AdviceTech Podcast #55 – Word and Excel – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the Ensombl AdviceTech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And we’re joining me here today to deep dive into Word and Excel Would you believe, because we’ve had a lot of requests for this, so I’ve brought in somebody whose neck deep in it on a day to day basis, she’s worked for the Department of Defense. So you know, behave. She’s been on been an advice business paraplanner and a practice managers now a practice development consultant at scaler paraplanning. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. Katie Cirjak. That all now I must be excited to dive into this because I think this is one of those topics that we all underrate how little we know. But before we do that, let’s get to know you as a user of technology. Okay, what’s your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Katie Cirjak
I do. I do. My most used emoji at the moment is the clapping hands. I just feel like I’m forever. I’d like cheering people on. And so that’s yeah, that’s always on the top, which is, which is a nice one, I think to have when?

Peita Diamantidis
I think so too. I think so too. And it’s far more age appropriate, which it’s so funny doing this and we’ve actually collided or everybody’s responses, and there’s definitely generational answers. Oh, yeah. And yeah, so Boomers and Gen X fumble with the thumbs up? Oh, yeah. Whereas that’s even considered passive aggressive in the younger generation. Yeah, I know, right? Who knew with these one little one little emoji? Well, in fact, I just found out that there’s been a court case where a legal agreement was said to have been accepted because somebody responded with a thumbs up. So the courts are now considering that as an acknowledgment, can you believe

Katie Cirjak
I can’t believe that? Why?

Peita Diamantidis
I know, like, oh, no, that’s just made me reconsider.

Katie Cirjak
Ah, yes to everything. I’m thinking of every time I’ve done a thumbs up. Thumbs up now.

Peita Diamantidis
Right now, most of the time, I’m figuring it’s probably not to your lawyer, or to somebody’s lawyers. I’m like, Okay, no, exactly. One Listen, one thing led today, folks, listeners up to legal contracts, oh, dt. Now the second thing we love to know about I guess, is, we’ll live without smartphones just permanently attached to us. But if you had to wipe everything off your smartphone, and just keep three apps, which are the apps, you’d keep

Katie Cirjak
nesting, so I’ll keep WhatsApp, that’s, you know, the main kind of mode of communication with everyone I know, including my children. The second one, which my daughter said, Please don’t say this one, but I’m going to anyways, Candy Crush the shame ugly. I know, you know, one of those really old school games, and I don’t know, I don’t play games, but it’s white wine downtime, and I’m determined to finish Candy Crush, however long however many decades, it takes me it’s a bit of a personal challenge. But my children are mortified by this. And the third one is an app called Amy, it’s a it’s a generative music app. So there’s no playlist, oh, it’s just an app that, like, it just continues on and on. And you can kind of control the composition as it’s play. So you can kind of fine tune it to how you like it. And I really like it when I’m, when I’m doing like deep work. And that kind of focused, you know, three or four hours at a time to just have with continuous you know, I find myself, you know, if Spotify, I can skip through 100 songs before I find the one I like, yes, just we’ll go on our own. And then it will just, you know, slowly kind of evolve to the sounds that you like you listen to constantly. And I love it. The good ones,

Peita Diamantidis
it’s really powerful I’ve and I’ve actually had to remind myself to go back and start using again, I’ve used brain FM, which is a similar type of thing. And it even puts a timeframe on mobile. So I can say, hey, I need 90 minutes. And now generally, the only challenge is generally it’s only like, rainforest music, or you know, dolphins and stuff. So, so depending on what your preference is, they’re getting better, they will add a lot more but I sound can make such a difference to how quickly you can get into that zone. I couldn’t agree more. So I’m right there with you. I’m going to check that actually, my head is down audience I’m just writing that code cuz I’m always looking for things like that. Because with so many distractions in our lives, we need everything we can at our disposal to sort of dial in right to salutely. Alright, so let’s dive into what we’re here for, shall we the very exciting and you wave apps word XL. There will be some of you listening who are thinking, Peter, what on earth are we doing chatting about this, but the reality is for most of us, we spend a good part of every day in tools like this. And so it just made sense to actually take a good look at them because I think we probably don’t give them the attention they deserve from a learning sense. So let’s start with what they are. The category boy broadly is that I mean, I think they call them productivity tools, essentially. Which is sort of funny because it means something that’s not in that category is not productive, I guess. So I find that category really fun. Yeah.

Katie Cirjak
And I don’t know, I wouldn’t describe them necessarily as product tools. Like an initial description. No,

Peita Diamantidis
it’s weird, but it’s what they do, what they, when you see them in groups, that’s what they call them, I do have an initial question for you. And in your experience, and having dealt with what I’m embedding is quite a few practices. And most people in the Microsoft family is how many people going into the sort of the Google side of things as an alternative, interesting, actually,

Katie Cirjak
probably in the past, let’s say, four to six weeks, I’ve come across clients who are either in the Google Suite when moving to the Google Suite, you know, up to now the campus always in the majority has always been in, in the Microsoft can because it was convenient, it’s easy, kind of integrates into, you know, just about anything in everything, that there has been a notable shift to the other side. I’m not sure. You know, and I actually have asked the question, you know, of people who have said, it’s a personal preference. You know, in some actually, I’ve said, it’s a productivity preference. But I haven’t looked into it deep enough, to be honest. But there is a notable shift, I have to say.

Peita Diamantidis
And I look, I think, for us, so our practice is a Google practice, although we’ve had to get Word and Excel, because there’s just some apps that that’s going to come out. And interestingly, the Google equivalent of Excel sheets just isn’t it. It’s not the financial analyst yet Excel, as you know, it’s sort of the more basic version. So you know, for that reason, we’ve had to use Excel for some things. But for us years ago, the decision was because Google Bing delivered online, so there’s no local version or download, you know, like, it’s all online, meant that it integrated with more things a lot earlier, because it was online, you know, whereas Microsoft has got there. But it’s, it’s

Katie Cirjak
sad. It’s very much like in that camp, and it’s kind of catching up now. And is now I find myself still not quite used to that advancement. Like, I’m still using the desktop versions of everything. You know, when someone says, Oh, yes, put it on OneDrive. And you know, you know, it’s not like instinctual thing. You know, I still use the old fashioned thing, because that’s what it’s been for a very long time. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
right. And I guess I had that question is, is, as far as you’re aware, are there any material differences between the desktop versus the web versions of Word and Excel? Like, like, does excel have everything in the cloud version than it does on the desktop version,

Katie Cirjak
but the layout wouldn’t be different. And if we used to the desktop version, I find that the cloud version throws you off. And it’s great for collaboration. However, anyone with a fancy spreadsheet, won’t want to be collaborating all that much. Because, you know, it’s data that once somebody tampers with it, it’s you know, you become very married to spreadsheets. No, you do. You know, somebody that is in Excel quite a lot and using it for complex purposes. I will say, the majority of people and I, you know, I could be wrong, but the majority, including myself, will use the desktop version for sure. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
I think you’re probably right. And it look, it’s an interesting thing, too, I should confess to, to the listener out there that my background prior to financial advice was in corporate finance, and m&a. And I started in that game as a financial analyst. And so we built these massive spreadsheets to work out the values of businesses and things like that. So it was, you know, instructing clients about privatizing a government asset or whatever. And there were these massive spreadsheets. And I learned very quickly to lock down as much as possible those spreadsheets, because when somebody else gets their mitts on those things, like it can be a two day recovery process, because your boss decided to fiddle with something a little bit over, eat. It’s just,

Katie Cirjak
I guess, that’s the beauty of Excel, you know, in general, is that you can be you know, you can create something so incredibly complex. You know, which is why I say, you know, when you create something so complex, and like you said, you, you know, you’d like it out as much as you can. But at the same time, how cool to have this program where you can create these complex, you know, complicated, like, spreadsheets and calculations and run businesses on an Excel spreadsheet. You know, that thing?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, it is amazing. And I guess that’s let’s start with sort of, let’s talk about Excel. So. And before we press record, we were just chatting about the spectrum of people that use Excel. And none of this is judgment. This is just sort of laying out that you know, different users use it for different things. And at one end, you’ve got the highly technical probably uses a lot of formulas, all sorts of complexity in the sheet really using that function functionality quite deeply. And probably even beyond that. There’s some other clever stuff beyond that, but why The other end, people that really use it really, because it’s like grid paper. So it’s really just the boxes and the lines, and maybe some summaries, it’s the layout really that appeals to them. Is it? Is it encouraging, you know, from a layout sense? And what I’m curious about what you see from advice practices, and it’s not just advisors in this, do you see sort of experience across the spectrum in advisors practices in terms of how they use Excel, or what their experience with it is,

Katie Cirjak
I’ve seen it used as a, like a workflow management tool, right through to really complex investment calculators, you know, in these things will be, you know, 20 sheets long and locked out with, you know, really kind of intense macros and VBA in the background. And, you know, like you said, there are some people who are just using it as a paper, it will just have a whole bunch of random calculations, you know, one plus three plus four. And so really interesting to see how it’s been applied, you know, insanely different ways. Yeah. So many different people. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And it’s, I mean, the thing I’m, I’m interested in, too is, is, would you having seen that? If somebody is not an advisor, or say, a power planner? Who’s Who’s I guess, more likely to be in the complex calculation category, then do you think potentially, there’s a opportunity to get some more training in something like an Excel for even support, so they better understand what these tools can do for them? That they’ll be could there could be some things they’re doing a hard way that perhaps using a tool like Excel, or maybe even word could just make that bit easier?

Katie Cirjak
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously, there are those who, you know, have absolutely mastered it. And, you know, what, you know, can create array calculations, you know, their eyes closed. But there are certainly, you know, if you’re somebody that does use it, or want to use it, you know, aren’t for me, probably the easiest place to start is YouTube, is to just or to just to Google and just kind of go How do I use it? How does so many help articles out there? There used to be a lot of courses. I remember when I started in service, there are a lot of courses. I did Excel. Yeah, absolutely. They were horrible. And I think I’ve learned more from YouTube. Yeah, open file here.

Peita Diamantidis
File New, like, Oh, God. No, I’m not here. For this. I know how to open a new file, I need to do the things after that place.

Katie Cirjak
I think Excel can be quite intimidating, because there is just so much there are so many menu options that, you know, I think 90% of them is just ignored widely, because I don’t know what but you know, what does? You know, my suggestion to just start Googling, you know, what is this menu? Meaning what is this? Or what is that? Or how do I you know, what are some this messy table? Or how do I turn this into a pivot table? You know, and just have a play around. Like I said, there are lots of YouTube tutorials, there are lots of, you know, fantastic people who have dedicated channels on YouTube, Instagram, and, you know, all the social media platforms that are dedicated to teaching people how to use the more complex areas of Excel shortcuts as well, I assure you will shortcuts for Excel and Word. I have developed a massive library of shortcuts. You know, and anyone that knows me will know that f4 is my favorite absolute favorite shortcut for everything. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
So and just for those, so to cover off these, there’s a few things we sort of words, we banded around there and to acknowledge the fact that not everybody listening is going to be across those. So the shortcuts being, you know, the combination of two keys that can cause something to occur in, say, word or, or the spreadsheet and the opportunity, I’m betting there as you can combine multiple steps into one sort of shortcut. Is that a short way to describe it?

Katie Cirjak
Yeah, correct. And then, you know, it just speeds up whatever you’re doing. You can repeat, you know, previous actions. So you know, having to, you know, repeat the same calculation or the same entry. 28 times. Yeah. Yeah, once you get used to shortcuts, they, you know, you won’t go back.

Peita Diamantidis
And it’s something that’s a sort of a newly learned skill, isn’t it? Where watching what we’re doing on a daily basis of the small repetitive things, like really taking notice of those, and there will be a lot of those in both Word and Excel. Yeah, there’ll be a lot of them, you know, and, and, you know, for me in things like word any sort of word processing tool, you know, the templating and, and the title types that like layout types, and all those sort of things. I think people sort of think they know how to use but don’t realize how much repetition in fixing formatting. They apply on a daily basis. And it’s crazy making that stuff if you don’t, yeah, like he’s spent a lot of time doing something that really isn’t really your job. Like you’re not direct. You’re not a word form, but like you’re not a document format or that’s not what you’re hired to do. But we spend so much time doing

Katie Cirjak
it. Yeah. And it’s, it’s not until you kind of sit down with someone and go, Hey, did you know that you can just press this button here or press f4 on your keyboard or whatever it is that people got? My gosh, I didn’t even know that, you know, Excel word could do this. Yeah. And so, you know, sometimes it is somebody else pointing it out to you. And sometimes it’s just kind of a well, why am I doing this? You know, 28 times, but I don’t need to and yeah, Googling how to, you know, make it more efficient, I

Peita Diamantidis
suppose. Yes. So now there was another one. So you mentioned arrays, just as a high level? What is that in Excel? And what have you seen it used for? So what’s the benefit of an array? So,

Katie Cirjak
arrays, a cutter for really, really complex calculations, you know, where you’ve got, you know, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen people use it for, you know, investment property modeling. So when it’s, you know, when you’ve got really complex, you know, when you kind of calculating, you know, the potential of buying an investment in should you? And, you know, yep, everything that’s involved all the fees, you know, how would that look? Yeah, the years, you know, what’s your, what are your rates gonna be? What’s your, you know, rent gonna be? How does that all add up to CPI and everything else? It’s not my area of strength, I have seen it used, and when it’s somebody that knows how to use it, it adds just a whole other layer of just incredible, you know, I guess advancement to what you’re doing, you know, compared to, or comparable to modeling in software that you see.

Peita Diamantidis
Right. And I think that’s an interesting thing, actually, we should probably touch on is, is there are a lot of modeling tools out there. And so there is a decision, I guess, when we’re using it for client forecasting, modeling, as opposed to all the other ways we can use things like Excel, which there are many is there is that decision between whether you use something that you like the like, design yourself, versus using an external tool? And for some people, you know, I mean, so for us, then generally, we’ll use an external tool, like something that’s a modeling tool. The places we don’t use that are when the modeling tools too complicated. And you need something much simpler, because the 400 assumptions, you enter into the modeling tool make the answer ludicrous, you know, and so, it’s we’re over complicating it. So do you see, are there still practices, though, out there that are using it for quite, you know, forecast modeling is still using Excel for that sort of thing? And how are they sort of keeping on top of that, because clearly things change, and update and assumptions need to show? So how are they sort of monitoring and keeping keeping up to date with that sort of use of Excel?

Katie Cirjak
Yeah, I still don’t we do see it still? Yep. Probably less as time goes on. But certainly, you know, I have seen, gosh, it’s been maybe five in this past year, where they’ve used it, you know, I guess, yeah, in like, you know, for pure modeling, because they don’t want to use, you know, any of them major platforms, you know, whether it be because they’re not quite sure whether they can rely on the the output or the the data feeds or fees coming through, or whatever, you know, the reason may be what I have found with a lot of these spreadsheets that they have, are quite complex. But they’re also quite old, because somebody on my back, and so usually, a lot of them become like a patched up kind of, you know, Band Aid version as time goes on. And then, you know, from that point, it’s really, really hard. You know, this is where I have the conversation with somebody will say, you know, do I keep going with this? Or do I now move to a software platform in, you know, how do I make that do what this does this band aid and beautiful thing that we’ve built for the past 15 years? How do I do that here? So yeah, absolutely. There are still some very, very complex calculators out there that are certainly I

Peita Diamantidis
can see it like having, we just recently sort of took a look at a whole lot of the modeling tools. And I think this doesn’t apply to us. But if you’re modeling is inter year, so if there’s anything you’re doing within a year, or over strange timeframes within a year, what’s the modeling doesn’t cope with that it sort of looks at things in whole years, or are like it might do a portion of the year to begin and end but it sort of doesn’t have any, any concept of within the and so, for example, I can even see with certain cash flow modeling, I could see where somebody might be using Excel, if they’re trying to just give somebody a sense, that’s more like, Hey, this is what the year, like the next 24 months looks like, it would be actually very difficult to do that in external tools, because I just don’t look at it that way. Right. So I can see that making sense. Yeah. To that end, though. And I’m sure given you’re seeing these tools that are built some years ago, potentially even, you know, built by somebody with a whole lot of interest, but maybe not any training or any sort of analyst training in their background. You know, there’s probably some rules of thumb out there with using things like Excel. I mean, for me, one was always you know, you should never have a number in a formula Yep, so where we’re earthly possible, it’s a field times a field divided by a field multiplied by a field plus a field. Like, it’s all, the whole formula is about referencing fields, whether they’re anchored, so they don’t move when you copy and paste them or not. The thing I’ve seen go pear shaped is when people have got numbers embedded into formulas. And of course, that’s difficult to find if you try to update a spreadsheet for something that’s changed. Absolutely.

Katie Cirjak
And, you know, the rule I was always taught, and this was going back to, you know, where I was part of editing the budget payments every year. And that’s, you know, complex complex, you know, spreadsheets. You know, the more general you can make it the better. So, like you said, if you do have numbers, you know, something goes pear shaped, it’s a needle in a haystack situation. Yeah. And you don’t want to be responsible for that.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. Well, and it’s so easy to it’s human nature to go well, something calculated it, therefore, it’s right. Correct. Yeah, you know, it’s human nature to do that. So we’ve got to do everything in your power to have ways to limit the possibility of just dragging a formula across, and it messes it up, because you didn’t enter the field, right? Or you got a number in it. It’s like it’s and there’s an extra day in that year, like these things that, you know, every year isn’t 365 days. That’s right. So depending on the way you put formulas in, that’s gonna go pear shaped like it’s all those sorts of things. So yeah, I remember like it got drilled into me when we were doing analysis, like it’s much as human possibly, humanly possible. No numbers and formulas. The other thing I’m curious about, what you would say is, do you prefer like your assumptions or the fields, you’re going to enter be on a separate sheet in that spreadsheet? And then the calculations on like, a second tab, say, like, what’s your take on that? Or are you, hey, there might be some assumptions sitting up that somebody might fill fiddle with and see it flow through below it? What’s your take on that?

Katie Cirjak
And I would usually, it I would usually have really high level assumptions, just really, really basic kind of things, where the calculations are, but anything that’s quite deep that needs, you know, lots and lots of fields, lots of lots of information, or lots of updating, always in a separate sheet, or in a separate sheet. Yeah. In my role always is to hide that sheet. So now tampers with that unless you need to, or unless it needs to be updated. You know, but always on a separate sheet. Because if anything goes pear shaped to at least you still got the stuff I hopefully. Yeah, yeah. But it’s it’s, you know, kind of just really basic inputs, you know, age, retirement age, you know, CPI rate, those kind of really, really basic kind of level things, if you just want a simple classification or calculation. Sorry, boys on the sheet where the information is, yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah. Cool. So while we’re on it, so why don’t we will sort of focus on Excel, and then we can go into Word a bit more. You also mentioned VBA. Yep. Some people won’t know what that is. So just give us the like, high level, what are we talking about there?

Katie Cirjak
Sure. So VBA is Visual Basic for Applications. And it’s a very old programming language, very old. Oh, it’s, it’s actually,

Peita Diamantidis
really, really, I remember it being there. This is a really old program.

Katie Cirjak
It is it is very, very old. It’s one of the very first languages that I learned how to code in. But it’s an area in the back of kind of the developer area in the back of Excel and Word where you can manipulate the front end through the back ends. It’s also where you’d see if you ever recorded a macro. If you open up the back end, you’d be able to see, you know, a series of steps in a different language.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And so just to give people a sense, though, what what’s possible using some of these tools, like what have you seen built, that’s just really changed either doesn’t doesn’t just need to be for an advisor or paraplanner. Within the business web, somebody’s really managed to get some great bang for buck out of Excel and make life easier, what sort of things do you see

Katie Cirjak
government and I touched before on seen really, really, really complex? Property modeling spreadsheets? Yep. You know, and that’s, you know, kind of remodeling on existing properties, and adding on extra properties and selling and retirement and super, and what that whole situation will look like, you know, today versus 20 years versus retirement or whatever it is, you know, and that’s, that’s one of the most fantastic examples I’ve seen of Excel being used. I quite a while ago, created something that I couldn’t find a program. Anyway, that will do it, but I created a strategy filter in so it’s essentially this massive database of advice strategies. Yep. That you know, with just one little screen, one little spreadsheet kind of screen where you can enter in, you know, client’s kind of basic details where they’re at. And then the VBA in the background, would filter through all the strategies that are in the database and spit out and go, Hey, these might work for this client based on what you’ve done. Coding, awesome. I’ve seen really, really complex workflows, and they’re really, really complex workflows, you know, 30 or 40 people and practice,

Peita Diamantidis
managing meaning that they’re using it to manage manage work in progress,

Katie Cirjak
or Yeah, manage the task. And so it’ll be, you know, quite granular and, you know, task by task by task, and what’s the accommodation? And where does that lead to? Yeah, and like I said, before, that throw love about just that you can do that for so many different things. And it just so is

Peita Diamantidis
that sort of almost using Excel like a database? Is that really what they’ve done? There? Is sort of turn up more into a database. Yeah.

Katie Cirjak
Yep. And I think a lot of people, that’s kind of the general what I see, it’s either they use it as a as a calculator. Well, they turn it into some kind of database, and it works really well as database.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s sort of was originally built alongside that, wasn’t it? Like it was sort of one of those things that was like the first version of that for most people? And what about things like templating, and look and feel, it’s always been something that’s been a bit of a bugbear of mine years ago. So my clients when I was in, you know, advancement, banking, always, and particularly ones that weren’t finance people. So they were operational, people used to love it, because I would make to go to a lot of trouble to make things easy to read, even when you’re printing off the spreadsheet, like really careful layout, highlight of cells, even some cells with shadows, so it’s clear, you know, which ones are fields? And which ones that you know, all that sort of stuff? Do you see many people setting up any templating? or anything like that in Excel? Do you think there’s any value in some of those things that could be better used?

Katie Cirjak
Not only more, not so much? It’s more? The question I get asked a lot is, How do I print this nicely? How do I get this into a nice one page? That’s always your biggest question, which sometimes is near actually, a lot of the time is near impossible. Yeah, more so than, you know, how do I make this pretty all user friendly? or anything like that? It’s more just how do I get this to fit onto one page, so I can show my client or email it to my client? So

Peita Diamantidis
is that is there? Do you think there’s much of me, for example, sending somebody a spreadsheet? Or is very different to sending them a one pager or a PDF? Or a, you know, a screenshot? What are you seeing people use in that sense? How what’s the sort of normal behavior for people when they’re using tools that they then send the details to a client? How are they generally doing that

Katie Cirjak
is generally just, you know, they’ll extract the information that they need. And, you know, it’s just like a PDF to the client, just a one pager, very rarely do I see anybody thinks the clients, you know, kind of ofour calculations, or the law, spreadsheets, and a lot of people just won’t, because, you know, the chance of something going wrong? Is the non stop most people.

Peita Diamantidis
Right, let alone them actually being able to open it properly. Because, you know, do they have the right version? Well, I mean, maybe that’s less so now, I just remember years ago, you know, if you didn’t have the right version of it, then it wouldn’t process the thing. And it’ll look funny, and like, it was just a disaster. And it’s still

Katie Cirjak
an issue. It’s, it’s an old, still an issue. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And actually now talking about that, then, you know, we’ve got Excel, which we’re using a lot, but clearly word I mean, there’s still be a lot of SOPs and other advice documents being produced in Word in terms of Excel, say, tables, or graphs or anything like that. Most people like in, you know, embedding or having a link through to advice documents for that, are they screenshotting it and dumping it in, what’s the way that you’re seeing people sort of be the connector between those two things?

Katie Cirjak
It’s mostly a, just a screenshot into a Word document into a template. Yeah, every now and then I’ll see, you know, a merged chart from Excel, which I actually quite liked, because you’re going to make any changes, you know, reflecting the Word documents straightaway. But I think it’s more not so much that people just don’t do it. I think it’s just that they’re not aware of how it works, or what it actually does, and how it Yeah, plays within the Word document once they make changes in Excel. But that’s something that I you know, it was one of the first things that I was trained on, when it came to transferring data from Excel to word was to was to link it, so that any changes I made, the data was correcting me once versions,

Peita Diamantidis
right. And it’s quite a cool little thing, because it’s almost like you’ve got a little portal from Your Word, Doc. Yeah, that’s a portal for a certain bit of the spreadsheet, for whatever the thing is that you want to capture. But anything that goes on in that link spreadsheet will then feed through and your portal will be updated, you know, and it’s, it’s, if done well, I mean, you’d probably need if you’re going to do it with a lot of documents over time, you’d probably need the two templated linked ones set up and then what you’d copied us or something so that you could before you started using them but the new ones weren’t linked to an old Excel spreadsheet, it’s linked to a new one. Is that valid?

Katie Cirjak
Absolutely. And yeah, the rule always either gonna do that if you know before, I guess the client for you, whatever you’re doing With that, is to, once you make sure that your data is correct, you break links, and then you just got the static chart data, whatever is in your Word document. That’s absolutely correct.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, okay. And so that’s a valid thing. So it’s like using it connected. And then once that is no longer valid, because it’s actually a document that has a date, effectively, like it’s, uh, you know, it’s got a point in time, break the link, so that that isn’t likely to then change it. And that’s just a nice sort of sanitation of the way you do things and making it clean. So that’s a good tip, actually, to just do that as part of your process, I mean, I’m also a bit of a frequent that stuff, everything, that’s a point in time, I’m just always PDF thing, like, it’s just my way of locking something tiny. PDF. It is, it is and it means you just don’t ever get that instance, where somebody finds it opens, it starts changing it forgot to copy at first, you know, like the all these things that we all do, right? We all do it and make those mistakes. So then in Word, let’s just chat about that. Because I mean, we’ve even though we don’t live in Word as much, we have had to use it. And so I spent a bit of time in the template section of word. And I’ve got to say there’s a lot you can do. At that level that then when you open a document or even a document that’s been spat out by another system, if you open it within the template, it’ll be like, Well, we know what that’s meant to look like. And it’s sort of just sort of fixed all headings and layouts and all that sort of things. So it’s even though it’s a bit fiddly, I don’t know whether you found a fiddly bit is a bit fiddly to set up once done, once done, right, then it can be quite powerful and save a bit of a tiny bit of time.

Katie Cirjak
And plates, I I advocate templates, I’m a big fan of word I have, you know, I’ve used word for very, very, very many years. And you know, I’m a huge banner templates, you know, one because it keeps everything consistent, or two, it just automates so much. There’s just so much capability to automate and, you know, set themes so that you can brand your document and your colors and your fonts and your headings and everything, everything that I would lay out. So whatever spits out, yeah, it’s just doing it for you. Yeah, and why wouldn’t you want that? Like, if she can do that? Why wouldn’t you

Peita Diamantidis
100%. And I mean, even things that things that I discovered, actually were and I’m going to describe this wrong, because it’s been a little while since I’ve used it and word but the use of a thing like a watermark. So it’s, it’s something that’s almost behind that you want. So if you don’t just want the static a4 page, and you want something that’s got like a curved, nice edge, or maybe even a diagram, that’s like the background diagram, you’re gonna then do lots too, but it’s got this basic layout, then you can put that in as a watermark and a page. And so it’ll just be there on every page. And so if you do four versions of that, because it’s four pages long, it’ll just, it’ll just do it, you know, you don’t have to try and drag it and then drag text over the top, and it moves. And you know that I mean, one of the things I struggle with in any of these tools, Excel, Google Docs, any of them is the whole, I put something in, it shifts things down, you try to line them up like that rubbish, it drives me nuts, right. So if you want to see me throw a computer out the window, it’s when God has been done that rubbish. And so anything that takes that out of the challenge, you know, the problem, and I find doing logos, so if you want your logo on a page on every page, or everything, but the front page, then the watermark sort of style, just let you do that so easily. So it doesn’t mess with it. Yeah,

Katie Cirjak
and again, this is where I like templates, because you can set the layout, and you can lock that layout. So that you know, like, and, you know, I, it’s even the most experienced word user will complain about moving an image because then you know, you move it and millimeter, you know, 3d pages are created before you’ve even realized, you know, it’s just stop. You know, trying to undo that is just as hard. So, you know, I’m all for templates. You know, we just invite again, why wouldn’t you just stayed stay Eric, some, you know, they’re really easy to create, and really, you know, big fan,

Peita Diamantidis
and look, and I think but something we like lots of us probably unaware of is the consumer, you know, our client structure in documents helps us absorb the information. So the more that there’s a certain type of heading, that’s a certain font size and color. But you know, triggers whatever it could be triggers, like these are the action items or these this is another section or this is whatever it is, the more structure you have, like that that you stick to, then the easier any document is to absorb. Yeah, it’s really important and I think some people think it’s just nitpicking like when they get comments back, you know, somebody’s like, oh, that fonts off or this. It’s like, no, no, this is about making it easy for this to be consumed.

Katie Cirjak
It’s also about accessibility. And this is something that I learned, you know, in a lot of detail when I worked with defense, particularly around Word document, it’s about you know, when you’ve got consistency when you’ve got, you know, when you’ve got a 30 page 60 Page document You know, it needs breathing room, it needs consistency, you know, your eye needs to kind of initially broken up enough so that, you know, you’re, you’re not getting fatigued within this whole thing. And, you know, accessibility, you know, one obviously needs, you know, so that anybody can read it. And it’s not complicated or confusing or whatever. But to it’s just so your readers aren’t losing interest, and they’re not missing, you know, the key points, they’re trying to highlight an array. It’s also just professional, you know, it just looks nice when it’s yeah, you know, nicely laid out, and you don’t have three different fonts with three different sizes everywhere.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And look, I think, you know, the other thing that we can all do better, I think is, and it’s always the challenge I’ve had, and it to be fair, this has changed a lot in recent years. But the problem I’ve had with the SOA templates that would get spat out of any of the systems is, you know, they’re hideous. Yeah. I mean, they’re really, really hideous. And when you look at a document that you absorb, or you know, when you see something you like, wow, that’s really well laid out and looks great. And I can quickly absorb that information, I find things like, like the McCrindle guys, actually, when they do one of the reports, and it comes out, and there’s an icon for each thing. And it’s just really easy. It’s almost sort of infographic style. You know, it’s got that sort of fear where it’s easy to follow you, we don’t do that enough in our documents. And I’m not just talking advice to humans, it could even be in the letters or the updates we’re sending on other things, you know, do you have an icon for each key type of information you give so that the client learns, hey, this is a market update bit. So it’s got a little icon that’s about market. So like, start to use these repetitive signaling? Yes,

Katie Cirjak
it’s a conversation that I have, quite often, when I’m creating web templates for clients, where they, you know, where I kind of suggest that maybe, you know, this book could be in a table, or this could be a graphic in where documentation, there’s this kind of this worry that it won’t look professional, if there are too many pictures in it. And, you know, it’s an interesting one, because there’s this, there’s just this fear that, you know, the client will think that it’s not professional, if it’s not, you know, a little icons and pictures and, you know, lots of tables, and, you know, lots of color and things like that, when in fact, I believe it’s the Yes, I really do. You know, it keeps you engaged me to, like I said, when you’ve got a 30 page document, that’s a lot. And if that is just purely text, I would lose interest after the second page, you know, little 930 page. And

Peita Diamantidis
there’s years ago, and I don’t know if it’s the textbooks are still around, and I’m probably gonna get his name wrong, I think so for unit maths in New South Wales, they probably call it something different now. But you know, high level maths. The textbook was written by a guy called Caronia, so I think it was his name. And it used a script font. And there was no difference to the font, heading, no indent note, like it was a stream of consciousness consciousness, this entire textbook, full of mathematical formulas. And what was interesting about a DS, the trauma, eight like that can be a connecting point to any new person you interact with, if they happen to mention, like, they’re my sort of age, and they did maths. And like, I remember cronies.

Katie Cirjak
Oh, my God, I use this tool. Many. That’s

Peita Diamantidis
right. And we really got to, you know, think about who does this stuff? Well, I mean, even annual reports by say, you know, companies listed on the stock exchange, they spend a fortune getting those done, because they recognize they’re trying to communicate important concepts to people. And it’s a lot and there’s a lot of data, but they’ve got to try and get a great messages. So I’m with you, I think we don’t expend enough energy on making the look and feel look much better. And in that sense, my understanding is word can look far more like a brochure than it ever did. It’s not just word processing now, right? There’s a lot of ways that you can really testing,

Katie Cirjak
I think they just recently introduced a designer, menu option as well, where you can, you know, I’m pretty sure it’s an AI powered, little designer option where, you know, you can have a really, really basic, you know, horrible looking them documents, and it’ll make suggestions, you know, it’ll actually create little designs for you and go, Hey, you know, do you want one of these? You know, but absolutely, you know, there’s, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of creativity, I think these and, you know, when you’re no competing for attention for your clients attention when they, you know, they’re overwhelmed with information. It’s not just you giving them a document, it’s, you know, 30 other people, you know, Superfund investments, you know, catalogs, all this stuff, you’ve got to make it engaging enough that they’re going to take the time and have a look at it. Otherwise, it’ll just be in the pile with everything. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
And, and, you know, it demonstrates care. Like if you’ve bothered to make this thing look good, it demonstrates care. The trick is that you don’t have to build it from scratch every time. So and right and if listener if you are the As a person, that is part of your role, unless you are literally a PA or EA, and even then I would argue that there should be a lot of automation or templating, or whatever you could do in your role unless that’s literally your role is producing just the document judging, you know, the turning it into looking good thing, then, you know, please expend some energy in working out how you can Yes, make it look better, but how you can do it without taking any extra time, in fact, less time? Because it’s ludicrous. We’ve all I mean, if nothing else, it’ll just free up more time to spend with your clients, you know, if nothing else, and I’m curious, actually, to that extent, is there anybody you’ve seen that’s done some clever stuff that say, is a spreadsheet that they’re using, that they share on screen with clients or anything like that, like is anybody getting clever about cool graphs or cool ways of representing data, because there’s a lot more graphical options in Excel than there ever used to be like, there’s a lot more way to represent data than they ever used to be.

Katie Cirjak
Not that I’ve seen, and this is where I think a lot of people will then go and rely on, you know, like an online platform modeling where they can kind of get, you know, some bring something up on screen really quickly. Not so much in Excel. The only other thing I’ve seen is people dump information into Canva to show it just to their client. But I think that’s a yes, I feel like that’s a really complicated way when it comes to, you know, complex data. And not so much in Excel. Not anymore.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, okay. Okay, so it’s the Excel is the complex stuff. Yeah. And the the analysis may be some business tools. But you know, I look, the thing I would say about Excel is, you know, if you’re somebody that lives in it, so if you’re somebody that’s using it on a regular basis, then you could absolutely do worse than picking one menu item a month, as in one tab along the top, a month, and each week, you’re just gonna go down and find something you’ve never used before and Google it for a YouTube video and just watch what that does. Because we are using point 1% of these things. We think we are experts, and we simply are not.

Katie Cirjak
No, no, but you know, like you just said, there is just a wealth of information available to us this now. You know, even if you learn 20% of it, you’ll be much further ahead than a lot of people. And it’ll save you a lot. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think it really will. And and I think the other thing that’s that’s actually a downfall these days, so I’m showing my age here. But when we were using the 2005, out nearly 30 years ago that I was in that little analyst chair working 120 hour weeks bleary eyed at 3am. Sushi, staring at a spreadsheet, it’s not the right time to be doing that stuff, I might get tired and caffeine and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, when we were doing that, you could buy a book that had every function in Excel, and it had one per page and you could scan them to go, Look, I need to do this particular thing. And I need a function that will fit it. And it lets you sort of browse really easily. And it’s the weakness of online help functionality is when you know what you’re looking for, you’re fine. If you can describe what you want to do when you’re not sure. It’s very hard to browse. Right? It’s very hard to sort of go, oh, that sounds pretty cool. Why don’t I play with that? You know, which is what? Sorry, go ahead.

Katie Cirjak
Oh, I was gonna say this is where? And I actually I was working on the spreadsheet not that long ago, and I was frustrated and was my my 14 year old son who went well, why don’t you put it into chat GPT and ask it. And it was then that I went actually yes. And it solved my problem within 10 seconds flat to just go. Here’s what I’m trying to do. You know, he’s part of my formula. Here’s what I want it to look like, can you please fill in the rest? And it just kind of went? Sure. And that was the it’s Wow. Yeah, highly recommend that.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. And particularly as, as, you know, that meets the sort of sniff test for GBT, meaning there’s no client data going in. There’s no, there’s nothing that you need to protect. This is asking it a generic question. That’s right. For a generic formula, you know, it meets all of those tests. And I think the the other thing that people don’t fully grasp and I hadn’t, I’ll admit I had neither is so you ask it a question. You get something back and you’re like, ah, that wasn’t what I was looking for. The way to respond to that in chat DP is to right, that wasn’t quite what I was looking at for you. Please read do it for blah, blah, blah. Yes. So talk to it like you would a human being in that instance. And generally on the second crack, it’s fun. Yeah, no, it gets it done.

Katie Cirjak
Yep. And This is where I’ve, yeah, that’s where I was kind of worried initially, I stopped using chat at the time because I’d get the wrong answer or not what I was looking for, and you kind of go, well, it doesn’t really get it. I’ve now learned and I have had for conversations that chat TV to where it’s like, no, you need to try again. Yeah, no, this is not what I asked you to do. Please stop responding and try again. You know, like you said, just speak to it as though you’re speaking to a helpdesk, or whoever it isn’t, you know, trying to get a solution from, you know, second or third guy and

Peita Diamantidis
being being specific. You have it as much context as humanly possible. Yeah. And that will mean it because it’s, it’s only it can only learn from what’s out there. And if you make it too general, then it’s got too much to choose from. That’s right. That’s right. So undoubtedly, it’s going to be wrong. What are the odds, you know? So that’s, that’s interesting. How are you finding many people using or you’re yourself using cheat sheet PT when we’re trying to describe something, and we just don’t feel like we’ve nailed the description. So it could be a description of a, of a strategy or a, you know, a market environment or something like that, where the words we’re coming up with, we recognize are a bit stilted or just really aren’t as succinct as we like, or anybody, you know, are you seeing anybody feeding that into chat GBT to try and get something out, that maybe is a bit clearer.

Katie Cirjak
More and more people are doing that? Obviously, they have, you know, there’s that concern about putting anything in there. That’s, that’s quite sensitive. But when it’s just generic paragraph, you know, like he said, when you’re trying to just describe strategy, you know, in a generic kind of form. I definitely okay. And more and more people are doing that. And I certainly, you know, I use churches quite regularly. And it’s just for those times when, like you said, you just can’t You can’t get the words out or, yeah, yeah, I just need some suggestions on, you know, how would you say these? So, you know, is this grammatically correct, and just those kind of, you know, save yourselves, you know, 10 minutes? Just, you know, intense kind of brain trauma and just dump it in there. And yep, you know, yeah, see, when it comes up, and,

Peita Diamantidis
and, look, I’d also encourage, I’ve actually had a lot of fun with this where, you know, okay, you know, describe a whatever strategy, remembering that it probably knows most of the strategies. So most of the more fundamental strategies we all use, it probably knows about, right, because out there in the internet, so so it probably knows about them. So you know, describe transition to retirement, like I’m a 10 year old, if you use a story that a 10 year old in Australia would understand as an analogy for like, start to end, if you’ve got a client that’s of a certain background, maybe they grew up in Britain in the war, or like, whatever it is, tell it that and ask it how it would describe this thing. And it’s not that you use these things verbatim, but it can give you some wonderful storytelling or context. We’re like, Ooh, I can run with that. Yeah, you know, what can I do with that thing? So I do think that and I’m excited actually, to hear to use it for Excel formulas. That’s a great idea to sort of solve a problem you’re trying to fix. And I’ve heard of people doing that for quite complicated ones. Yeah. You know, not just some basic stuff.

Katie Cirjak
Yeah. I’ve, you know, I’ve done some really complex Python code in there. And just, you know, so can you can you just help me resolve? Well have a look at this? And please tell me, you know, where’s the needle in the haystack? Yeah, you know, if it’s gonna save me two hours of stress, and topic,

Peita Diamantidis
it’s at least a place to start. And then if you can’t do it, we’ll find we’ll use another strike in

Katie Cirjak
office for two hours. But you know, exactly, exactly.

Peita Diamantidis
Let’s run avoid that, if at all humanly possible. What, uh, what about integration. So, Word and Excel have been around for Well, we’ve established a long time, how much opportunity is there to either use triggers from other tools or integrate them with other things that people might be using on a daily basis?

Katie Cirjak
I think, and this is I have actually writing an article, I have it at the moment called Why word is my MVP and will forever be because it integrates into so many different platforms. You know, I, my gosh, it’s just one of those things that just seems to work with, with everything. It’s very rare that you can’t extract something into some form of a Word documents, or you know, whether it be a doc doc or a doc RTF, or just some form of a editable Word document. And, you know, same as with Excel, you know, whether it be using what’s in Excel to import data into a platform or to export data, you can in some format, import and export that data. And that’s why I love them. I just think they you know, they’ve tried and true and tested and they just been around for so long and and they will continue to be you know, the MVP for a lot of people me included, because I just feel that this is so trial.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And there’s a lot of things I mean, we’ve discovered discovered this way Is with G Suite. But I’m sure it would apply to all of the appropriate Microsoft tools like OneDrive and others is you can set it up to do a whole lot of automation things like, when you set up a new type of folder, it automatically puts these templated documents in there ready that are empty to go with, you know, like, it can do a whole of these things that you’re manually doing that you can teach it just to repeat it, something you’re doing. So if you’re doing something that’s from here, to here to here to here, and it’s within the Microsoft suite, I would go I would search that, and I’d go on YouTube and see if you can connect that and make it an automation because I bet you can. Absolutely.

Katie Cirjak
And you know, Microsoft is now quite heavily releasing a lot of automation. And a lot of these little features where you can connect all your different productivity tools, as we said before, you can go through all your information and connect your workflow end to end. You know, right to write down to I think there’s a tool, I’m not sure what it’s called, but you can literally, you know, this kind of guy I want, you know, as soon as an email comes in from Outlook, I want these things to be done in Word to open an Excel type and, you know, teams to do the calendar to schedule this. Yeah, absolutely. Google it. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
there’s, there’s so much of it, and you will be stunned how much of your time it frees up? Yeah, it’s just ludicrous. Once you start becoming aware of these things. Now, we’ve we have chatted a bit about AI. So speaking of AI, you guys have a program you’ve put together that’s for I guess, advisors or paraplanners? Really, that’s about you know, SOPs and AI. So what sort of thing can they learn in there that you think would be valuable, that can really add some asset, add some warmth to what you know, they’re doing on a day to day basis?

Katie Cirjak
Yeah. And again, it was, you know, when we started looking at this, and, you know, we started looking at AI, when open AI kind of was released late last year, and, you know, how can we start using this? And what can we do with this? And, you know, really, is it? Is it something that we’re going, you know, is it going to be the thing or not? And then we started looking at, you know, well, how can you, you know, optimize the statement of advice, because that was the question that we started been getting quite a lot, you know, what can I do with AI, particularly around SLA s, because that’s, you know, quite a big bug there, in terms of time for a lot of people. And so, you know, I started looking at this thing, and, you know, optimizing it in terms of layout, and, you know, accessibility and, you know, language. So, you know, there’s a section about, you know, rewording things just so that they’re not so, you know, technical jargon and complicated. There’s a section on, you know, layouts. So how can I make this three pages worth of just plain text into something that’s broken into something that somebody actually wants to read? And so, you know, there are prompts about, you know, dumping all this text and making your table, for example, a bullet? Yeah, you know, so it’s all just, it’s not so much about, you know, the strategies and the advice itself, it’s more just about the layout, and just making it something that your client, as we’ve discussed, you know, that makes it more engaging that the client wants to look at. And, you know, part of that was kind of done with the Tyr in mind as well, you know, going forwards, if the SOA is going to, you know, no longer be or it’s going to be something different or something shorter, you know, could you use some tools to, you know, to make it something different? And why can you how can it actually do? Yeah, it’s in we’ve had, we’ve had quite a lot of interest, quite a lot of uptake, we’ve had quite a few people do the course. Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s just a quick little body minute kind of, you know, out of your day, to run through it, and then you’ve just got it forever, and you’ve got access to it forever. And we’ll play around as much as you want.

Peita Diamantidis
Look, and I think anything that looks some people like me are just going to use them and break them. That’s how I learned, right? I just sort of, I mean, I’m even doing a little program that’s about image generation in AI, right? I’m really fascinated about the opportunity to get a photo shoot, that means I’m never in front of a camera, like this appeals to me immensely. That’s fantastic. You know, learn how to do this, so that then I can have an adventure outfield or I can be a spice man. Like all of that, to me. Sounds awesome. But I do think most people actually aren’t like that. So they don’t want to actually dive in. So anything that can give you that it’s a little bit of confidence, isn’t it? It’s like, okay, learn enough that then you will start playing with it. And you’ll start to see more application over time. Yeah. Expecting honestly, if you’re not using AI, sort of on a semi regular basis. By now, doing something like this will, will help a lot. And, like, it’s so pervasive now. In fact, as of today, I’ve added an extra question for every interview. Now that just covers AI because it applies everywhere now. Yeah, it’s not something that do you think you might get there whereas a year ago, or do you think you’ll ever folding AI to the system now it’s like so how are you? because everybody is right, it’s like, well, no matter what app it is, how are you going to use AI? Right? What’s your use for it? So it is here to stay? It is not? Yes, it has some challenges, but it absolutely has some application that could be really powerful. Yeah. And I think, you know, if we’re smart, I think

Katie Cirjak
that’s that’s the, you know, conversation. I don’t I don’t think it should be treated as, you know, some issue that needs to be resolved. And, you know, we make it you know, it is here to stay, people will use it, whether, you know, people like it or not, it is being used, you know, my kids use it. You know, I’ve had emails from school about it. Yeah, it is, you know, community wide. So, if you can, you know, start to use it in a way that is comfortable for you. I think that’s a good starting point. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, looking into it.

Peita Diamantidis
And look, if you, if you ever catch yourself, you know, doing this sort of railing against it, you know, and it’s this, it’s going to pass as be outside, it’s a bit of a flash in the pan thing. What I would say to you is that in doing that you are dangerously mimicking all of our parents who thought TV was going to rot our brain, when we were watching rage and first thing in the morning on a Saturday or whatever, like, it’s just, it’s here to stay, this is not something that you’re going to be able to anger away. This is it’s just not that it’s a it’s a given, what’s what we need to do is work out how we can make ourselves bionic, by using this sort of thing. Like, what can we throw out and enhance?

Katie Cirjak
It’s all about working with it, you know, learning how you can use it, to optimize whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. That’s all it is, you know, and I know, when I started paraplanning, everything, I did this with a calculator. And, you know, I was told them that, you know, there will be nothing to replay, you know, it’s just,

Peita Diamantidis
you’re always going to have to do this manually, this will always be a manual process.

Katie Cirjak
And you know, there will be nothing else that I remember the last time I touched a calculator, it’s just

Peita Diamantidis
to that end, actually, there is a lot of discussion about what’s the end of paraplanners, like, which I just think is hysterical. Because, well, I find I find when people say those sort of things, it’s, it’s the sweeping statement. And what I do think is all of these tools, so the analysis tools, and how far they’re going now, even with scenarios they can do with a click, and all this sort of stuff does change what each roll does, but my expectation actually, and given what we’ve been talking about, actually today, that paraplanners are going to end up needing to be better communicators, like I think their skill could be, here’s this complex thing, and they’re going to become really good at creating great ways to communicate those messages. You know, so it’s, that’s going to become an art is how do you make this really easily absorbable a ball and clear and like that, and particularly Cuellar, right, when we’re not restrained by these ridiculous documents, then the paraplanner can be the one that can be that sort of lens, from the clients perspective, how can we make this easy to understand how can we communicate this message?

Katie Cirjak
Absolutely. And I think this, you know, I mean, paraplanning, you know, has has evolved, how many times over and over throughout the years, and I think this is just another iteration of that. And I think we’re an opportunity to evolve and kind of go, right, well, how can I use this for my job? You know, and how can I, you know, how will my role now shift into into? What will it evolve into, but not in a bad way? Yeah, I just, I genuinely believe that this is an opportunity to leverage, you know, new technology, and in 10 years, we might see something else that, you know, is feels a lot scarier than this. Yes. You know, I truly believe that this is an opportunity to, you know, take it and run with it and see, you know, what it can do for you and what you can learn and yeah, you know, what changes you can make? And in paraplanning?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, is there anything we sort of missed in terms of the magic of Word and Excel and any other tips or, or things you’d point people towards, that they should check out? That’s things you’ve seen, that’s like, Wow, that really blew my socks off. Anything else? Do you feel that we should cover off?

Katie Cirjak
I don’t think so. I think it’s one of those, you know, they’re not kind of new, shiny tools. They’re not these exciting things anymore. But, you know, I think they’re definitely worth attention and learning. I think it’ll be around for a long time, they will continue to evolve. And, you know, with the advent of AI, you know, I think those tools will, you know, be a bit more flashy, but there is a reason why they’ve stuck around for so long. And I think they were learning to use Well, or to the best of your capabilities. Yeah, you know, it was value and, you know, I’ve been able to trace for my Word and Excel skills into every roll I’ve ever had, and will continue to do so.

Peita Diamantidis
And don’t miss them. No, and I think you know, bothering to understand the other talk like most people will Have a Microsoft suite of some fashion that yeah, part of their role that they’ve been given. And they’ll be using a handful of them, maybe outlook and Word and Excel might be the core, and then a few others bother to look at what else is there. Because sometimes there’s this clever thing I’ve seen some people use forms in a really clever way to feed into Word docs that do the, so you don’t have to go and try and find all the places you got to change something to look for a client’s name or, you know, like, there’s clever things you can do by connecting a few of these tools. So that then yeah, no, you can save yourself some inordinate amount of time.

Katie Cirjak
Yeah, and it’s just more than anything, just, you know, to have that curiosity, just be curious about it. And if you come across something, you know, you can’t really you can’t break the program itself. You know, you might, you know, mess up a document, but be curious and just respond and see what they do. And if you’re not sure, like you said, you know, Google or YouTube, you know, yeah, we can do with it.

Peita Diamantidis
And, and I would, yeah, I would really encourage any listener, like, if you are using these tools, at all, really, like in a week, if you don’t, you know, if you’re using Word Excel at all, then I would find a YouTube a couple of YouTube channels that you just find have a lot of this and start following them, because what they’ll do is, they’ll have the latest update, and then they’ll give it like, there’ll be a short little video, that I’ll show you the latest stuff, these companies are now for a while my take was Microsoft was lagging in terms of new stuff, you know, like they’d, they’d you know, just they give it another number. So it was the, you know, the 19 version of this, and the 20, and the or whatever. But there wasn’t significant difference in the functionality each time. Whereas they are, I would argue, probably gone beyond catching up, they’re now actually starting to sort of surpass a whole lot of other tools. And they are going hard. They’re investing seriously. So keep up to date with what they’re releasing yet, because they’re doing it for people like us. Worker bees, yeah. They try to help out worker bees. Because they know that’s the market. So try to find some a couple of YouTube channels you like you like the way they describe things that they keep up to date on those updates, and subscribe to those channels. Yeah, I think it’ll Yeah, it’ll do, it’ll serve you really well. All right, folks. Now, the other thing I’d say is Microsoft now have or sorry, I believe in final beta testing are about to roll out their version of an AI called copilot. And this would sit embedded within this suite of tools. So as opposed to what we were just describing, where you sort of go to another tool, and, and there are actually actual ways that people have actually added in things like chat GPT into Excel, and word. And there’s some concerns about the privacy and all sorts of things of data and information for that. But what Microsoft have done is their own AI. We’re getting somebody on the show to talk through what that might look like, so that we can all sort of get a bit of a heads up of what might be possible. So that when it goes live, we can all you know, click our heels and get done in one day, what currently takes five. So fingers crossed, that’s what they deliver. But advice explores if you would like to find out more about this sort of clever tricks and tips about the SOA and IO masterclass then of Katie’s the website link will be in the episode along with her LinkedIn details. Thank you so much for joining us here today to cover something just, you know, I guess so general, and and something we’re so used to using, I really appreciate it, we ever have a chat and talk about all the different elements that might be available for people to check out. So thank you so much for your time.

Katie Cirjak
Thank you for your time, I really enjoyed it.

Peita Diamantidis
Okey dokey. So normally at this point, just before giving my thoughts, I suggest, Hey, are you a current user of this app? Well, we’re talking Word and Excel here. So I’m betting most of you are. And if it’s not, if you’re not a user of Word, or Excel, it’s because you’re a user of Google Docs and Sheets or equivalent version thereof. I’m hoping that at the very least, this conversation has prompted you to rethink learning more about those tools, I think we can all get very used to what we’ve used them for to date, not realizing that we have some Formula One cars that were sitting there using like they’re a moped right, so if I can encourage you please start to investigate what else these tools can do. Now, there’s a couple of ways you can do that. And YouTube truly is your friend here. So I just spent a couple of seconds and went into YouTube and typed in Excel and VBA right, I just went alright, you know, what can we use this for? Is there some tutorials and I came across a YouTube page called Kenji explains that’s ke n j AI and you know, he had even some little tutorials just on how you could build a couple of things. One could be alright you use this sheet all the time, but at the end of the week, you then wipe out the data And you entered in again, right? So it’s the same sheet you use over and over again, then you can set up just a button that when you click, it will just clear the data in a table. Easy, right? Super easy. And what it’ll actually do for you, if you want to, you could code it such that when you click the button, it sort of does the Are you sure? All right, which we all love, there’s just some things we like, do you really want to do this, so it will do a little pop up. Another one I really liked actually, that he has an example of is, you’ve got a spreadsheet user type, maybe there’s something you update that then gets sent around to the team to take a look at this is something you regularly do with this particular spreadsheet. Then you can add an A button using VBA. You can add a button in that Excel spreadsheet that when you click on it will automatically open up an email with the spreadsheet attached with certain code and to certain people. And you can just check it and then click send. So I know that says ABA. Peter, is it really that many clicks for me to do that? Myself? Well, no, it’s not. But if you are regularly doing these things, and you can find multiple examples of the of ideas for this type of these type of little ninja tricks and shortcuts, you will gradually add more and more time you’re freeing up. And if you do this really well, we are talking you could free up a whole day a week like this can become a massive impact on your day. So I encourage you to go into YouTube, check out Excel, and VBA or Excel tips or 2023 Excel tips. Similarly, word tips 2023, or even word designer, you know tips if you haven’t weren’t aware that there was something that could help you design, I mean, just in my quick look, you know, I discovered you can drag a you know, you can open a PDF in word and it will convert it all to text that you could then edit or drag some of that content and use it elsewhere. And even an image. So if you’ve got an image that’s got some stuff in it that you really like and you want that you want that text, then you just copy that image into Word, save it as a PDF, and then open it again in Word and it’ll convert all of that into text. So there’s a number of these tricks, right, that could really make your life easier. So I would encourage you to use YouTube it to me, it’s the it’s the digital of the place to find these. So that’s the first thing I’d encourage you to do find and follow some of these people that just provide constant updates. The second thing is if you are regularly living in any of these tools, then I’d take a look at the menu items at the top, you know, there’s all those, there’s a couple of whatever it might be fall view whatever the items at the top, assign them one to a month. And then you know, once a week, you got to spend some time checking out some of the features you’ve never clicked on under that menu item for that month, right. So you’re going to allocate an hour or whatever, once a week. And this month, it’s about the farming you and we’re going to go through and you’re going to check out a feature I’m and then you go in and either play with it in, say Excel, or you just go into YouTube and say, you know, explanations for this feature in Excel right and or uses for that sort of thing. So really start to dig use things like ninja tricks, or, you know, creative uses for these sort of search terms will give you some great ideas and systematically work your way through the menu items, I’m, I’m confident you will find a whole lot of things that are going to make your life easier. And if you’re feeling particularly generous, can I ask that you share them on the Ensembl community platform because all of us could benefit from those. So please, as you discover these ninja tips, please share them with the rest of the community. Now, the other thing I just add to that I see a lot and some of this is just old school stuff, right? So feel free to ignore if you like, but file naming when we’ve got these files can get a bit loosey goosey. And people can name things a bit randomly and they can be potentially maybe difficult to find when say you’ve got a sub folder, you’ve got something sitting under so it might be multiple sheets or multiple, you know Word documents. So one thing that that this was a carryover from years and years ago when I was an analyst is the reverse date naming methods. So that’s something you do at the beginning of a file. It’s the date in you can choose is it the date you create it is it the date you finalize it, whatever it is to you, but so today is the seventh of September 2023. So the reverse date naming method would be 20230907 spacious desk base and then the name of the file, maybe even the clients name and then whatever you like, but if you do it that way, it will perfectly order in any folder. So they’ll always be in date order whereas if you date it the the other direction. So Oh 7092023 Then stuff gets mixed up right because of why’s that? The month? No, I mean, I think so, reverse date order is a little ninja tip that could make life a whole lot easier for you. The other thing I’d say is in a client folder, consider having events, event folders or subfolders for a client rather than having advice, Doc’s and then, you know, I do or whatever like those folders having, you know, that reverse date review. So if it was done for September 20230901, dash, any review, and under that fop sub folder or all the documents, you may find that event based folders could serve all of your team much better. And it meant that, you know, it’s not going to mean that all the advisors only know where those things are in the support team only know where these things are, it’s like everybody can find things at all time. So I just wanted to share that. It’s just another little trick on making things easy to hand over and easy to share amongst us. But please, if you find a YouTube channel that rocks for this stuff, please share it with everybody. We’d all love to see it as I definitely would love to hear about it. Now we’re down to that time. Again, as you know, there’s only one skill we need to become bionic advisors. And that is avid curiosity. Now, to help you with that habit this week, today’s curiosity corner side is something really interesting. And this is one of those where you just need to have a bit of a play. This is about experiencing what technology is doing out there, as opposed to something that’s really going to rock your world. This is not in the rocky world category focus, right, this is a bit of fun. So the one I’d like you to take a look at is called PI. You can find it at pi.ai forward slash talk and Pi is your personal AI assistant. This is basically a chatbot that you can ask questions all of you can have a conversation about it’ll ask you about what things you’d like to do in your spare time. And then it’ll it’ll dive deeper into that it’ll have all sorts of insights, hey, which version of that book do you like to do? Like, well, what are the ones you recommend? Did you know there’s another like, it’s this, just, you know, it’s a virtual chat, buddy. And people that get into this end up, you know, finishing the night saying good night pie, you know, I’m off to sleep like this is become somebody that they’re interacting with. Part of the reason I’m recommending this is so that we can all start to be more aware of what’s out there. more aware of the way tools can be utilized in the way AI is being AI is being applied. The more you can experience this, then the more you can start to think about how with a different AI behind it a different sense set of data it’s drawing from what could we all build that might help you Australian public get you know better in touch with their money in their future. So this is great fun. It’s called pie check it out. And I’d love to hear how you find it. It is your own. It’s a choose your own adventure story, folks, you just keep on talking to it ask it’s advice about something a choice you’re about to be about to make or a difficult conversation, you’re going to have seen what it comes up with, and then share it with the rest of the team. So enjoy. Welp, that’s all we’ve got for this week, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. So you’ll get your advice tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you know, listening to all this, despite loving loving the dulcet tones of PDD you’re actually feeling a bit of tech overwhelm. You wonder whether you maybe need to streamline all the different tech that the business is using or you’re using, then please feel free to either, you know, nudge your practice manager or maybe even you know, a trainer in your dealer group. And they can reach out to me as I’ve been doing a lot of sessions and workshops at conferences, sort of talking about this paradox of advice, tech abundance and innovation. But its potential drawbacks, you know, and how applying a bit of advice, tech mental minimalism in the way we work could actually add some value and what habits you’re going to have to develop to make that possible. So if you’re curious about that, please reach out to me on LinkedIn that’s forward slash Peter M DPITA M D, and I’d love to have a chat. Otherwise, I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explorers Stay curious.