JON HONEYBALL
As his dependency on Excel lessens, Jon starts to wonder – with the help of some friends down the pub – if he can exist in an Office-less world
As his dependency on Excel lessens, Jon starts to wonder – with the help of some friends down the pub – if he can exist in an Office-less world.
Afew months ago, I discussed how I had finally moved the lab accounts from hand-rolled Excel to QuickBooks Online ( see issue 296, p112). The problem with an accountancy package is that it’s very tricky to perform a trial run without ending up pouring many months of your business into the platform, and then to use it on a day-to-day basis. And it’s in those nooks and crannies that the annoyances can really live, hidden away from the spotlight of even an in-depth review.
My accountants are currently processing the year-end analysis, and I’m sure I will be presented with a huge tax bill payable to Her Majesty. I have already done the transition to Making Tax Digital, which was relatively painless and claims to be fully supported by QuickBooks.
There are two niggles that I want to raise. First, there are a worrying number of areas where the online help is simply wrong. QuickBooks appears to have ported some of the platform over from its American brother, and the online help is littered with information that doesn’t apply to the UK version. Or worse, there’s no help at all. While I accept that a cloudbased, web-delivered package is much easier to develop and deliver in an incremental fashion, it does allow some of the more historical metrics of “product completeness” and “ready to market” to be tossed out the window. QuickBooks must do a better job here.
A good example was when I added a new credit card account, only to realise it wasn’t needed. Deleting this from the package should have been simple, but the help was useless. I ended up going into an online chat, and the representative finally found the answer. And admitted that they had to check the US documentation
for a different version of the product. As I say, not good enough.
Second, and arguably even more annoying, the bank account linking appears to written on tissue paper. Drawing down live information from your accounts is a core reason for opting for a package like this: it’s incredibly annoying when this doesn’t work reliably. I have a current account at Barclays, a business Barclaycard Mastercard account and an Amex card. Probably over half the time, the link to the Barclaycard Mastercard fails and won’t update, throwing up an unhelpful error message that suggests I try later. The Barclays feed is mostly stable. But you can’t say “update this one account please”, it has to go off and try to pull from all of them.
QuickBooks’ support team members respond by sighing deeply, apologising and promising it will all be better soon. They point me to a page covering the forthcoming “Open Banking” initiative at quickbooks. intuit.com/uk/open-banking and state that everything will be lovely when they transition to it later in the year. As Intuit’s website proclaims, “there’s a brighter future for banking on the horizon”. Well, it can’t come quickly enough. It’s particularly galling to do a banking update using the iOS app, only to find the information is out of date on the view held by the desktop web browserhosted version. Sometimes the pretty face of a web interface might hide a mess of sticking plaster and other cruft. Friends tell me that their chosen accounts packages have equivalent issues pulling down banking data, so maybe it’s not just QuickBooks. Maybe the whole banking system really is teetering on the edge. Even so, that doesn’t stop me casting my cynical eye over the whole mess and wondering if it’s fit for purpose.
Excel lockup
Excuse me while I go on a thought journey. It was one of those moments when everything went wrong. I needed to open a spreadsheet and Excel for Mac decided it would crash every time I tried to fire it up. I’m not sure which particular set of planetary alignment was at fault, or whether the Fast Track of Excel/Mac had spat out something that barfed on the current build of macOS. No matter, I trundled over to LibreOffice and downloaded the current version.
LibreOffice was like having a flashback to my youth, the days before Microsoft Office went all shiny and “user friendly”. But it all worked and there were no glitches – even on some of our really complicated lab spreadsheets.
This led me to a discussion with friends in the pub. Could you run your business without Microsoft Office? For some, the thought was terrifying, a bit like going into the office in the morning and discovering you had left your trousers at home. But the more we explored the topic, the more it became clear that
“Sometimes the pretty face of a web interface might hide a mess of sticking plaster”
we’re holding onto the Microsoft Office platform out of habit. Indeed, strong feelings were expressed over losing Outlook, which is intriguing. Then we hit the issue of “what do you mean by Microsoft Office”, with a clear underlying feeling that the push by Microsoft towards the Teams platform was either a breath of fresh air or something to be avoided at all costs. It certainly brought out a fierce reaction among my friends, with a vocal majority suggesting that Teams was a reach too far. And that a link to a file in a share was all that was needed, and that attempts to micromanage their time within such a framework was tantamount to corporate slavery. At this point, it became clear that another round of beers was required.
But such talk opened up the possibilities. If you really could transition to LibreOffice, bringing complex documents and even VBA macros across, then there was an Office-free future to consider.
Then the discussion went quite sideways. One friend piped up that their organisation had successfully moved onto Google’s platform for all mainstream work. Only those who required tools such as Excel or InDesign were allowed to have them because almost everything else could be done through Google Docs.
I was fascinated by this because it really does take a clear vision of what you’re trying to deliver to be able to make such a move. And my friend’s is not the only organisation I know well that has made this move. Once you break the dependency on Microsoft Office, you then start to break the underlying requirement for Windows too. Maybe I should buy a Google Pixelbook for the lab and see if I could survive on it for a month. That would be quite a challenge.
Cedar champions
I like to champion technologies that I believe are cutting edge. And it’s even better when they’re from the UK. I never cease to be amazed at the depth of engineering capabilities, both physical and logical, we have in this country. I recently visited the offices of Cedar ( cedar-audio.com) in Cambridge and spent a morning going through its technologies with CEO Gordon Reid.
Cedar has been around for several decades now. Its specialism is in audio processing, especially removing noise from audio. In the world of music or audio restoration, this could be getting rid of hum. Or the clicks and bangs you get when you transcribe an old record to digital for archival purposes (maybe someone coughed during a performance). All of these can be handled by Cedar’s tech, and it’s clear why it’s the world leader in its field. Indeed, the breadth of the capabilities demonstrated was truly breathtaking. Need to pitchreconstruct a slow tape recorder start? No problem – and it can do most of the heavy lifting for you automatically.
Spectral analysis and display is where Cedar really made its big breakthrough, by showing you a frequency/intensity/time graph where everything that happens is obvious. It then developed the tools to let you go into this visualisation and to “paint out” issues like hums or door closures, or a taxi driving past. And to do so in a way that is utterly seamless.
As you might expect, some of the more advanced tools it has developed are of great interest to the forensics community. And it’s here that the company’s toolset really shines. Gordon and I took some recordings that were, at first listen, just incoherent noise. Imagine a recording of two people talking in a room with a TV and radio playing loudly enough to engulf the speech. By using Cedar’s filter sets, it was possible to tune out the noise components and, almost like magic, the original speech emerged from the noise. You can imagine that security services are interested in such technologies for cleaning up surveillance recordings, and “working in real-time” takes on an entirely new meaning when a few seconds can count between a bomb
“And, almost like magic, the original speech emerged from the noise”
detonating or not. Cedar has taken an innovative route of building custom hardware that lets the operator adjust a few controls to adjust the underlying filtering. I should point out that this isn’t just the obvious parametric or tight-notch static filtering that you can easily do. It’s way more analytical and dynamic, operating on real-time analysis of the signal and adjusting itself to provide the best outcome.
Even catastrophic failures in the recording process can be handled. One demonstration was of A/D convertor overload, where Cedar reconstructed the portion of the signal that had been flat-lined by clipping.
Prices? If you need to ask, you’re in the wrong space. A few grand through to around 50 grand for the full-function security services hardware box containing computer, software and everything you need. Interestingly, Cedar doesn’t charge an annual maintenance contract, providing all the support ongoing as part of the upfront purchase.
One look at its site will give you a flavour of its customer base. It was a fascinating morning spent looking at a company using computing power to do the almost magical. And doing it in Cambridge as well.
Talking of annual licence costs, I just had to pay the renewal for our licence for SpectraCal CalMAN Ultimate. This is screen-calibration software of the highest quality, and it is the reference platform here in the lab. The annual support fee was $595 but this year it rose to $795. When I queried, I was told that this was indeed the case. I’m not going to moan too loudly about the extra cost, but the explanation was essentially along the lines of “because we can”. It’s a fabulous toolset, and SpectraCal’s support is excellent. But rises like this always leave a sour taste in the mouth.
Logic love
One of the interesting announcements from the Mac Pro “launch” was that Logic has been expanded to handle many more simultaneous tracks. This led to the interesting question of just how many tracks you could use today. Logic is a full-power music and audio performance/ compositional/editing/ mixing platform. And it allows you to do almost anything you want. A friend pointed me in the direction of a three-hour live video on YouTube from a performer called Jacob Collier ( pcpro. link/300logic). Why am I recommending this? Because it’s worth having a grasp on just what can be done by an expert using software like Logic. It really is an object lesson in how far these sort of toolsets have come. And the speed with which he creates the track is astonishing.
This led me to look at Collier’s new album, which is fascinating. You can play it through YouTube or listen in hi-res on services such as Qobuz. My favourite is his rendition of Lionel Richie’s All Night Long, which will ruffle your carpet with its bass lines.
What is the “modern OS”?
I suggest you read the official Microsoft blog post ( pcpro. link/300mic) from the Computex show recently held in Taiwan.
Here you’ll find Microsoft talking about a “modern OS”. Apparently, this will have “seamless updates – with a modern OS updates are invisibly done in the background; the update experience is deterministic, reliable, and instant with no interruptions!”. It will be “secure by default”, “always connected”, with “sustained performance” and a whole bunch of other lovely things.
It’s clear that Microsoft can’t be talking about Windows 10 – updates frequently require reboots. Changing the architecture of Windows to allow this is no small matter. And what is this “modern OS” anyway?
I’d love to tell you more, but even the recent Build conference didn’t touch on it. Now I could sit here and bitch about Microsoft’s inability to communicate anything to the wider world, but it would be the same story that’s been told for the past 25 years.
There’s apparently a plan to come up with a more secure and robust version of Windows. But we went down this path before with Windows RT, which was the port to the ARM
processor. That failed because the hardware was too weak, Windows 8 was horrible to use, there were no apps in the app store to speak of, and you couldn’t run Intel-based Win32 code. Unless, of course, you were the Office team at Microsoft, who ported Office’s Win32 codebase over to RT and released it. RT flopped because it wasn’t even half baked. Quarter baked would have been generous.
If Microsoft is serious about truly re-architecting Windows, it has to make hard decisions. Will it support the vast selection of Intel-based Win32 applications out there? Will it attempt to push such code into a virtualised or containerised platform? Can it really transition like this without breaking everything?
The cold, hard reality is that Microsoft is a decade late to this party. And it was fascinating to hear Bill Gates ruing the mess the company made of the Windows mobile platform against Android (and iOS). Maybe it can come up with the new Windows Core platform that appeals to those used to iOS and Android and Chrome OS. One that’s truly secure by default, and that has no need nor ability to support antivirus packages. One that allows the current Windows 10 platform to truly become legacy.
Speaking of which, I’ve been playing with the new 1903 build of Windows 10 – and it’s finally coming into focus as an OS I can enjoy using. Many, but not all, of the issues that plagued Windows 8, 8.1 and the earlier builds of 10 are being sorted out, and it looks and feels more polished. When you consider how long this has taken, it’s almost enough to make you cry.