What laptop is best for Excel?

I’m often asked by clients to help them choose a PC to run Excel models, particularly large project finance models that might take several minutes to solve with a macro.  Here’s my advice:

Laptop or desktop - almost all of my clients want a laptop, so this piece just looks at laptop options, but as a rough rule of thumb, with a desktop you get about twice the power for half the price, so if you want a really fast PC for Excel, you should consider a separate desktop PC. 

CPU - for the actual calculation of a model, this is by far the most important factor, but don’t get sucked in by the clock speed.  Excel can use multi thread processing very well (for most tasks) and so a quad core i7 with a low clock speed will calculate much faster than a dual core i7 with a high clock speed, although the battery life will suffer.  Look for QM, QE, XM, MQ, HQ or EQ in the name, these are all quad core CPUs.  Avoid anything with a single letter, typically M or U, they’ll usually be significantly slower.

As an example, an i7-4558U has a clock speed of 2.8 GHz, but for Excel it will be much slower than an i7-4702HQ, with a clock speed of 2.2 GHz.

Memory - unless you’re using 64-bit Excel (and most people aren't), you’re not really going to notice any benefit from having more than 8Gb of RAM – even 4Gb is often enough, as 32-bit Excel has a limit of 2Gb.  So no matter how much memory you have in your laptop, Excel will only be able to use 2Gb.  However if you are using very large spreadsheets there are three ways to avoid this 2Gb limit:

• Use 64-bit Excel, which has no memory limit;
• Open each spreadsheet in a separate instance of Excel (press Alt when opening Excel); or
• Hack your excel.exe file to increase its memory limit from 2Gb to 4Gb.  This is easy to do but beyond the scope of this article, contact me if you want to know how.

Keyboard layout - when I look at a new laptop the first thing I check is the position of the Home, End, PgUp/PgDn, arrow and Ctrl/Shift keys.  If they don’t feel comfortable then you’re going to hate using the laptop’s keyboard for Excel.

Also, any laptop that combines the F1-F12 keys with Home, End, PgUp/PgDn is a complete non-starter for Excel.  Yes Microsoft, that includes the otherwise-perfect Surface Pro 3/4/Book.

Screen size - although most laptops are usually plugged into a large screen on a desk, there are of course times when you’ll use it away from your desk.  If you use it a lot on the road then go for the biggest screen you can.  Sure it’ll be heavier, but when you’re stuck in a hotel room at 3am trying to finish your model before the investor meeting 6 hours later, you’ll be glad you’ve got a big screen.

Touch screen? - touch screens (on PCs) are one of those innovations that you think are gimmicky when you first get one.  Then after a month using it you pick up a non-touch screen and you get really frustrated  when touching the screen does nothing.  Ok, so I really only touch the screen for web browsing and reading documents as in Excel I find it’s simply quicker and easier to use the keyboard or mouse – but who uses a laptop just for Excel?

SDD or HDD - when Excel opens a file it reads the whole file into RAM, so once it’s open you won’t notice any speed difference between an SSD and HDD. But in every other way an SSD is vastly superior and once you’ve used one you’ll never go back to a HDD.  In fact, given the failure rate of HDDs, I’m always surprised to still see them used in corporate laptops.  To compound the risk of drive failure, their higher capacity just encourages users to store all their data on their C drive rather than the network or cloud. 

WiFi - these days WiFi is the first layer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and even in corporate offices, many laptops connect to the network over WiFi rather than via an Ethernet cable.  Unfortunately, some new laptops still ship with the slower N WiFi.   AC WiFi is significantly faster and is becoming more common, definitely get it if you can.

GPU - higher end laptops will often have a dedicated graphics chip – look for an Nvidia or Radeon sticker on the case.  However, unlike games, Excel doesn’t really benefit from a separate graphics card, so unless budget isn’t an issue or you like playing games in your downtime, don’t bother with one.

So in summary, if speed is your main priority, and you can't justify a desktop, pick the fastest quad core i7 chip you can afford, and after that choose the laptop based on how it physically feels to use.

iPad Pro to kill off the Windows laptop

Back in June, Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims recommended "Apple should kill off the Mac". He argues that the Mac with its 20 million units is just a distraction, albeit a profitable one, and that the resources dedicated to it would be better invested elsewhere. Looks like something entirely different is about to happen. 

In truth, the Mac is a bit odd. Roughly speaking, the 300 million units PC market is split into expensive commercial machines and cheap consumer machines. The Mac as an expensive consumer machine does not quite fit in. So why doesn't Apple position the Mac as an expensive commercial machine and take a bigger share of the market? The answer is that corporate IT departments resist it. They have been trained to work with Windows machines for decades, are busy maintaining legacy applications and are concerned about keeping the lights on. For them, Apple products are at best tolerated as an exception in a BYOD culture. 

This changed markedly when the iPhone replaced the Blackberry as the device of choice for corporate road warriors. With its relatively closed iOS, the iPhone appeared less supicious than an unruly Mac and services like MobileIron make it palatable to them. For the first time in Apple's nearly 40 years of history, the gates to corporate IT departments are wide open. And here is where the iOS powered iPad Pro fits in. Scores of executives frustrated by cumbersome Windows machines will flock to the iPad Pro. Despite its big screen, it is lighter than the lightest laptop. With its keyboard and the Microsoft Office apps, it lets you handle all corporate tasks. The split screen feature is perfect to comment on documents and with a SIM card, it is always online. Add the facts that it is nearly maintenance free and that IBM and Cisco are developing corporate applications and you have a winner.

Observers describing the iPad Pro as a rival to Microsoft's Surface Pro are missing the point. It is not a laptop that looks like a tablet but a tablet that will severely challenge the Windows laptop - at least in the corporate world.

What You Miss When You Take Notes on Your Laptop

Even in my relatively short foray into office life, I notice that few people bring a pen and notebook to meetings. I’ve been told that over the years, the spiral notebooks and pens once prevalent during weekly meetings have been replaced with laptops and slim, touch-screen tablets.

I suppose it makes sense. In a demanding new age of technology, we are expected to send links, access online materials, and conduct virtual chats while a meeting is taking place. We want instant gratification, and sending things after the meeting when you’re back at your desk feels like too long to wait. It seems that digital note-taking is just more convenient.

But is longhand dead? Should you be embarrassed bringing a pen and paper to your meetings? To answer these questions, I did a little digging and found that the answer is no, according to a study conducted by Princeton’s Pam A. Mueller and UCLA’s Daniel M. Oppenheimer. Their research shows that when you only use a laptop to take notes, you don’t absorb new materials as well, largely because typing notes encourages verbatim, mindless transcription.

Mueller and Oppenheimer conducted three different studies, each addressing the question: Is laptop note taking detrimental to overall conceptual understanding and retention of new information?

For the first study, the researchers presented a series of TED talk films to a room of Princeton University students. The participants “were instructed to use their usual classroom note-taking strategy,” whether digitally or longhand, during the lecture. Later on, the participants “responded to both factual-recall questions and conceptual-application questions” about the film.

The students’ scores differed immensely between longhand and laptop note takers. While participants using laptops were found to take lengthier “transcription-like” notes during the film, results showed that longhand note takers still scored significantly higher on conceptually-based questions. Mueller and Oppenheimer predicted that the decrease in retention appeared to be due to “verbatim transcription.”

But, they predicted that the detriments of laptop note taking went beyond the fact that those with computers were trying to get every word down. In their second study, Mueller and Oppenheimer instructed a new group of laptop note takers to writewithouttranscribing the lecture verbatim. They told the subjects: “Take notes in your own words and don’t just write down word-for-word what the speaker is saying.”

These participants also watched a lecture film, took their respective notes, and then took a test.

They found that their request for non-verbatim note taking was “completely ineffective,” and the laptop users continued to take notes in a “transcription like” manner rather than in their own words. “The overall relationship between verbatim content and negative performance [still] held,” said the researchers.

In a third study, Mueller and Oppenheimer confronted a final variable — they found that laptop note takers produced a significantly greater word count than longhand note takers. They wondered, “Is it possible that this increased external-storage capacity could boost performance on tests taken after an opportunity to study one’s notes?” So while the immediate recall on the lecture is worse for laptop note takers, do their copious notes help later on?

For this study, participants “were given either a laptop or pen and paper to take notes on a lecture,” and “were told that they would be returning the following week to be tested on the material.” A week later, they were given 10 minutes to study their notes before being tested.

And again, though the laptop note takers recorded a larger amount of notes, the longhand note takers performed better on conceptual, and this time factual, questions.

This final test clarified that the simple act of verbatim note taking encouraged by laptops could ultimately result in impaired learning. “Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit disappears,” said Mueller and Oppenheimer.

Though your days of cramming for tests may be over, you still need to recall pitches, dates, and statistics from meetings. That’s why we take notes in meetings.  And while there are plenty of ways to work smarter with digital tools, you may remember more if you leave the laptop or tablet at your desk and try bringing a notebook and pen instead.

In addition to your mode of note taking, be extra aware of what you’re writing. Are you focusing more on recording what a speaker is projecting on a slide show, rather than actually listening to what is being said? Write your notes in your own words. It’ll encourage you to process and summarize what is being said rather than just regurgitating it.

Of course, not every meeting is the same, so you need to be able to distinguish what type of meeting you’re attending. Bring your laptop or tablet if you know you’ll need to just record a few key dates or a to-do list — and if you need access to materials or the internet. But keep in mind that meetings such as presentations, progress reports, and performance reviews contain information you need to stick. If you ditch your digital ways, and bring the pen and spiral notebook; your memory may thank you.

Why does Instagram make it impossible to post from your laptop?

It’s the question I’m sure nearly every social media manager has asked themselves over the last couple years:

Why doesn’t Instagram come up with a way to post from your laptop?

I know, I know, it’s a mobile platform. But, for brand and agency folks, posting to Instagram from your own mobile device is far from ideal.

Let’s run down a few of the inherent challenges and risks in using your personal phone to post to your client’s/brand’s Instagram account:

* What if your phone gets stolen and you’re logged into your client’s/brand’s account? Whoops.

* Ever try keying in a 300-character-long Instagram post on your phone (and yeah, I know 300-character posts aren’t ideal on IG–but sometimes it’s necessary)? Not fun–and prone to errors and typos.

* Toggling between your personal account and your client’s/brand’s account. All sorts of risk here, for obvious reasons (namely, posting a #selfie of you and your dog to your client’s account!)

In addition to those big risks–it’s also just not very easy at all. Even if you are an expert typist on your phone, it’s not easy. And, it takes a task that should take about 10 seconds on your laptop and turns it into a 3-5 minute exercise. Not a huge deal, but basically a pain in the butt.

But Arik, there are tools that let you schedule posts, you say? Sure, there are tools likeLatergram.me–but again, they don’t allow you to share from your laptop. Mobile-only.

There are tools like Gramblr–but you look at that site/tool and tell me you’d consider using that for a Fortune 500 brand. I don’t think so.

If you look at Instagram’s Terms & Conditions, it’s clear they do not want people posting from third-party platforms or non-mobile devices. Staying true to their mobile roots. Again, I get it. But, I don’t have to like it.

For now, it seems brand/agency folks will be stuck using their phones to upload pics, videos and text to Instagram.

Not an ideal process by any means…

Can The Tablet Replace The Laptop?

The most pressing question on everyone's lips is will the tablet replace the laptop? Well maybe not the most pressing question at the moment, and probably not on anyone's lips, except mine. But still a worthy question to ponder. Recently I came across an articleTablet Industry Continues Steady Decline that claimed the tablet is in decline. While I might be inclined to agree that sales of tablets have slowed down, I wouldn't write off the tablet just yet.

Don't get me wrong, I love my laptop and would not get rid of it. But I decided a while back to see if I could use a tablet to replace my laptop. That and my laptop, if you could call it mine since it was a hand-me-down from my wife, really couldn't go more than five seconds unplugged. So when I got the tablet, another hand-me-down from my wife, I gave it a hard test drive.

A few years ago my wife was offered an iPad. Seeing how neither of us own any Apple products, and my firm belief that Apple is the Betamax of the computer industry, she opted for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 inch screen. I was able to get her synced with her Android phone and she was off and running.

As it turned out, it wasn't much running. Shortly after she realized that while tablets are great, they are not a laptop. Although the bluetooth keyboard and the leather case was a great add on, she decided to get a new laptop. She got a small laptop that was more of an ultra book with touch screen technology, which meant I got another hand-me-down of her old laptop and the tablet.

First I started to use it at work during meetings. I'm a simple man when it comes to software, proudly I've made my career by not going above layer 3 (an inside joke for those who know OSI), so a basic text document app worked perfectly. And I didn't want to remove my wife's email account, so I found another freeware program. In fact the amount of freeware products for Android are vast and many of them are good. Of course you get what you pay for, but I have a lot of patience when it comes to apps. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

I avoided putting any games on the device since I know my obsessive nature would have me playing them non stop. So I started to download programs that work better on a tablet than ones for your phone such as watching old movies which is one of my hobbies. And watching a ten inch screen is not much different than the thirteen inch screen I grew up watching as a kid.

I even found an app that works like Office and had a text and spreadsheet program that could save in Windows Office format. Since I had the wireless keyboard I decided to use it to write my first novel Taste the Purple. It was a bit difficult since the keys had a tendency to spit out multiple letters or strange foreign characters often. And there really isn't a good spell check, or at least one that works with the freeware apps I was using. I just keep telling myself that I am frugal, not cheap, frugal, not cheap, frugal......

I believe I reached the full effect when I was at my brother's wedding on the other side of the county and got a repair phone call at midnight because a T1 was down. Using the table I was able to VPN into my work computer and on the tiny screen, was able to pull up information and the software I needed. Wasn't easy and was much slower than if I had a laptop, but it still worked.

Can the tablet replace the laptop? No it cannot. But I don't see them disappearing any time soon. They are good as a download device, just not so much as an input device. Either way I am glad that I tried this experiment and know for sure that I do work much better using a laptop.

Adam Mayer is a telecommunications manager and aspiring author who lives in Oregon

Best practices for securing Desktop and Laptop Endpoints..

One of the most vulnerable parts of your infrastructure is the desktop and laptop computers that your end users use. These devices can be responsible for bringing in viruses or malware or causing your organization to lose sensitive data that can subject your organization to all sorts of headaches. In this guide, I’ll cover the practices I use when securing end user desktop and laptop systems.

Even in the age of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and things such as the Windows Store in Windows 8+ that give end users more control over their devices, maintaining some level of control over the endpoints that your organization owns is still important for security reasons. Following are some of the things I do as best practices when securing an organization’s desktop and laptop systems.

Be transparent to the End user : If you’re implementing any of the technologies in this article for the first time, I highly encourage you to communicate the changes to your end users and make sure they know how the changes will impact them. Letting them know about the changes and how they will benefit the organization will go a long way toward gaining acceptance.

You should also strive to keep the changes as unobtrusive to the end user as possible. You want users to know the changes are there, but the changes shouldn’t be so drastic that they impact the performance of the users’ computers and their ability to get their work done. The worst thing you can do is implement a security change that users circumvent because the change prevents them from doing their job.

Inventory Management and MDM :You can’t secure what you don’t know about. Running a product such as System Center Configuration Manager, LANDesk, Altiris, or some other systems management platform not only lets you inventory all of your assets but also gives you the ability to manage other aspects of your endpoints, such as software updates, antivirus, and firewalls. If a device walks away, either through loss or theft, having access to its model and serial number can be helpful to law enforcement and insurance companies if you insure your devices.

For your mobile devices, a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution is a must for maintaining those devices that are on the go and not regularly connected to the corporate network. Products such as Microsoft's Intune are a great option for managing those systems and can also integrate with SCCM.

Antivirus/Anti malware : This is really a no-brainer, right? Sure, Windows 8 and 10 come with Windows Defender built in to the OS, but are end users going to call their IT person or the Help Desk every time they get a notice on their computer that the antivirus application has performed an action? My experience is that most end users won’t until it impacts their ability to work.

I highly recommend using an antivirus/anti malware product that allows you to manage the application on the endpoint rather than something like the built-in Windows Defender that doesn’t send feedback to IT.

Enterprise antivirus applications check in (usually through an agent) with a central server that IT can use to control the configuration, control updates, and monitor the solution. And, it’s really nice to set up email alerts for system infections. Who wants to have to run a report on a system every day when you can just have it emailed to you?

Firewall : Another no-brainer. Personally, I’m a fan of the built-in firewall in Windows 7+. It handles both inbound and outbound filtering and supported IPv6 before most of the third-party products out there did. Using the built-in firewall also gives you the benefit of being able to control it through either Group Policy or System Center Configuration Manager.

Disk Encryption : Disk encryption is no longer just for mobile devices. Encrypting the hard drives of your endpoints is a must now. Even if you’re using technologies such as Folder Redirection to keep data off computers, sensitive data can still end up in Offline Files, temp directories, and other non-standard locations for data storage, such as folders in the user’s profile.

File Explorer showing a BitLocker encrypted OS disk, data disk, and removable drive.

What if your users don’t have access to sensitive data? You should still seriously consider encrypting all devices regardless of form factor—even if the device is stationary and physically locked down. An attacker or malicious employee can use an offline attach to reset the local Administrator password and access the computer with that local Administrator account. Once after the system has been compromised, it can be used to steal the credentials of anyone logging in to the computer and all sorts of other malicious activity if it is connected to your corporate network.

Application Whitelisting / Blacklisting : One of my favorite new features that was included in Windows 7 when it was released is AppLocker . AppLocker is an application control service that allows IT to whitelist (allow) and/or blacklist (deny) executable, scripts, Windows Installers (MSI files), Windows Store /Universal apps (in Windows 8+), and even DLL files from running on endpoints.

With AppLocker (or other third-party solutions), you can allow only selected software to run based on criteria such as file location, digital signature, or file hash. Even if you set a policy that allows all software to run by default, you can still blacklist/block applications that your users shouldn’t be using with the same location, digital signature, or file hash settings.

AppLocker blocking an unauthorized application from running (program is blocked by group policy)

Windows and third-party updates : Even if you’ve locked down a computer to the point of being barely usable (which I don’t recommend), missing updates can still allow an attacker to compromise the computer. Smaller organizations can simply use Windows Update to automatically update systems. Larger organizations can use Windows Server Updae Services (WSUS) or systems management products such as System Center Configuration Manager for pushing out updates for Windows, Office, and other Microsoft products.

Third-party updates are just as important (if not more important!) than Windows and Office updates. Adobe Flash and Oracle Java both have a bad track record when it comes to security and usually need to be patched as soon as the updates are released to the public. Configuration Manager is capable of publishing third-party updates using the System Center Update Publisher or via plugins from third-party vendors.

Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) : Last, but certainly not least, is the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit. EMET is a utility from Microsoft that helps prevent an attacker or malicious user from exploiting vulnerabilities in applications.

EMET can enable Windows features such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), and other enhanced security features for applications that don’t specifically request them based on how the vendor or programmer designed them. This can act as an additional safety net to protect applications that may have unknown security issues or known security issues that, for whatever reason, can’t be patched.

Conclusion 

I hope this best practices guide can serve as a starting point for improving the security of your organization’s desktop and laptop endpoints.

The one with the grey lapto

I remember the first time I encountered the Internet. It was 1996. It was a sunny day. I was inside, in my father’s office, watching him hook up his grey laptop. It was the only device with a modem card installed. He opened the device, selected the modem connection window, pressed start and we listened to our phone line dialing. For the next half hour our family was unavailable to pick up the phone. The internet was using it.

The sounds stopped, my father double-clicked on the lighthouse icon and Netscape loaded steadily for the next 10 minutes. I forgot what we searched for or if we just stared at the browser screen, unable to grasp the singularity of that moment. All I remember is that it was a glorious day.

20 years later, the Internet has expanded beyond the boundaries of my imagination. Approximately 40% of the world population is connected and about 1.5 billion have an active Facebook account. And interestingly enough, there are still 50 million or so active MySpace users.

Sources vary but per minute about 640TB data is being transferred and 200 million emails are being sent. I can only estimate the number of likes and shares in that same minute. The sheer immensity of these numbers makes it impossible to grasp their true meaning and I have trouble relating to what these numbers mean emotionally or what they mean to society.

My brain seems naturally predisposed to think micro instead of macro. For instance, when it comes to memorization, the method of loci, used to memorize π to 67,000 digits, focuses on deconstructing a number and attributing each element to a certain object in, for instance, a building. In the end the number is no longer a number but has become part of a personal story. It is just one of many examples that strengthen my belief that faith in technology is just an expression of the human acknowledgement of its own fallibility.

Since the day my family sat around that small, heavy, grey laptop and watched the Internet load, the challenge of memorization has been overcome. Our collective memory is now in the cloud, yet scattered and often difficult to contextualize. The new challenge lies in improving our understanding, building a story that makes sense and closing the gap between data and knowledge. Google is probably working on it but until then it is up to us.