Excel keyboard shortcut - CTRL+1

Hold down Ctrl and press 1. This opens the format cells dialog box.

Knowledge worker?

Are you a knowledge worker?
Then make sure you know stuff!

Lots of stuff.
A huge range of stuff.

Excel Shortcut - Insert Today's Date

Like a lot of engineers, I live and die by Excel. There are a handful of essential keyboard shortcuts, but they are hard to learn. It seems easier for some reason to learn shortcuts one by one. So I will occasionally post the ones that I think make me more productive.

Ctrl + ;  (Hold down the Control key and press the semicolon key at the same time).
This inserts today's date in the current cell. Cool.

Cool PDF tools

I know - your boss won’t pay for full adobe acrobat to edit and fix pdfs. Don’t grizzle there are lots of free tools that will do the same jobs. The three I find best are:

1) Bullzip – for creating pdfs. It appears in your list of printers. (Windows) http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php

2) PDFsam for splitting, merging, rotating and visual reorganising files http://www.pdfsam.org/ (free, open source Windows and Mac)

3) NitroPDF for converting pdfs to excel, word, extract images and edit pdfs. (Windows) http://www.nitropdf.com/

   Bullzip and pdfsam require the installation of ghostscript a free open source tool.

Let me know in the comments if you have found something better that you have been using for a while.

Why use pdfs for archiving engineering calculations?

Four reasons for a start:

• You can print a copy from almost any format. Even Linux and Apple users get the same printout
• It is likely you will still be able to print a copy 15 years from now.
• PDF is the most widely used format with lots of free open source tools as well as the original Adobe ones.
• You can easily store most common types of documents - drawings, reports and scanned documents in pdf. 

Spreadsheets change over time – almost mysteriously. Print a calculation spreadsheet a year after you last used it and it has nearly always changed. Links are missing, dates have changed, someone has updated it. So save a pdf snapshot of important spreadsheet calculations. This is part of a bigger discussion about electronic engineering files, preserving records and doing calculations in the modern world.

It is always wise to produce a .pdf copy of any report including all attachments and figures. That way, a year from now you can find exactly what you sent and carry an electronic copy with you everywhere. This should go without saying – but I'm surprised how often it doesn’t.

Oh and by the way pdfs can easily be edited (unless they are locked) so don’t assume that they are unchanged from the original.

Buying into a business

A smart guy once told me that a wise man said, that when it comes to buying into an engineering consultancy there are two types of sellers - those who want to sell and those who think they should but don’t really want to. With the latter you will never reach agreement.

Tips for New Engineers - Learning Fast

In the first few months of your engineering career you are expected to know very little. Your charge-out rate is low and everybody expects to have to teach you new things. This is a great period – take advantage of it. Take the opportunity to be taught anything.  Once you have a few years’ experience you will find yourself being asked “Can you size a ...” and if you say no, the reply will become “Oh OK I will get one of the other engineers to do it,” or “ I will teach one of the new guys to do it.”