It’s all very well talking about advanced pivot tables in Excel, but what about people who need to grasp the basics of using Microsoft Office? Like how to create a Table of Contents, copy some formatting or filter a column? It’s often the type of thing you are struggling with at the office when a colleague leans over, grabs your mouse and does it in two seconds. That’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it?
FileMaker is a relational database application that runs on Mac and Windows. It’s owned by Apple, Inc. via its subsidiary FileMaker Inc, formerly Claris. It began life in the early 1980s as an MS-DOS program called Nutshell and has been through many iterations.
The word ‘entrepreneur’ comes from the French verb entreprendre, to undertake. It denotes a person who sets things in motion – a prime mover, rather than someone who takes instructions from others in order to make a living. It could be said to define a character trait rather than a job title. If so, how can entrepreneurship be taught?
"Judge a person by their questions rather than their answers" - Voltaire
In business and government, making too many assumptions can be fatal. Business leaders and civil servants need hard data on their markets and customers if they do not want to be left stumbling around in the dark. On the daily news you often see names like Ipsos MORI, Gartner and ACNielsen, often at the foot of a pie chart, animation or other representation of data. These are three of the leading companies who do market research, alongside other activities like polls and consulting.
The UK’s departure from the European Union is far from a done deal. It is very much an ongoing situation whose ramifications will be felt for decades to come. Government departments are scrambling to restructure themselves for a post-Brexit future, and the sound of head-scratching will continue to ring out on the British and European political landscape for a generation. Laws must be rewritten, business relationships reshuffled, and demographics reassessed. Taxation must be redrafted, subsidies reimagined and public finances melted down and re-minted. It’s a difficult divorce.
The music industry tends to be a place where the winners win big and the rest scrape along as best they can. Raw musical talent is probably not enough to make it to the top. It’s pretty vital to have an entrepreneurial spirit too. But what is the state of the industry today, and what do new arrivals need to know?
Why exactly did the apocryphal apple fall on Isaac Newton’s head? That’s what Newton wondered, and set out to discover why. Many of us wonder in the same way about why things happen, but don’t have time to dedicate our lives to getting to the bottom of it. Most of us don’t have a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator in our garden shed. Here’s a course for armchair physicists around the world who want to be told how it all works by people who have done all the hard thinking.
With the UK having voted to leave the European Union and right-wing leaders in Europe and around the world celebrating the decision (when this was written), it might be a good time for future leaders, administrators and businesspeople to deepen their knowledge of International Relations. In an atmosphere of growing nationalism, diplomacy and knowledge of world affairs are skills that might be in higher demand.
How can we be free in a world of jobs, debt and alarm clocks? What’s the best way to live life from moment to moment? If we don’t decide this ourselves, the pressures of life are sure to fill up those moments for us and we risk being left without a sense of peace, purpose or pleasure.
‘The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.’
Have you ever wanted to solve a crime? It seems to be a common fantasy – stepping into the shoes of a flinty-eyed detective, assessing the evidence and leaving no stone unturned to tighten the net around the criminal until he is forced to confess. These days a lot of that work is done via forensic science. There are quite a lot of games on the Google Play and Apple Stores based on forensic TV shows like CSI and NCIS in which you analyse the evidence to deduce who committed the crime.
