On Thursday evening I baked a coffee cake and finished it off with butter cream and a dusting of cocoa powder ... then I called it a Cappuccino cake. Marvellous! DW

I just spent 20 minutes telling you all about Dima's Leaver's Ball at which he looked very smart as did his partner Charlotte. I told you about the 6 month long saga of the evening suit. Then I pressed the wrong button and lost the lot. In the end, we have to say that Marks and Spencer came out of the process with their ceridbility dented and we ended up with a decent suit with just 4 hours to spare. DW

I am happy to announce that there are quite a few cherries on our old cherry tree this year and the apple tree looks as if it might be festooned with apples. The plum tree didn't blossom at all this year and the second cherry tree blossomed but it doesn't look as if there is going to be any fruit this year: we moved the plum tree and the second cherry tree is new this year. The pear tree has fruit on it, more than last year too by the look of it. There are birds in my garden that have taken a dislike to the marigolds I transplanted at the weekend: they've eaten or destroyed them, the bleeders! As a matter of interest, bark chippings are a great way of keeping the weeds down and keeping the soil most. They are also a great way for birds to want to throw them all over the place as they move them around in search of insects and larvae. Messy bleeders they are! DW

Paul wrote this over at AccountingWeb I have created an Excel file, but everytime I open it, 2 identical files are opened. They are shown as .xls:1 and .xls:2. Why is this happening, and how do I stop it? In Explorer, only one file is shown, as .xls Paul Sanderson Jim added I think that you have managed to set up two different views of the sames files (hence, why only one file in Explorer). I have accidently done that before and never been able to figure out how to get back to just one view. Mark told Paul and Jim how to get rid of it: You've opened a new window within a spreadsheet. Easiest way to get rid of the extra window is to open the file and close one of the windows by clicking on the "x" box on the top right hand side. Not the "x" to close Excel but the one below that. This closes the extra window. Then save the file. This will get rid of the extra window permanantly. I piled right in with how they got it in the first place and then confirmed how to get rid of it: One really useful feature of Excel is that it allows us to take a file, any file, and open two or even more views of it and have those two or more views on screen at the same time. This is useful where you are working with a large and/or complex file and need to see what is happening here and there at the same time. It's also useful when developing complex formulae and so on. However, you don't want it so here's how to get it and here's how to get rid of it: to get it: Open a file in Excel click Window in the menu bar at the top of the screen select New Window click Window again select Arrange choose Tiled (choose any of them but just choose Tiled for now!) hey presto what do you see but TWO views of the same file: one called book1:1 and book1:2 to get rid of it: close the one you don't want, and it doesn't matter which one, by clicking on the X in the top left of its screen and it will disappear like magic and you will be left with little old book1 on its own. So there you are! DW

Yesterday in Oxford I came across a sign in Longwall Lane (or is it Street?) that announced, appropriately for this august city I felt: Advanced Warning ... this road will be closed ... Now, plebs like you and I have to make do with Advance Warnings but in the city of dreaming spires they are just that cut above! In the consulting room of one of Oxford's hospitals was a measuring scale for measuring people's heights ... vertical, attached to the wall ... but at the top, the slidey down bit was a child's plastic rule that was hanging on to the thing by a scabby piece of sellotape (Scotch tape if you must). I wish I'd had my camera. More seriously, the doctor began the consultation by having us sit in silence as he read Mrs W's notes (for the first time by the look of it) and then announced he'd like to have seen Mrs W's X ray plates to help with his consultation but they were "lost in the system" somewhere: she'd never seen this man before and since she's only weeks away from a major operation, we felt it was laughable that he tried to make such light work of such a major omission. That's Modern Britain for you and yet people are fighting Tony Blair's NHS reforms! DW

Nick asked about an update to my easyJet case study and whether there is one. There isn't yet but following on from today's annojncement from the company of their pre and post tax loss for the 6 months to 31 March 2003, there soon will be. Here is what I said to Nick: Dear Nick, Whilst I am intrigued to review easyJet again since they are about to post a LOSS this morning for the first time ever, I don’t have anything in the pipeline today but could well have within the week. I said in my original assessment, or when I was introducing it, that I didn’t like the way that easyJet’s pricing policy was really just a scam and having researched some of their prices recently I have been proven correct! From their web site this morning: easyJet plc generated a loss before tax, goodwill and non-recurring items for the six month period [to 31 March 2003] of £24m which compares to a reported profit of £8.3m for the same period in the prior year. The loss after tax for the period was £46.9m, which compares to a reported profit of £0.8 million in the same period of the prior year. They have posted a PDF file of their interim results and a very quick look through them shows that their Operating Costs are all drifting upwards, contributing significantly to their loss. I really don’t like the way this company operates and never have. They sacked their founder Stelios a while ago and my prediction is that this company with either close relatively shortly or they will have to revise their mode of operation despite their Chairman’s claim in their latest review that easyJet continues to demonstrate that its business model is robust and that there continues to be strong demand for low fare, point-to-point services between major European airports. Their model may be robust; but their ability to manage that model is open to doubt! Anyway, go and take a look at the ratio analysis section that I recently wrote for Biz/ed: there as you will see that I use easyJet together with British Airways for some of my analysis. Then click on this and scroll down the list of companies in the database that I put together and you can do lots of calculations on the data relatively easily from there … for some reason easyJet is out of alphabetical order in that list. Do you know www.tutor2u.net? They recently put together a couple of case studies in PDF format and the report on the European Airline Industry although rather weak could be useful for you. Best wishes DW