The street sweepers here in Sarajevo need to be trained! When it snows and is icy, someone spreads grit and sand all over the footpaths ... the street sweepers come along and sweep it all away! Let me be kind and assume they are recycling it. Still, they could reorganise it for a while to prevent clots like me slipping all over the place!! All being well I am leaving for the UK shortly: looking at the weather en route and in the UK has me concerned, however. I'll be back on line very shortly. DW

Vicki wrote back to say: Ah ha! I just re-read my assignment booklet and you are completely correct, it says that it is to be assumed 20% of the selling price. You are a genius!!! Thanks for your help Vicki My pleasure! DW

Just found out that Jake Thackray died on 28 December 2002. Jake was, for me anyway, a folk singer. I've just read his obituary from The Independent newspaper and I think they think he was something other than that. My opinion is based on his television appearances when I was growing up: his lasting impression on me, that is! "Oh, Sister Josephine ... what a bloody funny Nun you are" can never be the same again! DW

Friend Vicki wrote again, nice to hear from you Vicki, with this: Happy new year to you, I hope you had a good break. Sorry to bother you, I just wondered if you could explain how profit is calculated. I have sat my exam for the piece of coursework I spoke to you about before, however I ended up with a few odd numbers on my spreadsheet, the reason for this is that I needed to alter the profit to be calculated. The profit was to be assumed 20%, so I had this: costs * 1.2 however, my friend (on the same course) advised me that what I should do was: (costs/80)*100 The two give different answers but using his formula gave me what should be the correct figures. (The selling price was discussed in a tutorial where my tutor had said that they were the correct figures, at the same time as telling us about the problem with hours for the interpretation). I understand how my friends calculation works but I do not understand why this way is to be used because mathematically, it is not straight forward being increased by 20%. I hope I haven't confused you, and I would be grateful if you could advise me the correct way to calculate profit. Although the exam is now gone I want to know and understand how to do this properly. Thank you for your time, Vicki Not confused, I replied as follows: Hi Vicki, I had a good but all too short holiday thanks. Your problem is a typical problem both to solve and to get confused by. Here’s the explanation! If someone says that the selling price is Cost plus 20% of cost, then the following is true Cost = 100% of Cost Profit = 20% of Cost Selling Price = 120% of Cost In this case, the method for getting from Cost to Selling Price is Selling Price = Cost * 1.2 So far so good; and I can see that you understand that! Now, let’s assume that we are told that the Profit is to be 20% of Selling Price when the Cost is known to be £100. Aagh! What’s the Selling Price … what’s the Profit … ? Keep calm and use the same layout and apply the same logic: fill in what we know and then derive what we don’t know: This is what we know: Cost = £100 Profit = 20% of Selling Price Selling Price = £x This is the logic; Cost = £100 = 80% of Selling Price … can you see why? Profit = 20% of Selling Price Selling Price = £x = 100% of Selling Price Hence, the Cost MUST be £100/80% = £100/0.8 = £125 Hence, the Selling Price MUST be £125/80*100 = £156.25 Hence, the Profit MUST be 20% of the Selling price = 20% * £125 = £31.25 Does this all work out? Cost = £125.00 Profit = 31.25 Selling Price = £156.25 So, is Cost of £125 equal to 80% of £156.25 … YES! You might need to think about that a bit Vicki: it’s a cheap trick, of course, but such questions are very commonly asked at ALL levels of accounting education. Let me know of any more bother! Best wishes HTH DW

Physician heal thyself ... or what? This morning I was about to give a presentation to some important people and I received another bit of info that I NEEDED to insert ... it was on paper! I whipped out my digital, took a picture of the page and ran it through ABBYY FineReader ... it read it like a charm and it took me just two minutes to go from hard copy to brand new slide that just needed a bit of formatting. What a winner! DW

I am spending some time learning Photoshop 6: photo editing software and let me record here and now that it has possibly the worst Help files I've seen in a long time. DW

Here's a top tip that some of you might appreciate. Ever thought you'd like to have something in a Word file but all you've got is a hard copy? Don't have a scanner? If you have a digital camera, here's what you can do: Learn to take a decent digital photograph of the page or pages you are interested in, get some OCR software (there are full versions easily downloadable available: such as ABBYY FineReader) and the chances are it will be able to read the text into a Wrod file ... might also be able to put it into an Excel file if it's a table and the software's reasonably up to date. I do use a scanner and I have an up to date OCR software package but I thought I'd get ready for the day when I'm on the road and I want to input a file ... it works! There, another top tip from your truly! DW