I juggled last night at Bryant Park. Did some club passing with Joe and we did pretty well, a woman who is 49. Talked with Alice, Iggy. Asked Jeff if he wanted to pass but he said "no." Worked on 5 balls, 4 balls, clubs. I juggled clubs around 180 tosses. Taught 2 kids but they were impatient and couldn't do it. There was another guy who was learning that I tried to help and some uncoordinated guy who needs to practice.
Weight
Still struggling to get below 160. I did it once but I'm wondering if it was a scale issue. Weighed myself a number of times yesterday and got many different numbers, but I'll use 161.4 here is my latest chart.
Goals
My goals continue to elude me. I'm trying to come up with goals for August 2017 and for the year 2017. I do have a book http://MyGoals.87sc.com.
I was shocked at the number of sheets I had on goals in time-monitor.
Goals at work
Actions to goals
Three Goals Three Tasks
Action to goal
Year by Year Goals
Daily Goals
Goal Analysis
Monthly Goals2
Commitment not Goal
Goal Sheet - Zig Ziglar
Health goal of the month
Goal Qs
10 Life Goals
Goal Analysis2
Goals at home and work
Monthly Goals
Goals
Goal Questions
Book to Goal
PURGE of Goals
This needs to be organized better.
It might be time to really work on STS (Smart Task Selection). I found a way to track my location via an IP address at http://ipinfo.io.
Twitter
I'm getting more people liking my stuff on twitter. I've changed my name on twitter to Al Berg from Alec Berg. as to not be mistaken for the writer by the same name from Seinfeld.
This week at work I've started completing the automation of my software to create PowerPoint slides. This is pretty cool, that I can set a command and have it run on a server in Excel. Though some work is still needed as it's not good at say asking "Are you alive?" and getting back a response, yet. Also, the process can get busy running something. Also, I have to deal with msgbox's and how to handle errors that occur.
I didn't get it to run my data verification process. Have also started on the idea of having a process that help do manual and automated tasks.
Most tasks have components of both automation and manual steps. I'm trying to find a way to better manage this process. For example, the data verification will run on two files looking for issues with the data. If it finds them a person must look at the data and create an event that will allow the automated process to continue.
I recently finished my mid-year review and I don't think I'm doing as well as I'd like. My new boss has pointed out that I'm the only one that knows VBA more than once. This is definately a risk I need to mitigate.
One way to mitigate this is to make the process so easy and useful that the value of VBA skills is seen as useful.
Books/Writing
I continue to work on books but this has stagnated a little bit. I need to do some more proof reading and then getting the book to Kindle. I'm not sure I like the way I write as it's missing something. The books are all available for free on-line write now. If you go to http://w2fo.com/showlist2.asp?parent=49304.
I also need to work on my book covers.
Books I'm Reading
I'm reading a book called The Like Switch that well I like. I've also downloaded too many free books from Kindle.
Time Tracking
This once and always is a problem I'd like to solve as I have to track and enter my time at work. I'd like to be able to answer some very basic question on how I spent my time and analyze if it was spent wisely.
I get the following error message while trying to run some code I've developed. I just made some changes to this subroutine so odds are that it's missing.
The first thing I do is check if other macros are working. I have one that inserts a blank cell and shifts all the other cells down within the active column. I try it and it works.
I did move the macro from ThisWorkbook to a module so it can be called by other routines.
I press Alt+F11 and search for the string in the error message "book.on"
and then try the function again. It fails with the same message. I check the change I made and see that I did it wrong and fix it. Another test and the the fix works.
In this blog post I address a number of topics that will help you succeed in life.
This will help you.
Three most important Questions
There are three questions that I've been trying to answer:
What to do now?
Where to store information?
How did I spend my time?
What to do now?
Is the difference between wealthy and poor people, successful and unsuccessful, happy and sad that the wealthy, successful and happy, correctly answer this question and take action on the answer?
Where to store information?
There is so much information I need to retain. Especially how I've solved a problem or an answer to a question. Google is great for data on the internet but what if the answer isn't on Google? Then there are all the blogs, podcasts, books that have great information.
How did I spend my time?
This question can answer the question "What did I do yesterday, last week, month or year?" Tracking how time is spent is very difficult. It's been something that I've been working on for year in one form or another.
If you want to be super productive you have to know the answer to this question. Recently I've been tracking this and I'm amazed at how much time I don't spend on my computer at work.
Monthly Goals
As March comes to an end I'm thinking about my monthly goals. I halfheartedly went after my goal of deciding what to focus on. I have come up with a list of > 100 items and have split the list into 2 groups the top half and the bottom half. I used some Excel code I have to make it easier.
I've also started rating the top 1/2 on 3 criteria
$ecurity
Longevity
Fun
This got a little boring after 25 items so I started blogging again.
I've created a list but I am having fun just blogging.
For April 2016 I want to focus on I2$ (Idea to Money). How to go from an idea to making money on it or moving on to next idea.
Do you have monthly goals you're working towards?
Lost Wallet
I was on train and had my headphones on due to a noisy person. As I was leaving someone pointed to the floor and there my wallet was sitting.
Holy shit, I was lucky this guy was nice. I always try to get a persons stuff back to them if I see they dropped or left something behind. It makes me think of a new habit to create.
Check if I have my phone, wallet and keys before leaving anywhere. I have gotten into the habit of looking after I get up.
Haircut
I have an unusual skill. I can cut my own hair. I often get compliments on my haircut. But recently Evan at work didn't believe that I could do this. I've been doing this for almost 20 years. I use to hate getting a haircut. It never came out good.
You need a good location. I use my small bathroom, You need a good pair of scissors, electric beard trimmer, brush and mirror.
The steps are:
Take a shower
Don't dry your hair
Remove all things from bathroom that you don't want to get hair on
Taking hair in brush or in hand cut it short sections at a time
Brush hair in back straight down
Using hand held mirror and a wall mirror cut across the back
Using hand grasp hair and cut evenly around head
Using beard/hair trimmer,remove hairs that are sloppy
Use a hair dryer to dry and style your hair
Using a broom and dust pan clean up the stray hairs
Clean up and you're done
Now if I screwed this up I can always go to a barber and get it fixed. My main rule here is if the risk is low and it can be fixed if you screw up then take a shot.
Blogging
I've started blogging and I like it. The main suggestion came from Jeffery Gitomer who wrote the Red book of Sales. He states that the number one thing that's helped him in his career is writing.
Music
The song "Need your Love' by Cheap Trick came up at work and a few other of their songs Auf Weidersen and I Want you to Want Me. They're a great group and their older albums are better. Some other of my favorites are at Alec Berg's Favorite Songs
Productivity tip
You can use auto-correct in Microsoft Word to type faster and fix common mistakes you might make. For example I've been typing the word MicroStrategy and added an auto-correct of "ms". Use this for words or even phrase that you use.
New Habit
Document things in one place so you'll find the answer when you're looking for some information. I currently have a problem in that I document information I need in too many places that makes it hard to find. I currently store this information in:
Wiki
Word documents
Memory
I have a "How Too" sheet with my to-do list in Excel and I'm tracking:
date
Subject
Question
Answer
So if I need to find and answer I've solved I'll look here.
Pain in the ass shoulder
I need to do some research into prolotherapy. This was introduced to me by +Tim Ferriss and reinforced from a co-worker Robert. He said that he had wrist pain for a while but it went away after getting prolotherapy.
The other day I also had an excruciating pain on my nose from my glasses. It was so bad I spent a lot of time concocting methods to keep the glasses from resting on my nose. Eventually the pain went away.
Time Tracking
I continue to make progress with my time tracking software. I've cleaned up a few problems and the latest issue is the code is pausing and not tracking the window I'm using. Some issues are already coming to surface with the time I'm not at my computer or not using it for > 30 seconds. It surprising to me how much time I don't spend on the computer. I need to track this to get a better handle on it. .
I also came up with an idea on how to better track questions and answers. While working I often run into questions that I've already answered but didn't document the answer. I'm thinking about a way to better tell system that I have a question and tracking how long it takes, what I did and what lessons can I learn from the solution.
I want to better track how much time I'm spending with this blog post and see if I can get the time down because it's taking more than the Tim Ferriss suggested 5 minutes
Car Salesperson Asks for a 10
I just bought a car and the Salesperson's biggest concern was to give her a 10 on a questionnaire I'm supposed to receive. She said that anything under a 10 is considered a failing grade. Three years when I leased my previous Honda the salesperson gave me a similar request.
Should I Ask for Recognition?
Today I helped a person in London with a problem she was having with some software I worked on. I couldn't tell from her description in the email what the problem was so we did a screen share. If your company is a Microsoft customer their Communicator product is very good seeing someone's screen and diagnosing the problem. You could talk to me for hours and I might not understand what your problem is but show me and I'll get it in 5 minutes.
There are other companies that support this type of functionality:
Microsoft Windows - Remote Desktop
Join.me
Webex.com
GotoMyPc.com
All allow you to view someone else's desktop. So I quickly resolved the woman's problem. The software is pretty interesting system that uses Python, Excel/VBA and JIRA to create an Agile dashboard to manage scrums and the backlog.
The user was very thankful for the help. At my company we have an internal website that allows you to give someone an award for helping you. I was very temped to ask her to give me one. It basically thanks you and sends your boss a copy. But I chickened out.
I had a thought that I should include a link in my signature.
"If my service was above your expectations please feel free to thank me via xxx.company.com"
What's your thought on this issue?
Why the Need to be Clean?
"Cleanliness is next to godliness"
Why do I and others have this need to declutter and be clean and neat. People run that gamut from clean freaks to complete slobs.
One thing about cleanliness is it doesn't fit into my 3 goal categories of Longevity, $uccess and Fun.
I feel good when things are clean and bad when they're messy.
Yet I have a brother who is a complete slob. He must throw his garbage on the floor instead of a garbage pail. Maybe it's related to Longevity as clutter can bring:
Mold
Bugs
Mice
Smells
It may also be related to Fun as why do people want to keep their new car clean and shiny? To send a message that you have resources.
Diversity at Work
At work, all they talk about is diversity. If anything at my office there aren't enough Americans. They're either Indian, Chinese or Russian. It seems we should always be hiring based on merit and never on age, sexual orientation, etc. If diversity means to get all opinions, then I'm for that.
There are obviously fewer women in technology than men, but I wouldn't want to hire one over a more qualified man. There are fewer blacks than whites but let's hire based qualifications and not on disversifications.
Don't Quit
I played chess yesterday with my oldest son. I use to be pretty pretty pretty good at it. I was best player on my public school's chess team.
My son is very smart and has been playing and practicing much more than I.
We played and very early on I lost my Queen for a Rook. I was thinking of quitting but played on. I wound up winning the game. The lesson I got is once again, "Don't Quit!"
Neighbor's son Kicks my Son
My 19 year old son was outside talking to my neighbors 5 year old and I see the boy kick at my son. This angered me as a few days prior he was trying to kick my dog.
I attribute this behavior to a lack of discipline from the parents. +Cesar Millan the "dog whisperer" sums it up the best with his "No rules, boundaries or limitations" quote about teaching dogs. Children are the same. I hate it when I'm on the train and a parent lets their kids do whatever they want.
New Neighbor doesn't have Blinds
The house behind mine has been empty for a couple of years. We
just got new neighbors and they don’t have blinds on their windows so I can see
right into their house. It’s annoying for me but at least I have a house to be
annoyed. Thanks Sam Harris for your Waking Up book.
I took a flying lesson and flew a small plane. Flying a plane is fun but the thing that most people don't realize is that when you're flying, it feels like your driving on a road and the turbulence feels like a bumpy road. The plane is very stable when flying and this experience helped my overcome my fear.
Ice Hockey
Last night I may have played ice hockey for the last time. I scored 3 goals and felt good. But since I've been diagnosed with osteoporosis I've been afraid to play. I love playing the sport but the dangers outweigh the fun. It was a very light turnout at Midnight Hockey in Ice works rink where the Islanders use to practice. I guess this goes against my "Don't Quit" advice above.
69Laws.com
I have the website 69Laws.com and thought the tag line should be
69Laws.com because 70 are too many and 68 are too few.
Free Yankee Tickets
My company was giving away free Yankees tickets for games in April. I really didn't want them as I know how cold it can be in April during a baseball game. I also ran into a frustrating time trying to get the tickets. System kept timing out. I couldn't press the final submit button. I think it was because I didn't check the box that I accepted the terms and conditions.
Transcribing a podcast
I've developed some software to help with transcribing a podcast but I realized that it's a poor use of my time to do this. It's much better for me to summarize the podcast with the most important information and then add tasks to my to-do list.
MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy is a company that makess a software product used by business to do reporting applications. I just started with the software and am not crazy about it. It's very un-intuitive. I'm sure in a few weeks it will make perfect sense. My company has a group that supports this software. I'm trying to get up to speed quickly so someone in our support group sends 1500 pages of documents to read through.
Thank you for your help
For some reason I always notice whether people thank me when I help them out. These words aren't optional.
Sorry is also useful to let someone know you made a mistake. I bumped into someone leaving our kitchen at work and we both said "Sorry."
James Altucher Podcast
I just finished listening to James' podcast with Steve Scott who writes Kindle books. Very interesting content. Highly recommended if you're a writer.
Boss makes me change unused code
I'm not sure that any boss wouldn't be annoying but my boss made me do unnecessary work. I was tempted to tell him "NO." I can't think of anything I hate more than wasting my precious time.
New Car
My new car (Honda CRV) is now 4 days old. I have 10,000 mile per year lease and I've used Excel to help manage the mileage. With the following sheet I can enter the miles column and it will show me how I'm doing on my lease. The column to the right is the formula or data in column B.
A
B
2
Date of purchase
3/28/2016
3/28/2016
3
Return
3/28/2019
3/28/2019
4
Days Left
1095
=B3-B2
5
today
4/2/2016 0:00
=INT(NOW())
6
Days elapsed
5
=B5-B2
7
Miles
100
100
8
Avg per day
20.00
=B7/B6
9
Estimated
21,900
=B8*B4
10
Per Year at this rate
7,300.00
=B9/3
11
Miles left
29900
=30000-B7
12
days left
1090
=B4-B6
13
Avg per day
27.43
=B11/B12
Anger
I'm working on reducing my anger. Sam Harris has helped the most. I like his book Waking Up and his self guided meditation is very good.
I get angry about the stupidest things. I was talking to my android phone and the word "comma" kept becoming "China." Once I said to the phone "Tim Ferriss is the Dos Equis Guy" in a tweet and the phone generated "Tim Ferriss does techie guys."
The dirty floor in bathroom, piss on the toilet seat also set me off.
I'm just trying to not get so upset about these insignificant things. Though I'd love to catch the guy that pisses on the toilet seat and then piss on his chair at work when no one is around.
Summary
Set monthly goals
Don't quit
Control anger
Learn/use Excel to save time
Please leave feedback if you liked or didn't like this post. Thanks for reading. I hope this helped you. Connect with me on twitter at @Alecberg
One habit I've failed at is using a laser to restore my hair every other day. I bought something called HairMax Laser comb many years ago for $500. I have trouble remembering to use it.
One reason I forget is that I'm supposed to use it every other day. I think I'd be better off doing it on specific days Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.
This activity takes 15 minutes and now I'm going to add it to Microsoft Outlook. My Excel to-do list could use a way to automatically add the task to my to-do list.
It works on a pretty simple principle. It answers the question "What should I do now?"
Now as I get distracted it also answers the question "What should I be working on?"
In addition, it time-boxes the task so I can use Parkinson's Law to set a limit on time I spend on it.
The basic idea is to capture things I have to do into 3 columns of a spreadsheet.
The first column is the highest priority stuff to get to
The second column is the next level priority
The third column is the backlog of stuff I need to get to
The I randomly select a task to do from the 1st column. The spreadsheet selects it and I start to work on it. I can select 15, 30 or 60 minutes to work on the task or skip it if I want.
When the task is selected it shows me in a form what I'm working on with the elapsed time. When I finish the task I use the Strike-through font (Ctrl+5). .
I'm sure that doesn't make sense so I'll have to put a video together showing the power of this tool.
Caption Monitoring
One thing I'm working on is better time tracking. I was wondering how much time I spend in Outlook so I developed some Excel VBA code to monitor the Active window and track the amount of time I'm in Outlook. I think this could be useful for detecting time other software is being used. After developing it I'm not sure that it's that useful as there is a process that I take when I get emails. There are 3 types of emails:
Useless stuff that I didn't need to look at
Information that I may need in the future
Some request that I need to answer
Now the 3rd item can take me from minutes to days depending on what the request is. So knowing that I was in Outlook gives me some information but it doesn't track well the issue that I'm working on. I would be nice to be able to track information related to the request that came in.
Ernie Belittles me
My friend Ernie at work belittles me because I told him about my list of > 100 things I'm focusing on. He's a Buddhist and to him it's the opposite of focused. "You can't do that!" But maybe I can and maybe it's exactly what I want to do. I can explore new things and put to rest tasks that I don't want to do and figure what to work on. I got the idea from +james altucher who says to be working on 20 ideas because you don't know which one will get traction. Then he minimizes my video on how to transcribe a podcast with shortcut keys.
Left out again
Not sure why I wasn't included in a meeting this morning. My boss invited everyone on the team but forgot to invite me. WTF. He realized it an then invited me after the meeting was in progress for 10 minutes.
Interesting Titles
I was at Barnes and Noble and they had a number of interesting titles. I bought War of Art
The Art of Thinking Clearly
This Book will make you Smarter
Idiots Guide to unlocking Creativity
Wired to Create
The Art of Creative Thinking
Why we Snap
One Simple Idea
Voice Recognition to Transcribe a Podcast
I tried to use the Windows and the Google software to transcribe a podcast but it doesn't work. I think it's still quicker and better to just type it. The software could barely understand any words. The only thing that worked partially was playing the podcast to headphones and repeating what the guests were saying. I'm going to try a test for a fixed time say 10 minutes and see which has better results.
Yesterday I posted a video on how to transcribe a podcast using short cut keys. The main keys to use are:
Key
Action
Alt+Tab
Switch Window
Alt+Shift+Tab
Switch Window
Space
Play/Pause YouTube video toggle
Left Arrow
Back video 5 seconds on YouTube
Right Arrow
Forward video 5 seconds on YouTube
Ctrl+PgDn
Next tab in Chrome
Ctrl+PgUp
Prev tab in Chrome
Nice Guitar
While napping yesterday I awake to the following video on PBS of Paint it Black.
Today, I went to the kitchen at work to get butter so I could make my Bulletproof Coffee. When I got there my butter was gone. There was a sign on the refrigerator that said "All food will be removed on Friday March 4th" which I did. So on Monday I bring in my butter but notice that the refrigerator isn't that clean. When I go to get my butter it's gone. I had also wrote all over the box.
Do not throw out!!
My name
phone number.
But it was gone. I got so angry that someone threw it out. It turns out they came to clean out the refrigerator on Monday and not Friday.
Later in the day I realized that it was only $4.00 and there are people who don't even have food. It wasn't the end of the world.
Interviews
I interviewed 2 people today and some things I need to do and noticed.
Both resumes had summary sections which were way too long. Summary means summary and not 385 words. There is a general rule of presenting data in 7+/-2 which means a bulleted list should have from 5 - 9 items. The same goes for PowerPoint slides, number of people reporting to a manager, chapters in a book, etc.
When I see a resume its the first impression I have of the candidate. They're setting me up for a negative confirmation bias. I feel that the resume is an assignment the candidate does. If it is sloppy, too long, has typos it reflects how they'll perform on the job. A bad resume can show an inattention to details, not caring, not verifying what the recruiter is sending out.
I showed this to two managers and one said it's okay for a programmer but not okay for a manager. The other manager said that it doesn't correlate with work performance and that these guys don't have to be great writers or marketing wizards.
These were both phone interviews today and I couldn't understand the first candidate. He seemed smart enough but was very hard to understand. I almost ended the interview early, but didn't. When considering a candidate I hire people at the company I work for as if it was my own business.
The second candidate appeared to be lying to me. We are looking for people with Tableau and Apache Drill skills, but this candidate made it seem like he did these on the job but didn't. I found this out by asking very specific questions.
One of the things I noticed that the resumes repeated terms over and over. I'm not sure if this was to do well on search, but have two resumes if you're doing this. One for the search engines and one for the interview. Before the interview I developed a spreadsheet that counted the words used.
I did this by copying the text from the resume and importing the text delimited by space, Then I ran a script that created one column out of the data. I removed blanks with filtering and then ran a pivot table to get word counts.
Resume #1
and - 6.3%
Data - 2.5%
Hive - 1.2%
Java - 1.2%
Hadoop - 1.0%
ETL - 0.7%
MapReduce - 0.7%
Pig - 0.7%
Sqoop - 0.6%
Resume #2 (2,240 words)
and - 6.3%
Data - 3.2%
Hive - 1.5%
SQL - 1.1%
HDFS - 0,9%
Hadoop - 0.9%
Pig - 0.9%
Sqoop - 0.8%
The routine to extract this data is:
Sub ConvertToOneCol()
Dim i As Long
'select data and paste into sheet set the delimiter to space, comma, period
'set the 26 below to the last column
lr = FindLastRow(1)
'Find the last column
For i = 2 To 26 'the 26 is the last column
Cells(1, i).Select
r = FindLastRow(i)
Range(cl(i) & "1:" & cl(i) & r).Cut
Cells(lr + 1, 1).Select
ActiveSheet.Paste
lr = FindLastRow(1)
Next
End Sub
The above routine uses two functions:
FindLastRow( )
cl( )
The first function returns the last row of the passed column. The cl function does a column lookup converting column i to it's letter equivalent. For example cl(27) returns AA.
This seems like it would be a nice webpage to extract word counts. One strange thing I noticed was that two different resumes used the word "and" 6.3% of the time. That's just weird.
One thing I just learned is that before you develop a tool, see if someone has already solved this problem. https://wordcounter.net/ solved this problem and I could have saved time by just using their webpage instead of developing the code myself.
I still need to have better questions for the interviews I do and prepare not before the meeting.
How will I get to the next step and what is the next step?
I'm not sure what's next for me. I'm working on a bunch of projects both at work and at home. My list of projects in prioritized order based on time spent is:
Daily Blog
Twitter
Super Productivity
Health
Excel Class
No Rain - Blind Mellon
This song came up in my Google play today and I like it.
Penalty Kill Hockey Sticks
While watching the Islander game during a penalty kill I saw a player's stick break, so the 5 on 4 became a 5 on 3. There should be special sticks for when you're killing penalties so that your stick doesn't break. Just a thought.
Better Call Saul
I liked this week's Better Call Saul. I could do without the scenes of Saul's brother but the scene with Mike and Tuco was really good. I'm leaving out the details because I don't want to spoil it if you didn't see it.
Have you heard of the rebate scam. This is where you buy a product and are given a rebate in the form of a coupon or action to take to get some money back. But the majority of people forget to submit it. According to Wikipedia the rates can be as low as 2 - 5%. Also there are 2 times when the consumer could fail to get the rebate. The first is if they forget to submit it and the second is if they forget to cash the check.
On the receipt there was no indication of a rebate, so I called the 800 number and they helped me complete the Staples rebate form online.
Task at the last minute
I hate when I get a task to do at the last minute. My boss tells me at the end of the day he needs a report. So I have to work overtime from home on this. This couldn't wait until tomorrow?
Frustrating day at work
Today was a frustrating day at work for me. I was trying to copy data from my local PC to a MapR cluster and kept getting error messages when trying to read avro formatted files in a directory. At first I was having issues due to a bug in Apache Drill that was solved by updating it to a newer version 1.5.
I was also getting an error -Xmx512m is not a recognized as an internal or external... This error was caused by my JAVA_HOME=c:\program files\..... and the space in the directory was causing the problem. I did a Dir /x which shows the 8 character filename and used that which was PROGRA~1.
Your draw is messy
A co-worker comes over to my desk and says "Your draw is messy." I wasn't in the mood to hear this and didn't care much about what he thought. Keep these things to yourself. So I said to him how come your shirt isn't ironed, it's all wrinkly. Don't give unsolicited advice to people.
He also made a comment about whether I was drinking Bulletproof coffee and a previous day he was looking through a bag of mine to see what I bought.
Books at Barnes and Noble
I wanted to buy some books:
301 Smart Answers to Tough Interview Questions
Start your own eLearning or Training Business
Big Data for dummies
Python for kids
But the line was too long. When I looked them up on Amazon I saw that they were all rated poorly and priced much lower.
Was on sale used for $10.00 with shipping vs. $30.
The eLearning book was $14 vs. $20.00 and only had 3 stars. The Interview Question book was $4.00 vs. $15.00 and was rated 4 stars
Find String Code
I have some Excel VBA code that will find strings in text files. I have 6500 files that I have to search each for 6000 different strings or however many you specify. The output is the file names in column A and in column B - IV contains what matched.
This code takes a very long time and usage of Doevents and Application.Statusbar is needed. Also I have code to update the status bar every 500 items by doing a remainder calc as follows
Was on sale used for $10.00 with shipping vs. $30.