do:

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do: is a series of lunch time talks that highlight the use of IT technology in support of business systems and processes in the University.

The talks that were given in the Spring 2014 season are described below.

If you could be interested in doing a do: or if you have an idea for a talk that would be useful – contact us.

“do-do, dee-doo”

Why is Easter late this year? This do: talk is for anybody who uses dates and times in their Excel work. We will explore functions, formulas and formats that are under-appreciated, or even hidden.

Learn how to work with dates and times, including calculations that work on dates. Understand how Excel formats dates, and explore some interesting formats. And, after all, find out how to calculate the date when Easter will fall.

Duncan Young has been a member of the University’s Financials Training Team since 2006 and gave his first Excel course in 1993. Since then he has given countless courses in all aspects of Excel, including installation and programming, and was part of the team which wrote and delivered Microsoft’s internal helpdesk training for Excel 2002.

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Duncan Young, who gave this talk, says this:

The book I held up was “Excel Formulas” by John Walkenbach. Below is the Excel 2010 version, but obviously people should buy whichever one is appropriate to their version:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Excel-2010-Formulas-Spreadsheets-Bookshelf/dp/0470475366/ref=la_B000APG96Y_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394810723&sr=1-7

Look at the slides from this talk:
Do talk Duncan Young Excel Adventure 2014-03

Try out the workbooks with formulas from this talk:
Do Talk Duncan Young Excel Workbooks Formulas

Come and find out how we can leverage the ‘Cycle of Visual Analysis’ to find a needle in the haystack of Big Data world. The human visual system is powerful, and when we add fast, intuitive interaction to this experience, we empower everyone to analyze and share data effectively.

You will hear about how academic organizations around the world have been leveraging the ‘Cycle of Visual Analysis’ to balance data, analysis and reporting requirements across the system.

Mrunal Shridhar is experienced in operational strategy consulting, with strengths in improving performance and efficiency across the supply chain. His fact-driven analytical approach helps people transform data into actionable information of decision-making quality.

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Look at the slides from this talk:

Do talk Tableau Mrunal Shridhar 2014-03

You can read more about the Tableau software, and set up a free 14-day trial at www.tableausoftware.com

Running an academic or training programme can mean grappling with several systems, lots of spreadsheets and, as a consequence, endless version control issues.

This do: talk will consider how to run the administrative side of a programme in SharePoint, to make things more efficient and to help provide students and course participants with useful sources of clear, current information. It will interest anyone who wants to run an academic or training programme more smoothly.

You will hear about using SharePoint to run a programme more efficiently, maintaining good communications and hosting resources.

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John Miles invites anyone who is interested to visit the Humanities training site in SharePoint, to see what they have set up:

https://sharepoint.nexus.ox.ac.uk/training

Managing code changes in a programming project isn’t easy, especially when collaborating with other developers. Git automates many of these tasks such as merging, tracking, diffing and rolling back code. This talk will present a practical introduction to common tasks using Git.

You will learn about version control systems and see a basic Git workflow. You will hear about Git tools and clients, and the importance of GitHub. If you are working on programming projects – either as a lone programmer or in a team – then this do: talk is for you.
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Ben Holmes, who gave this talk, has sent these helpful comments:

Thank you for attending the talk about Git, I hope you enjoyed it. If you are interested the presentation can be found at  https://github.com/bdvholmes/git-intro-talk

There is a link to the online presentation in the readme or you can download a PDF from the Releases tab.

If you have any questions or would like to know more I would be happy to answer some questions, you can email me at  ben.holmes@it.ox.ac.uk

Sending email to one person is easy, but when you’re sending to lots of people there are multiple options. The options may depend on who will use the group, who is in it, how you want to process responses, as well as how you want to manage it.

This do: talk helps you understand which of those options is most appropriate to your needs. You may just need a simple group in Outlook, you might need a formal web-managed Mail List, or perhaps an Exchange Distribution Group is called for. After this talk you’ll know which will suit your needs best.

You will learn about group-mailing concepts and consider the benefits, limitations and best practice for: Outlook Contact Groups, Mail Lists and Distribution Groups. This talk will interest anyone who needs to email a group of people and is unsure about the best way to do so.
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Look at the slides from this talk:

Do talk Mailing Groups at Oxford Matthew Gaskin

Committees at the University of Oxford can be simple, or very complex beasts.  This do: talk introduces the idea of using SharePoint to help manage those committees.

You may wish to try to ‘go paperless’ and have everything available from one web page.  You may wish to keep a check on versions of a document that the committee is working on.  Or to work on some documents for the committee, only releasing them for everyone on the committee to read when they are ‘published’. As part of the SharePoint Best Practices project, a site template was produced for managing committees and distributing the documents.  It has recently been improved further.  Come along and hear about how to use it.

This talk will interest anyone who looks after a committee or working group, who wants to spend less time on admin.

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Look at the slides from this talk:

Do talk SharePointCommitteeSites Mark Norman 2014-02

This do: session describes how you can use both University and other software & services to exchange documents with your colleagues securely. Hear about using OxFile and SharePoint, passwords and encryption and how to keep safe and comply with University policies.

Whether you’re sending CVs by email, sharing and working on committee papers or just don’t want anyone to read your emails, this session is for you.

Beth Asbury is an administrator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and she has several years of experience in similar positions elsewhere. She has found time management training invaluable, and she is happy to share some of the tips and tricks she learned with others.

In this do: talk, Beth will be discussing ‘time bandits’ and how to deal with them, energy levels, prioritising tasks, ‘elephant tasks’, delegation, scheduling and workload analysis.

These skills are useful for anyone who has more than one thing to do every day, and not only for administrators!

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Look at the slides from this talk:

Do talk Beth Asbury Time Management 2014-03

Do talk Beth Asbury Frog Time Sheet 2014-03

WebLearn is useful for teaching and learning, but did you know that it also has tools which can help with the administrative burden, so you can become more effective and efficient?
This do: session will focus on these WebLearn tools: Surveys, Sign-up, Calendar, Announcements and Email Archives.

It is relevant and useful for administrators as well as researchers.

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Look at the slides from this talk: do talk Fawei Geng WebLearn reduces admin burden