Waking to the sounds of cockerels, dogs and crows

Very different from the sirens of Paris.

The friend I am staying with, J-L, is an Excel spreadsheet expert. When we met in Maidstone a few weeks ago I picked his brains about the beautiful but flaky rota spreadsheet I am in charge of at work. It was created by Secondborn, and I have added to it to provide more information. It's pretty intuitive for its users and it does what it needs to do but behind the scenes some of the formulae are cumbersome and it needs fairly frequent patching up. I love spreadsheets and over our meal in Maidstone J-L and I talked quite a bit about them. He kindly promised me some bespoke Excel tuition while I am here.

In the meantime he has approached the rota spreadsheet from a different starting point and created a new draft so, after a lovely lunch in the company of friends in the village square, we turned our backs on the sun and plonked ourselves in front of screens. I learnt techniques for making spreadsheets more robust and I learnt some new formulae (Excel has translated all my formulae into French on his PC and it was a bit of a challenge for me even working out what some of mine were doing, let alone formulae that were new to me, but I am getting there).

We didn't get round to our evening meal until 10pm - I well understand why programmers are nocturnal - and we have reached the interesting stage where I say how I want it changed from a user perspective and he tells me the constraints from a developer perspective.

Yes, I know this isn't most people's idea of a holiday but if I can start to see some light I'm very happy.