gavinshearer.com

December 10, 2008

Some Simple Suggestions For Saner Spreadsheets

This is cross-posted from the Mac Mojo blog.

If you're like me, and spend a lot of time building spreadsheets to model or budget or crunch a set of numbers, you have probably had the following experience.

One day, you have a bright idea. You fire up Excel and begin working to express it. After hours and hours of constructing and tweaking and changing and modifying your spreadsheet, you find yourself sitting at your desk, brow sweaty, with a goofy look of happiness on your face - "Aha!" you think. "That's it! I've done it!"

You then save your work, quit Excel, and head off for a much-deserved snack.

Three months later, you remember your genius spreadsheet and want to update it. You locate the file on the drive, double-click, and ... find yourself staring at gobbledygook. The spreadsheet is, well, unreadable - you can't tell which cells do which, what math is being used where, and quickly find yourself starring in an episode of CSI: Excel, relying on clues, fingerprints and guesswork to determine what the heck is actually going on in your workbook.

This "unintelligible workbook" situation is not uncommon - and not even that surprising, if you think about it. Unlike the art of writing, where there are defined conventions (sentence structure, paragraph structure, document structure, story structure), spreadsheets are as varied as the minds that create them. On one hand, this is great - spreadsheets are fantastically flexible tools - but on the other it can lead to confusion, error, and misunderstanding. Without standards for what a spreadsheet "should" look like, the reader of a spreadsheet is often left scratching their head, wondering just what it is they're staring at.

(This by the way, is doubly true in large organizations, where some long-departed employee once built some hairball of a spreadsheet back at the dawn of the last Ice Age, and now your boss wants you to "update it a little bit". I've been there, and, well, good luck with that.)

Enter the concept of spreadsheet "best practices".

As spreadsheets become more integral to our work (and, consequently, more complex in their design and function), a clear need has emerged to have a set of principles around which spreadsheets are designed and developed. There are a number of distinct methodologies and approaches, such as FAST ("Flexible, Accurate, Structured, Transparent"), but in my view the important thing is to find a few guidelines that make sense for you (and the people you work with), and then ... just follow 'em.

My first personal experience with best practices came when I was in business school. My Quantitative Methods coursework was done entirely in Excel, and my professor, Dr. Hillier, insisted that people follow some guidelines when laying out their spreadsheets so he could understand what the students were doing. His guidelines were simple, straightforward, and made a lot of sense; years later, I find myself still using them and saving my sanity. (Dr. Hillier, incidentally, credits Duke University professor Dr. Robert Nau for inspiring him.)

Of the tips I've seen for sane spreadsheet design, the most valuable have been:

• Each cell does one thing, and one thing only. Any given cell on the spreadsheet should be responsible for doing exactly one thing, whether it holds data, calculates something, or merely provides visual space between other cells.
• Use intermediate steps. If a cell is doing one thing and one thing only, then you'll need to use intermediate steps to complete more elaborate calculations. That's OK - subtotals are your friend.
• Separate data from formulas. Formulas should always reference other cells on the worksheet for their input; they should never have hard numbers embedded in the formula itself.
• Use labels. Never let a number sit on a spreadsheet without a text label next to it that explains what it is or what it does. These labels will boost the "readability" of your spreadsheet, and help you spot errors.
• Use color. Use splashes of color to color-code certain cells on the spreadsheet. There's no hard-and-fast rule, here; I personally use blue for cells that contain facts that affect my model (think: tax rates, discounts or fees), yellow for cells that are considered inputs to my model, and orange for just one cell - the ultimate conclusion, or "answer" cell.
• Remember the "rule of thumb". As a rule, no formula should exceed about a thumb's worth of horizontal space on the spreadsheet. If it takes more, break it up. This will act as a forcing function to ensure you're using intermediate steps properly.
• Flow from top to bottom. Spreadsheets should read like the page of a book - start at the top and let the eye trace down the page to get more detail. The conclusion - the ending to the book - should be at the very bottom of the page. Your "reader" will know where to find it, and, if you've observed the other rules correctly, the build-up to your conclusion should be obvious and logical.

Now that we're armed with all these rules, I'll give a simple example of how we might use them.

Say your boss wants to throw a pizza party for the office and asks you to figure out what it will cost beforehand. There are 30 people in the building, so you fire up Excel and quickly build a model. It might look something like this:

Figure 1 - Pizza For 30 ... But How?

Let's go ahead and expand these cells to reveal their internal formulas (Excel has a nifty keyboard shortcut for doing this: hold down the CONTROL key and then tap the "tilde" key (~)).

Doing so will yield something like this:

Figure 2 - Pizza For 30 ... The Mystery Revealed

Wow, that's some crazy formula there in B4, huh? Let's see, I'm seeing the CEILING function, some addition and division and multiplication, a few numbers I don't know the origin of ... spaghetti, basically. There's a nearly 0% chance that anyone who didn't create this spreadsheet - create it recently - would be able to figure out what any of this means.

Let's try this same example, but following some of the tips from above. We might wind up with something that looks more like Figure 3 (Figure 4 shows the underlying math):

Figure 3 - Pizza for 30, Take 2

Figure 4 - Pizza For 30, Expanded View

Going back to our tips, a few things jump out:

• Each cell is doing one thing only. Some cells, like "Number of Attendees" (C4), contain just the number of attendees. Others, like "Sales tax" (C10) contain just one math function. Everything is nice and simple.
• We are using intermediate steps. We have a "pizza subtotal" at C9, and a full-blown total at C12. Both help us to see what steps we're taking as we proceed through the model.
• Data is separated from formulas. Every variable we're using - sales tax, the amount to tip, the number of people attending, the number of slices of pizza we think they'll eat, and so on - has its own cell. The formula cells crunch those numbers, but they rely on the visible information on the spreadsheet to do their work.
• Labels are present. Virtually every number on the spreadsheet has a label next to it that explains what it is. This dramatically improves the readability of the spreadsheet.
• Color is being used. As expected, we are using blue, yellow and orange. Blue cells are things that are assumed to be true about the model - the pizza place charges $15 per pizza, for example, or we get 8 slices per pizza (we are ordering mediums). Yellow affects those things that are under our control - like how much we tip, or how many people are coming. And orange is used for the grand total.
• We're following the "rule of thumb". The longest formula on the sheet (on cell C7) is no wider than my thumb, which means it's much easier for someone who's never heard of the CEILING function to understand what that cell is doing. (Incidentally, CEILING rounds up for us; on its own, the math says we'd need 11.25 pizzas. Since we can't order a quarter-pizza, we instead round up to the next whole pie.)
• We flow from top to bottom. We start with our assumptions up top, and then flow down through the spreadsheet until we hit our conclusion.

So that's it - some simple suggestions for saner spreadsheets. This might seem like a lot of work at first - it did to me, for sure - but, as a loyal and regular practitioner of these techniques for the past few years, I can only attest to my own happiness and productivity after having adopted them. Your mileage may vary, but the next time you open a spreadsheet and go, "What was I thinking?" you might do well to adopt a few of these habits.

If you're interested, my spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 10, 2008 10:11 AM.
Comments (0). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

November 25, 2008

Going To MacWorld? Come Say Hi!

MacBU is gearing up for the annual pilgrimage to MacWorld Expo in January; a good chunk of the team will be in San Francisco for the entire week of the show, meeting customers, taking questions, and showing off our products.

In addition to working in the booth (which, truth be told, is a ton 'o fun), I'm participating in two public sessions:

• The two-day "Power Tools" session called, "Getting the most out of Office 2008 for Mac" (Monday and Tuesday), and
• A "Birds-of-a-Feather" called "Office For Mac: After Hours" on Wednesday, January 7 from 6:30 to 7:30 PM.

Both should be pretty interesting for productivity-minded Mac folks.

If you're attending the show, please swing by and say hello!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 25, 2008 10:09 AM.
Comments (0). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

October 24, 2008

Under-Appreciated Excel Feature Of The Week: Goal Seek

This is cross-posted from the Mac Mojo blog.

Last month's post about Data Tables generated a surprising amount of e-mail from readers. Lots of people, it seems, are interested in learning how to get more out of Excel.

In that spirit, I thought I'd take some time to discuss and showcase a companion feature to Data Tables, called Goal Seek.
As I wrote about Data Tables:

Put plainly, Data Tables let you do "what if..." analyses in Excel. They let you see how the results of a formula change as its underlying variables change. Data Tables let you see an entire range of solutions, rather than just one single answer.

In that post, we explored Data Tables through the frame of taking out a large loan. The feature let us see how our monthly payment would vary if we changed the length of the loan or its interest rate. Our end product was a matrix of numbers that lets us see, clearly, how rates and terms affected our monthly payment.

However, there are a number of times when we're not looking for a table of results, but instead are concerned with optimizing around a single variable. For instance, if I go out to buy a car, I have a certain amount of money - say, $350 - that I can afford to put toward a payment each month. In cases like these, I'd much prefer not to look at a matrix - instead, I'd like to just know how much I can get for my money.

This is where you use Goal Seek.

Like Data Tables, Goal Seek lets you do "what if..." analysis, but it will solve for a specific, single answer. Here, I'm really only interested in one question: given that I have $350 a month to spend, how much car can I afford?

I'll walk through an example to show how it's done.

We first need to set up our spreadsheet. Just as we did with Data Tables, we will make a few assumptions about our loan. (If you want to grab the finished spreadsheet from the Data Tables exercise (download here), it will save you a bit of time.)

Just to plug in some numbers, let's assume that we're borrowing $25,000 for 4 years at 7% interest.  If we set up our spreadsheet as follows and use the Excel PMT function (=PMT(B4/12,B3*12,B2)), we will get a monthly payment of ... $598.66.

A payment of $598.66 is quite a bit more than the $350 I have to spend every month. So now it's time to figure out how much car I can actually afford.

Go to the "Tools" menu and select "Goal Seek..." (it's about 2/3 of the way down the list). The Goal seek dialog will appear:

There are three variables to worry about, here: set cell, to value, and by changing cell. The nice thing is that they work as a sentence:

In other words: you're asking Excel to change the value of cell Z until cell X is equal to some value, Y.

With that in mind, filling out Goal Seek is pretty easy. On our spreadsheet, we want to set cell B5 ("Monthly Payment") equal to the value of our monthly payment ($350). And we want Excel to do that by changing cell B2 ("Amount To Be Borrowed").

Setting Goal Seek to these values, we get:

It's worth noting that "to value" is set to minus 350 (-$350). This is because a monthly payment is a cash outflow - it's money you're giving away each month. This is how the Excel PMT function thinks about monthly payments, and, since we're relying on the PMT function to do all our heavy lifting in the math department, we need to make sure we're speaking a language the function understands. (It's a quirk, but an important one.)

Click OK, and Excel will crunch the numbers. Goal Seek will come back and let you know if it found a solution:

Click OK again, and this dialog will vanish. You'll find yourself back out at your workbook, which should now contain the answer to our question:

Looks like I can afford to borrow $14,616 for my new car  - which means I'm looking less at a new Mini Cooper, and more at a shiny Toyota Yaris. Pretty cool, huh?

So that's Goal Seek - yet another under-appreciated Excel feature. As you might imagine, it's a pretty powerful (and profoundly useful) tool. Personally, I use it all the time for situations like this (which seem to crop up in business pretty regularly).

If you'd like to see my spreadsheet, I've attached it to this post - just click here.

Best of luck!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 24, 2008 10:24 AM.
Comments (2). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

August 3, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 8, 9, & 10

My last three days in Beijing were rather more subdued than the previous 7; following our sightseeing weekend, it was back to work on Monday and Tuesday, with Wednesday being a (very long) travel day.

The remaining details:

• Monday was a shocking normal work day: wake up, brush, breakfast, walk to the office, unpack laptop, e-mail, an hour of creative work, meeting, e-mail, meeting, lunch, e-mail, snack, e-mail and then packing it up for dinner. The jet lag was largely behind me, so I wasn't fighting strange bouts of fatigue - in fact, the whole thing felt so overwhelming usual that it made me a little homesick. Rather than being a cool day in a new land, it was just another workday, but one where I wasn't going to see my girl at the end of it. It made me kind of sad.
• (On the other hand, I learned that acclimation takes, on average, five days.)
• Dinner was Schezuan with a gaggle of coworkers. They were eager to see how well Brooke and I would deal with super-spicy-hot food. We both love the stuff, and managed to navigate the sea of chili oil that came our way.
• Spicy food, apparently, knocks me out. Early bedtime.
• Tuesday was tinged with a bit of sadness, and a touch of frenzy. It was my last day in the office, so all the final face-to-face stuff I needed to get done had to be done now, before I left for the plane. I was also cognizant that this was my last chance for good, high-quality Internet access before I got back to Redmond. (Airport and hotel WiFi is usually fine, but you just can't trust that it'll work when you need it.)
• Brooke is staying on for a bit of vacation; his wife is flying in on Friday, so he'll be working the rest of the week in China and then the two of them are off for some much-needed R&R in Shanghai.
• Tuesday afternoon is also time for shopping. I promised some folks back home that I'd bring them Olympic souvenirs, and so we're off to one of the gadzillion Olympics shops to find appropriate stuff.
• While out, my curiosity finally gets the better of me and I drag Brooke and our colleague, Ray, to McDonald's. I'm eager to see what the local experience is like, and, as expected, it's pretty adapted to local tastes. I order the cheeseburger, and am surprised to find that the thing is wholly unlike what we get in the States - the meat is tastier; the cheese is different (lactose-free), and covered in paprika; it has the same special sauce as the Big Mac (but no ketchup or mustard); instead of pickles, it has raw cucumbers.
• (In all seriousness, if they sold this burger in the US, I'd buy it. It's really yummy.)
• The fries are perfect. There is no Diet Coke. And if you want your meal to go, a plastic bag is 0.2 Yuan.
• More souvenir shopping, this time on behalf of my colleague Stuart, who has asked me to bring him back some "authentically Chinese" alcohol ("Look, Russia has vodka, Ireland has whiskey, China's got their something. If you can locate a flask of whatever the heck that happens to be, that'll rock."). After conferring with Ray, we duck in to a convenience store and select a small, 100ml green glass bottle of something that Ray assures me is both "authentic" and "very popular". We also select a slightly-larger (200 ml) clear bottle of something else that is "not as authentic, but is also very popular." The combined price for the booze is 10 Yuan (about $1.50); the alcohol content of each bottle is 56%.
• (In the back of my mind, I'm praying that this stuff won't cause wood alcohol blindness.)
• Back at the hotel bar, Brooke and I both realize how badly we're missing our wives when, over successive rounds of drinks, we find ourselves engaging in an ever-escalating "argument" about which one of us managed to marry farther above his station.
• Wednesday comes, and I'm up early. My flight is at 8:55 AM, so I'm out the door of the hotel at 6. (Sigh)
• Once again, my taxi has no seatbelts. And, while this is something I managed to get used to while riding in the city, it's considerably less fun when we're going 120 km/hr on the aggressive Beijing freeway with less than a carlength between us and the vehicle in front of us.
• After arriving at the airport, I check in for my flight and spend a scant 15 minutes waiting in line at customs. I give my passport control person a "very satisfied" as I head to the gate.
• Walking to the gate, it becomes clear what a full-blown shopping mall the Beijing airport really us. Once again, I'm struck by how many American and international brands are offered for sale. If you need a Hugo Boss shirt with your Starbucks before that flight to Tokyo, you're good to go.
• On the four-hour leg between Beijing and Tokyo, I watch "The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters", which is an incredible documentary about two guys competing for the world record in Donkey Kong. It's a funny, poignant, and totally gripping human drama, and I loved it.
• In Tokyo, I manage to snag some WiFi and find, to my delight, that Elaine is still up and heading to bed. We flirt shamelessly for a good 15 or 20 minutes before my flight starts boarding.
• "Be Kind, Rewind" is charming and totally disposable.
• The flight touches down in Seattle at 8:25 AM, Pacific Time.

Damn, it's good to be home.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 3, 2008 3:32 PM.
Comments (0). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

July 22, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 7

We woke up on Sunday to our second day of official non-work in Beijing, so Brooke and I decided to go for the the Big One of sightseeing - The Great Wall Of China.

• Hao and Fara claim that the best place to see the Wall is from Mutianyu, which is about an hour and a half outside of Beijing. They arranged a car and driver, and the four of us were off shortly after breakfast.
• The weather was not terribly cooperative - foggy, misty, and wet. Our visibility never really got beyond a few hundred feet. Each of us kept waiting for the sun to break through, or for us to leave the weather behind - never happened.
• We arrive at the base of the Great Wall, and find ourselves at tourist central. The path to the Wall is one gigantic tourist trap, with small shacks lining the walkway and selling every kind of Great Wall paraphernalia you can imagine - postcards, t-shirts, photos, knickknacks, ponchos, umbrellas, you name it. There's also fruit stands, snack stands, places selling water and beer. The sellers are aggressive, too, calling out in English phrases to get your attention, then trying to haggle with you on whatever item they saw you glancing at.
• Arriving at the base of the Wall is one thing; getting to the Wall is another. The government has installed a gondola to get people from the base to the Wall itself, but there's also a walking/hiking path made of stone. We opt for the hike. The climb is steep, and takes a good 20 minutes; I am reminded of the sand stairs at Baker Beach during Alcatraz. The moist weather isn't helping, either - it's like walking in a cloud. We pause as needed.
• The Wall astounds. The Great Wall is something I'd read about, of course, in my eight-grade history class (thanks again, Mr. DuBois, wherever you are), but, like the Pyramids or any of the other Seven Wonders, the Great Wall was something that was safely tucked in the pages of a book, and not an actual object that I'd be stomping around on one day.
• (And yet, here I am, and here it is, and here I find myself shaking my head with wonder about how small the world really is these days.)
• The overwhelming physicality of the Wall is incredible. It is made entirely of rough brick, made smooth and sloping in places from the contours of the land (which it hugs) or the erosion of millions of footsteps (which is has undoubtedly endured).
• At its heart, the Wall is a 20-foot-wide brick roadway, built to a height of about 30 feet. It follows the line of the mountain on which it's built, and has periodic guard buildings placed for lookouts and shelter for the soldiers that manned it.
• The thing is about as far from an antiseptic, safe-for-tourists attraction as you can imagine. The Wall slants and slopes, is slippery, has loose bricks, and offers many places to twist an ankle or fall on your ass. The hills are high and steep; going up is hard, coming down is harder. We feel like mountain goats.
• At no point does anybody complain about anything. The walk might be hard (and capable of taking the wind out of you), but, for all that, some poor bastards had to actually build it, which boggles the mind. (Your job, Oh 21st-Century Western Tourist, does not suck as much as you imagine.)
• Admission to the cable car at the Great Wall: about $10. T-shirt from a vendor at the Great Wall: 3 for $1. International roaming charges for the 2 minutes you use to call your wife from the Great Wall to tell her you love her and miss her? Priceless.
• The Wall is dotted with locals who are selling snacks, fruit and beverages. They sell from small milk crates, from hot-dog carts, from whatever they have. A number of them lead with "cold beer!" in English, which I think is strange - with this kind of climb, who wants to drink beer?
• It's easy to get vertigo up here.
• We ultimately walk the Wall from our arrival point to the 20th guard house (the end point of the zone), turn around and go back, past our arrival, and to the gondola. All told, it takes us about four hours. We take the gondola down, survive the tourist gantlet, and head back to Beijing. We are all smiling.
• All told, Beijing is incredibly clean. We see very little litter, and very few homeless. I am told that the government has been cleaning things up in advance of the Olympics.
• Olympics stuff is everywhere - banners, flags, logos, the mascots, billboards, bus boards, street signs. The city is swept with Olympics mania, and everyone is very happy and proud about it.
• A surprising number of signs come in English and Chinese. We see lots of Engrish.
• Hao and Fara take us to an expat district, which spans a river and has a healthy number of bars and nightclubs. Many of them have sofas and lounge chairs on the sidewalk, and are aggressive about getting you to sit down. We find a place that looks good, grab a table, and order some great local beer. It's outrageously expensive by Beijing standards, but about half the price of something comparable in the States. We watch gaggles of tourists zip by in the backs of rickshaws, taking in the sights.
• I want to by a t-shirt for Elaine, so Hao takes us to Plastered, which is a Beijing staple of hipness. I find her a super-cute white tee with a sketch of a Beijing subway ticket on it; I get myself an attractive blue number with "Kung Pao Chicken" written on it in Chinese. Hao assures me this is very, very, very funny.
• (Given some of the looks I get, I wonder if the shirt really says, "I'm a silly white guy who can't read Chinese", but the shirt is great, regardless.)
• Taxis in Beijing are mostly Hyundais, blue-and-gold Elantras. 2 yuan per km, 10 yuan minimum.
• After tromping around the dusty alleys of the city all afternoon, dinner is full-on culture shock - we go two blocks and find ourselves at a state-of-the-art shopping mall, all gleaming steel and glass, Starbucks and KFC, eleven stories, full of teenagers and cell phones and you name it. We could be anywhere in the States. We have some fantastic Chinese for dinner, knock back a couple of Tsingtaos, and call it a night.
• I sleep very, very, very well.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 22, 2008 9:00 PM.
Comments (0). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

July 14, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 6

After three days of hard work, the weekend arrived. Brooke and I decided to do a bit o' sightseeing.

• From The "Jet Lag Cries 'Uncle'" Department: I awoke on Saturday to a feeling that was wholly alien, bizarre, and unfamiliar - that is, I felt refreshed and happy. No horrible fatigue behind the eyes, no crazy dark circles, no slow-draggin' of my sorry self from the bed to the shower. Eyes opened, smile appeared, bounced out of bed. About. Freakin'. Time.
• A peek out the hotel windows reveals that the weather is cooperative. A bit of sun is breaking through the white Beijing fogginess; the city seems to be inviting us in.
• Two of our colleagues, Hao and Fara, generously agree to show us the city, to which Brooke and I readily agree. They prove to be fantastic guides.
• First stop: The Temple of Heaven, 600-year-old complex that is now a public park, much like the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. People are strolling down paths, playing modified games of hacky sack (with this crazy, badminton-esque shuttlecock thingy), taking pictures, gawking at the relics. The Temple grounds are walled off from the rest of Beijing, and go on (seemingly) forever. We take it all in, walking from the north end of the park to the south, then out to the east.
• My longstanding transit fetish is indulged with a quick trip on the Beijing Subway system; we take Subway Line #5 to a shopping district not too far from the Temple. The subway is thoroughly modern, clean, and quiet - stations of this design are typical of any Western city (frankly, we could be in London, for all anyone knows). The #5 uses glassed-in tubes, much like Line 14 on the Paris Metro.
• Tickets are 2 Yuan (about $0.30).
• For lunch, we hit this Brazilian BBQ buffet restaurant. It's apparently a very popular cuisine in town, and the waiters are forever visiting our table with skewers of this or that meat on them, trying to carve off pieces for us to try. Everything is delicious.
• After much moral dithering, I ask to try Starbucks. Fara and Hao crack smiles; Brooke looks vaguely relieved. Turns out that Starbucks in Beijing is pretty much Starbucks everywhere; apart from the Chinese on the menu, the items, options, and prices (adjusted for Yuan) are identical.
• (The place is full of Westerners. I hear more unaccented American English in 20 minutes than I've heard in the last 5 days.)
• Starbucks also has free WiFi, which allows me to take my iPhone out of airplane mode and send an "I miss you" e-mail to Elaine.
• We pop back to the subway and transfer to Line 1 (the oldest line), which ultimately takes us to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.
• Look, there's no real way to convey how huge these structures and places are in words, so I'll just say this: we emerged from the subway, strode a few steps, turned to the left, and ... the expanse just goes on. Tiananmen Square is a broad, sprawling expanse of concrete, brick and emptiness, bordered by the Forbidden City at one end and government buildings on the others. It's enormous. Standing alone on a football field at night might give you a sense of it, but just barely.
• There are tourists, citizens, and guards everywhere. The cameras-per-square-inch ratio goes up noticeably.
• We walk the square to the gates of the Forbidden City (adorned with a gigantic picture of Chairman Mao), and then walk in.
• Beijing is a city built on a series of concentric rings. The inner ring, Ring 1, is the oldest; subsequent rings represent later generations of the city's growth. The Forbidden City is, in a literal sense, Ring 1 - it's the original seat of power, the home to the emperors who ruled China for centuries. It's called "Forbidden" because you would be killed if you went in without permission. Today, about 50 Yuan does the trick.
• The emperors are gone, but the Forbidden City is preserved by the Chinese government as a public museum - a museum that runs 1km by .7km square. It's big.
• The City contains everything a city would expect to have - buildings for the people who lived there, for the various support functions (guards, priests, etc.), for ceremonies, for celebrations, for dining and you name it. The City is surrounded by a high brick wall, and that has a moat outside it for good measure.
• Hao and Fara have arranged for a guide to take us around the city, and they leave Brooke and me alone to head out to connect with her. I stand, just trying to drink it all in and ... failing. It's too much.
• The level of detail in this place is mind-blowing. I look at rooftops, and notice that the roofs are ornately adorned, hand-carved, hand-painted. Every surface has incredible detail, which means you can sit on a bench and stare at a wall and see something new just about every time you move your eyes. As I take this in, it dawns on me that all of it was built without the aid of robotics, computers, or mass-manufacturing techniques of any kind. It's just ... craftsmanship.
• Oh, yeah: no nails. Anywhere.
• The tour is about two hours. We walk and walk and walk, ducking down alleyways, taking in exhibits of concubine's quarters, seeing the temples and the seats of power. The guide is good; she knows her stuff. Very shortly, I'm in overload.
• The doors in this place are not built for white guys with high-protein diets. I duck a lot.
• The toilets are ... well, they're holes in the floor. Porcelain, yes, reasonably clean, yes, but you better have good knees and a sense of humor if you need to use the can.
• We wind up leaving as the City is closing, which makes hailing a cab a rather time-consuming activity.
• Dinner is Schezuan at a place off a hutong. As expected, the food is astoundingly good. We drink Tsingtao, a local Chinese beer that's light, refreshing, and not too booze-y.
• I woke up easy, but I go to bed hard - it's been a long day. (I'm still smiling, however.)

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 14, 2008 9:37 PM.
Comments (0). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

July 9, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 4 & 5

(Sorry it's taking me so long to get to these entries; this being my first full week back at work, life's a bit hectic.)

More China notes:

• Thursday and Friday were both traditional work days, in the sense that I got up, brushed/showered/shaved/brokefast and then headed to the office. The fact that I was working from the Beijing office - rather than on West campus in Redmond - was not lost, exactly, but it didn't manifest itself very often - generally, only when I'd get away from my screen or campus. Seen one Microsoft office, seen most of 'em.
• (There's something surreal about being able to fly halfway around the world and live, essentially, as if you were still at home. Maybe Snow Crash is right, the future's just going to be a worldwide, smeared-out sameness.)
• Microsoft's Beijing office is pretty nice. It's a 6-story building, plus a sub-level; the main floor is for visitors (and has some additional retail tenants); the second floor on up is all for employees. The sublevel (the employees all call it "P1") is like a mini-mall for employees - a few food places (one of which serves a mean rice bowl), a health club (with swimming pool), a barbershop, that sort of thing. Convenient.
• After avoiding its deadly grasp for the past two days, jet lag finally stalked and caught me on Thursday afternoon. I was on deadline for a project (deliverable due 5 PM), cranking away, and suddenly just ... hit the wall. Brooke had it, too; I'm surprised we weren't drooling on ourselves. Walking around the halls seemed to help, but there wasn't enough Nescafe in the world to resuscitate me. I just had to hope for the second wind.
• Thursday dinner was a special treat - Peking duck. The restaurant was very high-end, very swanky, and dated from 1864; they even provided a 'certificate of authenticity' for the duck (now up on the wall of my office), which contained the duck's serial number (#77648, as in "we have served 77,648 ducks since we opened"). No fooling.
• Everyone here - on the street, in the office, in shops, taxis, etc. - is very friendly. A lot of people will immediately ask us where we're from, and many will try their English.
• (For some odd reason, they don't think two 6'+ pasty white-guy geeks look like natives.)
• Beijing weather is low-70s in the evening, mid-90s in the daytime. It's humid, too. It feels like Houston to me.
• There's an odd cultural thing I keep observing where people - friends - walk down the street holding hands. It's very common, and everyone seems to do it. One of my coworkers tells me that "it doens't mean what it means in the States", which makes me laugh.
• After dinner, four of us went out for a massage near our hotel. It was, without question, one of the best massages I have ever had in my life - one where they treat you like bread dough, pushing, pulling and dragging you into various shapes until you're just a puddle on the floor. The whole thing ran around 90 minutes, and cost about 90 Yuan (about $13) for each of us.
• One the way out, I asked one of my Beijing colleagues about the prices - and about the masseuses, all of whom were twentysomething women. He explained that each masseuse likely got 20 - 25 Yuan for each massage, and they probably did four or so per day. That may not seem like a lot to some (it didn't to me), but 80 - 100 Yuan a day is 400 - 500 a week, and 1600 - 2000 a month. In a town where ~900 Yuan/month is considered a good living wage (you can hire a combo cook/nanny/housekeeper for that), doing massage is considered a good job. And for many Chinese, it's incredibly attractive relative to staying in a village, where the prospects aren't nearly as bright - or the freedom as broad - as they are in the city.
• (I have to say, it's a little disconcerting to grok the economics of a place with such a huge labor pool, and such disparities between modern urban and old-country rural.)
• A lot of the city seems retrofitted - apartment buildings with AC systems bolted to the side of every unit, storefronts that are mostly facades against older buildings underneath. There's a citywide sensibility of re-use, of upgrade. It feels vaguely steampunk-ish. MAKE magazine would love this city.
• Friday was an early-morning arrival at the office (jet lag + more deliverables), and I got to walk the (semi-deserted) streets in the cool air. I was taken aback at how few people were out and about; Beijing is busy, full of people, and to see the place without too many bodies was jarring.
• Even at 6 AM, the city is covered in the same flat, fog-diffused light that you see at all hours. No variance at all.
• Microsoft Beijing cultural observation: the nighttime staff makes tea, using fresh leaves, and puts them in all the offices in these nifty glass carafes. It's delicious.
• 3:30 PM - Midway through a presentation, I do the jet-lag stall (it's 12:30 AM Pacific), and it's all I can do to keep focused. Following the preso, I begin mainlining Nescafe.
• Driving in Beijing is crazy. CRAZY. In the States, we tend to like our roads segmented - sidewalk, car lane, bike lane, crosswalk - each marked with its own line, its own rules, and we want our people to stay where they're supposed to be. Beijing is totally different. Nobody in Beijing gives a damn about lanes, lines, or anything else: cars mix with trucks mix with buses and pedestrians and cyclists and guys on mopeds and some other guy with a bicycle pulling a trailer with a 10 ft. x 10 ft. x 10 ft. bundle of empty plastic bottles he's taking to the recycler. People stroll out in the street when they want to, and, when confronted with the horn of an oncoming car/bus/etc. (moving at 20 - 25 mph, max), they pause, 2" from the side of the inbound vehicle, watch it slide by, and then continue.
• In its own way, it's actually beautiful. It makes me wonder, too, about throughput - is Beijing's road system packet-switched, compared to the circuit-switched system in the US? With so many people, maybe they need to work as packets to get anything done.
• American brands are everywhere. KFC is to the Beijing fast-food market what McDonald's is to the USA (but, it must be said, McDonald's is pretty commonplace). Wal-Mart is here. Bally Total Fitness is here. Starbucks is here. The list goes on.
• We close the evening - and the week - with karaoke (natch), at what is, easily, the nicest karaoke place on Earth. Private suites, leather couches, flatscreen monitors for the cheesy videos, great sound system, wireless mics, touch-screen jukebox, in-suite catering. Unbelievable. The place was busy, too - we walked down a couple long hallways of suites, each full of private parties.
• (Yes, Brooke and I sang - a little Tears for Fears, a little "Bust A Move", even "Never Gonna Give You Up". There are pictures. There is absolutely, positively no video or audio recording.)

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 9, 2008 8:31 PM.
Comments (0). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

July 5, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 3

Wednesday, June 25:

• The hotel has, perhaps, the best breakfast buffet I've ever experienced. It's got a huge range of food choices - Chinese, Indian, western, you name it (likely necessary due to their expat clientele). You can get anything from pork-filled buns to curry to Cheerios to omelettes. The food's of good quality, too, and very tasty.
• (On the downside, the hotel insists on playing soft Western music (e.g., Wham!, the "Titanic" soundtrack) during breakfast, which, while initially earning points for kitch, gets old very, very quickly as the week continues.)
• The Microsoft office is about 1km from the hotel, so we walk.
• Beijing is enveloped in a white, cloudlike, foggy substance - visibility peters out about 1,000 feet away in any given direction. At first, I'm not sure if this is pollution or fog or what, but it doesn't have any appreciable smell, and doesn't irritate my eyes or lungs. It also never goes away for the duration of the trip. Huh.
• At 7:30 AM, the streets are full of people - people on foot, people on bikes, people on mopeds, people in cars, people in buses (the buses are packed), people streaming in and out of subway stations, people, people, people. Everyone has a bustle and a focus, and nobody seems to pay anyone else very much attention. It's got a fascinating rhythm to it; I feel like I could sit and watch the flow for hours.
• The Beijing Microsoft office is exactly like every other Microsoft office I've ever been to, except I can't read half the signs.
• Brooke and I, badly jet-lagging, grab coffee from a Nescafe machine in the shared kitchen. It turns out to be very, very, very yummy.
• Our first order of business is an 8 AM video conference call with some folks back home in Redmond, where it's still Tuesday, 5 PM. After yawning and blinking and drinking oceans of coffee to keep my focus, I now have a much greater degree of empathy for my Chinese colleagues.
• After the call, Brooke and I hole up in an empty office and focus on getting things done.
• Working remotely is actually pretty nice because you can focus. During my usual workday, I regularly shut off my e-mail and IM for periods of time to give myself unbroken stretches where I can concentrate and get in to flow. It's a deliberate effort, and one that can be controversial (people sometimes expect you to reply to email right. this. very. second.). When you're 15 hours ahead, your work day starts as the home office is closing down for the night (8 AM = 5 PM), so the majority of the e-mail that was going to be sent that day has already been sent. As such, when I arrive I slurp down all the mail that was sent during the day, process it, and ... that's it. Not much new comes in during my day, and the quiet is wonderful. I'm able to really crank on some of my projects.
• Around 2:38 PM, we get punchy enugh to start Rick Rolling one another. The Dramatic Prarie Dog also makes an apearance. More Nescafe does not seem to be helping.
• For dinner, our Microsoft colleagues take us out to a very nice, very modern Chinese restaurant. At one point, I went to set my napkin on my lap, and one of my fellows gently explains that this is considered rude - I was "taking the job" of the server at the restaurant who was supposed to do that. Hmm.
• The food is amazing.
• By the end of the day, I'm exhausted - deep-bone exhausted, everything-is-funny exhausted, walking-like-a-slightly-drunk-person exhausted. I return to my hotel room, brush my teeth, and call it a day.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 5, 2008 11:14 AM.
Comments (0). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

July 2, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 1 (& 2)

Last week, Microsoft sent me to Beijing (along with my fellow MacBU-er Brooke) on business. Our flight left Seattle on Monday, the 23rd; I got home this morning. This afternoon's been a bit brutal, energy-wise - my internal clock is still 15 hours ahead of Pacific time, so my 8:25 AM landing (it's the morning!) was 11:55 PM to me (it's time for bed!).

The last 10 days have been a total whirlwind. While very much a work trip, we managed to use our weekend stayover for a bit of sightseeing. Very exciting.

As usual, I took a few notes during the trip:

• During my Monday-morning suitcase-stuffing extravaganza, I peek at Dashboard, which says that Beijing has a low of 70 and a high of 95 all week. Yowza. Pack shorts.
• Brooke's wife gave us a lift to the airport, so on the way out of town we stopped by Vivace for one final cup of Seattle coffee. We then popped downtown so I could give Elaine a goodbye hug at her office. Mid-squeeze, I'm reminded of why I was glad when my insane Product Planning travel schedule came to a close last year.
• Since the time difference between Seattle and Beijing is so pronounced, it meant that our Monday afternoon departure wouldn't land in China until late Tuesday night. (Dude, where's my Tuesday?)
• We're on Northwest for this trip, living large in business class (Microsoft travel policy lets you go business if your flight is more than 7 hours). After clearing Seattle airport security, we head to the South terminal and check out the Northwest executive lounge. It's my first time there, and it's pretty excellent: plenty of windows (lots of natural light), tables (places to spread out and work), free soda and coffee, free WiFi, and lots of quiet.
• (Brooke and I are, I think, the most casually-dressed people in the lounge.)
• Business class is addictive: champagne before takeoff, a fresh Wall Street Journal, an appetizer of seared Ahi tuna skewers with ginger and cucumber. We remark to each other, many times, that we are forever ruined when it comes to future travel in coach.
• Northwest's Airbus A330s have AC power outlets in business. My initial feeling of joy ("Score!") gives way to mild annoyance as I realize the flight's AC power system is put together with baling wire and a couple of D batteries. The juice stops frequently, which makes it hard to sustain (or retain) a laptop charge. Our power manages to last the whole flight (and I have an outbox of queued up e-mail to prove it), but things feel very touch-and-go most of the time.
• Our flight connects through Tokyo. I've never been to Japan before, so as we're descending I'm peering out the window of the plane like a 5-year old in front of a toy store, nose pressed against the glass and trying to absorb everything I'm seeing. The country is unbelievably green - they have farms and fields laid out in grids as far as the eye can see, incredibly lush and gorgeous.
• We arrive in Tokyo at 4:15 PM, local time. We are pooped.
• My iPhone can't seem to lock on to a cellular provider in Japan. I had this fantasy that I'd be able to zip around the world and at least have the option of paying $4.99 a minute on foreign networks, but apparently the AT&T people aren't talking to their Japanese counterparts. Grr.
• The Tokyo airport has a McDonald's. Next to a sushi bar. I swear I am not making this up.
• On the flight from Tokyo to Beijing, I watch "Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man", which I find to be an insightful and balanced portrait of a very complicated and stubborn guy. It starts with his work in the 1960s and 1970s, and then proceeds up to his 2000 presidential bid. Truthfully, I'd been a bit mad at Nader over 2000, and had seen him as a spoiler for Gore. After the movie ... well, I'm not mad anymore; I think I have a good sense of where he's coming from. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I do think I understand him a bit better. Highly recommended.
• After the film, I manage to sleep for an hour.
• We touch down at 9:28 PM, local time (6:28 AM Pacific).
• Beijing's airport is gigantic, just enormous. It seems to go on forever. We taxi for a full 15 minutes after landing, and never run out of new things to look at - stretches of tarmac and clusters of buildings, going on and on and on.
• The plane's doors pop, and the weather hits us. Beijing feels a lot like Houston - humid and hot, almost menacingly so, as if the weather wants you to know that it can take things from "pretty warm" to "Crock-Pot cooking" whenever it feels like it.
• Inside, the airport looks like any other modern European airport, except with Chinese signage. Most signs and displays have English translations; international pictograms are used for bathrooms, exits, and the like. Navigating is not a problem.
• The Chinese customs people are friendly and polite. They also have a push-button customer-satisfaction poll on the customer's side of the counter; you push the smiley-face or frowny-face that matches your experience ("Very satisfied", "satisfied", "unsatisfied", "Very unsatisfied"). I give my guy a "very satisfied" and head off to get my bag.
• We are met at the airport by some of our fellow Microsofties. They meet us in front of ... the Starbucks. (I am a sad, sad Seattle cliche.)
• A taxi is procured to take us in to Beijing proper, and our hotel. I had been warned about the driving in China, but the reality of it is really quite striking - people change lanes whenever they want, drive at different speeds on the freeway (very fast, very slow), pass on the shoulder, you name it. For all the chaos, the drivers seem acclimated, alert, and ready for anything.
• (Brooke and I are both alarmed to find that our taxi doesn't have seatbelts in the rear seats. As we later learn, virtually none of them do.)
• Our taxi ride takes 45 minutes, and sets us back 75 Yuan. That's about $10 US.
• The hotel is very nice, very clean, and clearly caters to visiting Western businesspeople and tourists.
• After unpacking everything, I notice the small sign in the bathroom - "The tap water is not safe for drinking." The hotel has set out two 12-oz bottles of (privately branded) water for personal use. I'd been warned about the water situation before leaving, but being confronted with it still requires a shift in my thinking. I need to use these two bottles for pretty much everything - drinking, rinsing my toothbrush, taking vitamins, everything. Conserving water becomes something I think about a lot during the trip, and I find myself wondering whether this kind of water rationing is something humanity as a whole is going to have to get used to in the future.
• Slightly before midnight, I bomb out.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 2, 2008 4:47 PM.
Comments (2). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.

May 13, 2008

Office 2008 SP1

I'm happy to report that my colleagues at MacBU shipped the first service pack to Office 2008 (2008 SP1) today; you can get the bits directly from the "downloads" section of our Web site, or you can wait a day or two for it to appear in AutoUpdate.

All the product teams worked incredibly hard on this release, and I'm very proud to see the results getting out to customers. If you're interested in the scope of what got done, check out the KB article.

It's also worth pointing out that Office 2008 is a barnburner, sales-wise:

Office 2008 launched at Macworld Expo 2008, and sales for the productivity suite continue to soar, selling faster than any previous version of Office for Mac in the past 19 years.

..."The response has been amazing — since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004,” said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU.

(Awesome.)

UPDATE: Schwieb has a great post on SP1 on his blog. Check it out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 13, 2008 7:15 PM.
Comments (0). TrackBack. Permalink for this entry.