Chateau Keyboard

Monday, May 5: Now I can do sums, too

The column goes out first thing and we appear, finally, to have the e-mail problem licked. Well, no one's complained about not receiving it yet, which is a result either way.
I spend most of the rest of the day wrestling with an Excel spreadsheet which I'm hoping will calculate how to make a profit from buying land and having villas built on it. It's not easy, but I make a major design breakthrough when I realise you can (a) give cells labels like 'Agent_commision' and (b) refer to cells on another sheet of the same workbook. Hurrah! I end up with a nice, simple-looking calculator on the front page and all the calculations hidden behind it. Type in a new interest rate, agent's commission, selling price or building size and see the profit go up or down before your very eyes. Kewl. Assuming all my background calculations are correct, of course - the first version I send out has some very stupid mistake in it and I have to rush out a 1.1 version straight away.
The virus scan on Nina's PC finally finishes this afternoon, nearly a week after I started it. Good grief. Lots of viruses and infected files but cleaning them out hasn't speeded up the machine at all. In fact, if anything it's worse now - I fear these little b&ggers have really messed up the machine, and running a hard disc tester proves it - bad hard disc, broken, faulty, 0x72 'take it back where you bought it' errors. Oh dear.
Manuel's estimate for the roof and other work has arrived and is pretty decent, so now I'm trying to get hold of him to say go ahead. He's elusive though, so if your read this Manolo - come on round any time you like.