committees and everything remotely, but the big change for our members was that if they wanted to get access to government support for their businesses or for additional funding support, so cover shortfalls from their banks, there was a sudden and very sharp increase in the needs for people to be producing cashflow, forecasts, financial models, all these kinds of, you know, formal forecasts of how they thought that their organizations were doing as part of applying for funding from various sources. And so we had a real sudden spike in demand for those things. And therefore we had to very quickly try to pivot to producing additional resources for supporting those things.
David (24:38):
And then we'd obviously been doing stuff on those topics before, you know, financial modeling is one of the kind of perennial topics that we talk about in the community, but we had to really ramp it up. We had got some extra resources and some bloggers to put some stuff together about the remote working features in office three 65. We had a couple of other folks step in to do some stuff on cashflow, forecasting, and risk to do with with that. So we, you know, we had to really quickly get that demand met. And then since then we've been trying to do more webinars because it's something that we've always done and something that I really enjoy doing. But seeing as we were no longer able to go out and deliver sessions in person, there was just this big demand for additional webinars.
David (25:22):
And everybody I think was doing more webinars. You know, it's nothing revolutionary, but we also tried to change up what we were doing a little bit more. So usually our webinars would tend to be, you know, 40 minutes of presentation from an Excel expert on some particular topic and then some Q and a at the end. But this year we actually tried to do some which were more like surgery things where it would be just an hour where I would be there and people could come along to the webinar and ask their questions and I would answer them. So it was just all Q and a no presentation, just open them, you know, just experimenting with different ideas about
Speaker 4 (26:02):
How can people who want to educate themselves more on better spreadsheet use and hygiene. What other resources would you recommend?
David (26:10):
So there's lots of good things out there. I will, of course start with the ones that we've written. So there are some nice CZ short form URLs for the three publications we've done. So it's icy aew.com forward slash XL, 20 principles, spreadsheet, competency, financial modeling modeling with two L's that is the kind of free PDFs of the three big publications that we've done in terms of trying to get a grasp of good spreadsheet, practicing, like you just want to kind of just see a few of you. Somebody uses the spreadsheets in your job, and he wants to kind of try and upskill yourself a bit. There are some free webinars on the ICW website. We have some free blogs as well. But there's equally loads of great resources out there on the YouTube channel. Xcel is fun, is excellent, really well presented and very broad ranging.
David (27:03):
There's Mr. XL and Chan do, and other big websites dedicated to, you know, if, if what you're looking to do is learn how to do more stuff in Excel. Those are great places to do that. If you want to be thinking about the big pictures of, you know, how can you build a financial model that you can trust? How can you review a spreadsheet to make sure that it's doing what you think it is doing? Then yeah, I would look to there are several different financial modeling standards and guidelines out there, which are very much worth considering. And also actually looking at things like the use brig website, which is E U S P R I g.org. They have all of the past papers from the past academic conferences. They have that horror stories page. If you want to read through that, there's some excellent stuff in there. And there's also some mention on things from regulators and other kinds of industry bodies that have gotten involved in this stuff before. So there's loads of resources out there. I am also very active on the R slash XL subreddit on Reddit, which is very much driven to a question and answer format, but, you know, if people want to get answers to their spreadsheet questions, and those are very active and a positive community on there as well.
Mia (28:19):
Do you know if you're on, do you know if you're on Microsoft's radar, I'm gonna start again. Do you know if you're on Microsoft radar? I feel like you in this community would be a tremendous resource for them.
David (28:32):
Yeah. We've had a few conversations actually with Microsoft both in the UK and I've, I've been to their offices. But the, sort of the specific office in near Seattle where they are actually making where they make Excel. I was out there for some vacation time and I actually took a little time outs of my vacation to consider a woman speak to some of the, like the development team there. So they are aware of us. And I think that they are very conscious that accountants are one of the big user groups that sort of particular interest to them. That's one of their biggest kind of drivers of, of what they do. You know, they know that accountants are heavy Excel users, heavy spreadsheet users, and a very engaged with it. So they're always interested in hearing, you know, what our members are doing in spreadsheets, you know, for them, the difficulties always knowing what people want to be in the program, what people need to be added.
David (29:26):
And it can, it's very hard for them, I think, to get that information. But it's equally interesting for us hearing from them, what they have found them, what kind of the problems that they have. Cause you know, they get they see how widely spreadsheets are used and misuse. And you know, they've said, I was talking to one of them staff who was saying that, you know, they got called at some point by somebody saying that they thought that their knitting pattern program was good, but missing some functionality. And they're like, what missing pattern program? I'm like, yeah. In Microsoft Excel, you're on this and missing that.
David (30:02):
But it's super good for storing missing patterns, except for you can't divide a cell trying into like two triangles, which will be really helpful for recording anything pattern. Like that's not what it's for, but that's what it gets useful. This is the point in, you know, people use it for all sorts of stuff. And it's, you know, it's, it's a tool that can be turned to any purpose that is both its greatest strength and his greatest weakness. People use it for things they shouldn't and that goes wrong, but then people can use it for amazing stuff. People have made art in XL people who've made games and Excel. It's, it's really just an amazing amazingly versatile piece of software. But I think that does catch it up sometimes as well.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
What didn't, you know, when you started this work that you now know about building a community, I think
David (30:56):
If I had to condense it to a lesson it's been about persistence. It's really easy to think when we started and people were suggesting ideas, they said, Oh yeah, we should do something about good practice. And then we're all like, yeah, that sounds good. We spent ages thinking about it, working on it. We made the document. And that feels like it's the end when you've been working on a project like that. But what I've learned is that that's the, the end of the beginning. It's, there's still a lot more work in getting the message out and is actually most of the work. Most of the work is not about figuring out what good practice looks like or what you need to say. Most of the work is convincing people that they need to listen and then getting them to listen to you.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
And how do you get people to listen? That seems like a really important skill to have
David (31:44):
Good because they are catchy and humorous a lot of the time. But they also, I think open people up to the idea that most of these big disasters have tiny errors at the bottom. You know, it's not some subtle thing. It's a formula. That's not been included all the cells or it's something that's been formatted as text when it should be a number or it's you know, these kinds of tiny errors. And so the point we're trying to get to people is you cannot stop making spreadsheet mistakes because you're human. You can only get so far. What you have to do is try to design and plan what you're doing in a way that will make spreadsheet. Error is less common and you have to peer review, you have to get someone else to look at your work because you this is something that's come out of.
David (32:30):
Use Sprig. There's some great research done on review that said, no matter how careful you are at best self review, you can catch maybe a third of the mistakes that you, but you made the mistakes, which means you're also the least qualified person to spot them. So two thirds of those mistakes will get past you and you need other people to be taking a look if you really want to catch them. So being careful, building in our checks, getting someone else to look at your spreadsheet, these are the things you need to do. And those are the lessons I think that we can get across by focusing on those horror stories and saying these things are hugely embarrassing. Nobody wants to be in that position. And most of the time, it's about a little bit of extra spreadsheet training for the people on the ground.
David (33:10):
A little bit of thoughts about how you're going to lay things out and how you're going to test thing. And a little bit of more effort going into documentation and testing. Those kinds of little changes can make a huge difference to the outcome. And I think if we can convince people that, you know, spreadsheets are a big part of what they do, that risk is going to happen and that they don't have to spend a huge amount of effort fixing it, then hopefully that's enough to, you know, change the minds and get people to think about it.
Mia (33:37):
That's great advice. What has working with this community meant to you?
David (33:42):
You know the I've been writing a weekly XL blog for about seven years now and where I'm up at nearly in the four hundreds of blogs written. One of those that's the most successful is just about my spreadsheets, formulas and calculating for some reason why not. And that's the one that has the most reads and the most hits. And I think about how a small, you know, 25 minutes of blog writing from me can have saved a million people from some incredible annoying problem that they're having. It's that multiplication factor that I think is so compelling, but you know, if you've got an audience, you only need to be able to make a tiny change to each of them to really make a fantastically large effect on the world. And that's what I think I've taken away from all of the work that we've done in the XL world. And that's what I'm most happy about and most proud of.
Mia (34:37):
And it also sounds like content is really like the glue of this community. Do you have other members creating content as well?
David (34:45):
We do. Yeah. So thankfully it's not all me. So we have a few of our volunteer members writes blogs for us on various topics. And we also pay some bloggers and webinar makers as well as they've helped produce content for us. And that is very much to help support the part of the XL community that is, as I mentioned, it's a paid for community. So the people who pay for that, we want to make sure they're getting their money's worth and that they are happy with the content that they're receiving. That's helping them to improve, you know, learn new formulas or how to automate things using power query or how to, you know, think about those things. And the content is also is the way that we get people's attention for the bigger picture and stuff as well. So again, when we are getting out of the XL community, we can say, Hey, come learn about the newest thing in Excel.
David (35:36):
And then while there we can say, and that's actually comparing it with other things to say, how is it easier to use? How is it more difficult? Where are you likely to go wrong with traditional formulas, that these will save you? Where are you likely to go wrong with these new formulas that you would have been saved from before? And that's the kind of stuff that I think is the most important stuff that we do for all that. I think, you know, what the audience, most things they want is, is the suites. But they also need the medicine and it's about making sure they get both.
Mia (36:07):
And you mentioned Reddit, but what are some other channels that have been the most effective for you in terms of quote, unquote marketing and attracting new members?
David (36:16):
So we also have a Twitter account, but actually a lot of our work is, is kind of actually more about community outreach through our connections. So we're very fortunate as a professional body to have members in a lot of high places and lots of interesting companies, they will have ins with the movers and shakers and help us to get out there and spread the word about what we're doing and to open the doors, to kind of getting what we're doing involved.
Mia (36:42):
And where do you go from here? What are you trying to figure out right now? And what's the long-term vision for what you guys are doing?
David (36:49):
So we're actually working on a fourth publication to join the three that I've talked about previously, which is about spreadsheet review. So talking about, you know, if somebody emails you and there's an attached spreadsheet and they've said, Oh, here's our business plan or here's the financial model or the cashflow forecast that I've prepared or whatever it might be. Where do you start? How do you try to detect errors in it? How do you make your use of your time most effectively? So with that, there's been a community of writing projects and we're now work shopping on, you know, trying to build a draft and put that together. So I'm hoping that next year we'll have another publication. Again, it will be free to the public, but talking about spreadsheet review and how to go about doing that and how to make the most use of your time. And then beyond that with the XL community, I think it's just about keeping, doing well, things like this, getting out there and letting people know that there are people out there who think about Excel a lot and who worry about spreadsheets going wrong and who are trying to improve matters and trying to make sure that people are thinking about things and steering clear of those those pitfalls and those, those easy mistakes.
Mia (37:59):
Yeah. So if people do want to get in touch what can they do and how can they get involved?
David (38:05):
So if you're interested in finding out more about assess, then you can email xl@icaw.com for some information, that'll also get passed along to me as well. If you want to talk to us about anything, any of the work that we're doing with the XL community then you can find information about us, about it there. And that's probably the best way really of getting in touch with me as well to talk about everything that you know I'm doing and that we're doing with with spreadsheets and with Excel. And do you have any last parting words of advice for our listeners on what they can do to avoid having to call it?
David (38:47):
Well, the biggest thing that I always said when I was an in-house XL specialist was you're very welcome to contact me or someone like me for help, but I infinitely prefer being contacted with, I've got this big spreadsheet task, and I want your advice. Then I had this big spreadsheet task four weeks ago, and now I'm four weeks in and it's, I'm struggling. Can you help me fix it to 10 minutes of of sketching out how you want it to work and at the beginning can save you hours of problems trying to fix bad choices later on.
Mia (39:24):
David, it's safe to say you've totally revolutionized my thinking when it comes to how I'm thinking about my spreadsheets and how I will approach them. So thank you so much for your time. This has been really interesting. No problem. There has been an absolute pleasure.
Mia (39:42):
If you want to connect with David and learn more right to X L I C a w.com. That's the letter X the letter l@icaw.com. And he'll get your message there.
Bailey (39:58):
What an amazing email address, thank you to our team. Thank you. Rosanna Gabon for engineering and editing Greg David for his design work and Katie O'Connell for marketing this episode, you can find out more about the work I do with my partners, Kevin and Kai, as people in co helping organizations get clearer on who their most important communities are and how to build with those people by heading to our website, people and.company. Also, if you want to start your own community for supercharge one, you're already a part of our handbook is here for you. Visit get-together book.com to grab a coffee it's full of stories and learnings from conversations with community leaders like this one with David final thing. If you're still with us, please review this podcast or click subscribe. It helps get these stories out tomorrow.
Speaker 5 (40:48):
Thanks, Bailey SIA.