Apps for 2013: Business, Travel, Fun

Happy Holidays!

I hope that you all had a great holiday season. We were quite busy. First to Boston for Christmas with my family and then to Smugglers Notch in Vermont. We tried snow shoeing for the first time which was a blast. It was the best skiing in quite a few years although driving to the Manchester airport in the blizzard conditions was not fun.

As you may have figured out, we have become an Apple family - even my husband! Last year I shared with you some recommended apps and I thought I would add some more that might be of interest if you do in fact have an Iphone, IPad or Ipad Mini. All the apps listed below are free although some may have upgraded versions that cost money. This is just my personal list of apps. If you have any you want to share please do- I love to check out new apps.

The Kindle is still my favorite app. Unfortunately Apple's Book app while pretty visually is worthless as its book offering is minimal. Once you set up the Kindle App, you can order E books from Amazon and they automatically transfer and update on your Ipad. It is so easy.

Business Apps- there are a few that might be of interest to you.
Dropbox, and GoToMy PC are still two of my favorites from last year.
DocuSignInk is an app that my husband uses quite a bit. It allows you to sign your documents anytime, anywhere. It can be quite handy.
OneNote- I am always jotting notes on small pieces of paper and my desk overflows with them and of course you can never find the note you need. One of my last years's New Years resolutions was to get more organized so I downloaded OneNote. This is a nice app because One Note is part of Office 2010 so you can synchronize between your PC and your phone. It is a very nice program - I just need to remember to use it more.

Cam Scan is an app that I have just downloaded and it looks good. To be honest, it is usually just easier to take a picture of a page - essentially what the scanner apps do although this app apparently will convert it into a PDF and allow you to annotate it.

Adobe Reader can be useful if you are trying to read PDFs. I have had mixed results. I have not been able to get it to work with the CPE E-books that I sell on www.cpaselfstudy.com. I have  figured out a work around though. I have found that if you email yourself the PDF that the iPad and iPhone will open it from within the mail message just fine.. go figure!

QR Reader - my daughter and husband use this one all the time. Just hold your iPhone over the bar code in a store or on a product and it will read it.

Best Utility Apps
I am not sure that Find iPhone is actually a utility but it needs to be on your phone somewhere. You can set it up so that if you lose your iPhone,iPad, Ipad Mini or  Mac etc it will locate it for you. You can also set it to delete all data on the iPhone or other Apple product as well.

Flashlight can really come in handy.

Best Navigation utilitiesThank goodness Google Maps now has an app although I have become attached to MapQuest since it is good at pointing out if you have overshot or missed a turn.
If you travel, a number of cities such as Boston have mobile taxis that will pick you up very quickly -usually in a nice upscale car. You can pre-arrange or call as needed. The only one I have personally used is Uber in Boston (Uber is also now  in other cities) and they were very quick and professional.  New York is in the process of approving e-hailing  taxis so you will be seeing a lot more of these apps. It's one of those apps you want installed for when you really need it.

Health Apps 
Walk Tracker is the best. It uses GPS to track how many miles you have gone and how many calories you have burned. It also integrates with Itunes so you can listen to music as you walk or jog. The only downside is it is a huge battery drain.  If your News Years Resolution entails calorie watching check out MyFitness Pal. It works on the PC as well as the I phone. It is the best one I have found and I have looked at quite a few.

Travel Apps
TripAdvisor is my absolute favorite although Yelp and UrbanSpoon come in handy particularly if you are in a major city.
OpenTable allows you to make reservations on the fly.
I always try to fly Southwest and their app is great for Check In and finding out about delays.
SeatGuru will tell you the best and worst airline seats by flight#- this is really the most useful on international flights. isn't it amazing that there is an app for this!

Games
There are so many and to be honest my daughter introduces me to a lot of them.
Bejeweled - my absolute favorite
Spider Solitaire - 2nd favorite

Fun Logic games: 

• Flow Free 
• Fling
• Iassociate2- this is such a cool game....
• Sudoku2
• LineUp2

Fun Word Games

• Iassociate2 fits into both logic and word game 
• SpellTower - my husband is now addicted to this one
• Moxie
• WhirlyWord
• Words for Friends

I just downloaded a bunch of new ones over the holidays - can't wait to try them out.


Best wishes to you and your family over this holiday season.
I hope 2013 is a great year for you.

No Grandma!

I saw this photo today and it cracked me up - how many of you can identify with it?

Excel Arrays - Published by Texas CPA Society

We were really excited that the Texas CPA Society published our article "Incorporating Excel Arrays into Your Audit Plan". Click here to access a copy the Array article.

If it is of interest we have a more detailed version of that course for which you can earn CPE credit -
Using Arrays to become a Power Excel user.

We offer a lot of different Excel CPE courses. so if you are a CPA check them out when you get a chance.


Here is a link to other articles that we have written over the last few years.



Best wishes to you all and your families. I hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Surviving the File Restore Virus

My Survival of the File Restore Virus

Well yesterday I was sitting around and getting ready to update this blog but first I made a serious error and went to YouTube. Out of nowhere, a virus called File Restore appeared with dialog box after dialog box telling me I had critical hard disk errors! Essentially it tells you that you have all these critical problems and low and behold just click the Buy Button and for $85 they will fix the problems. (There really are no problems except what they created. The Virus locks down your system and hides all your files.) Nice huh?

Looks really official - doesn't it? Just trying to instill fear !  

But hey, no problem, right - this wasn't the first virus I have experienced. After all,  I had a spyware program installed on my computer. Ha Ha. No, it is never that easy. I couldn't access the program since all the files were hidden. So, first thing I did was try to download Malwarebytes Anti-Malaware which always works. Not this time! Access Denied every time I tried to install it. Then I tried pulling it in off a flash drive - No! Access Denied again. Aha, you are all thinking hey go into Safe Mode and restore your system to a prior date.  Well, if not, that is what I thought - as I said I have been through this before.
(To get into safe mode you can just press and hold the F8 key as you restart your computer. You can also press the Window key and R to access Run and then type msconfig)

Again, I was blocked - it would not restore it to a prior date. Luckily I  realized that I had a backup CD of Spyware Doctor. I always pay for the CD as a preventative measure and boy did it pay off this time.(Maybe now my husband won't laugh at me for being so cautious.) After about 3 tries, in safe mode I was able to get Spyware Doctor to identify and remove a couple of the threats. Notice I said couple! Once those threats had been removed I was able to get back into the system. I could tell I still had problems but luckily File Restore does not shut off access to the internet and I found this handy dandy thread of how to remove the File Restore Virus and I wanted to share it with you.
http://malwaretips.com/Thread-How-to-remove-File-Restore-virus.

This thread walked me through all the steps including downloading Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware (which I was able to finally download and install ) and downloading links to two of my new favorite products HitmanPro, which removed File Restore's  Rootkit, and  RogueKiller which restored my shortcuts in the temporary internet folder and removed some malicious  registry keys (don't you love the names of these programs.)
Now, at that point, everything was supposed to be fine but I re-ran Malwarebytes and it found another high-level threat. After I removed that I re-ran Spyware Doctor which found another high-level threat.
So, definitely double-check. I will be running both of these and possibly a third again - just to make sure everything is as it should be.

Malawarebytes, Rogue Killer and HitmanPro were all free. HitmanPro gives you a one time free trial, Malawarebytes offers a free and an upgrade version and RogueKiller appears to be written by an individual who asks you to donate if you wish.

So, lessons to be learned.
Have active spyware on your system to prevent a virus from getting in. I thought mine was on but apparently I was incorrect so check it periodically and remember Malwarebytes and Spydoctor in case you ever need them.  I personally plan to upgrade to the pro version of Malwareebytes and I need to donate to the RogueKiller cause.  Without these my 3 or 4 hours of frustration would have increased tenfold and possibly ended with me reformatting the drive.
Oh yes... last lesson to be learned... BACKUP your files periodically. Backing up is one thing I try to do religiously and which is what allowed me to remain relatively calm as I removed the virus!

It's Friday - Have a great day and wonderful weekend. I just had 3 deer and  big buck walking through my backyard. It's time to move away from the computer and go and enjoy the beautiful day.

Day of the Week

Day of the Week and Weekday()

I was working with dates and had to remind myself on how to display a date as a day of the week so I thought perhaps some of you might be interested in it too.

I was double-checking items and I wanted to verify that nothing was occurring on the weekend so the easiest way to do that would be for Excel to tell what day of the week that date was. 

In Cell A4 I had my date so all I needed to do was enter =Text(A4,"ddd") and it displayed Thu for November 1st.  If I had entered =Text(A4,"dddd") it would display Thursday.
Pretty easy - eh?

If you wanted to incorporate this into an IF or some other formula then you might prefer to have the actual number of the day as opposed to the text. In that case, you can use the Weekday function. The resulting answer for November 1,2012 is 5 which is Thursday.