I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be speaking about Salesforce best practices at Kiwi Dreaming on 23 March at the Aotea Centre in Auckland, New Zealand!
I’ll be speaking alongside some very talented Salesforce professionals including Salesforce MVP Anna Loughnan Colquhoun, GravityLab‘s David Smith, Salesforce MVP Vickie Jeffery, and Salesforce MVP Joey Chan!
Everyone is familiar with taking a vacation. Giving yourself time away from work to focus on you. What that means is going to be unique to you. It can be travel or spending time with family. It’s therapeutic and reinvigorating.
In each of the past 4 years, I’ve used a portion of my vacation days to take a ‘working vacation’. The concept is the same, taking some time away from work to focus on you. The difference is that a working vacation has a personal goal in mind. It can be learning a new skill or working on a personal project. It’s also therapeutic and reinvigorating.
My 2019 working vacation goal was to become a Salesforce Certified Application Architect. It’s something that I didn’t have time to do because of the work-related responsibilities that take up my time. I took a working vacation and completed 4 certifications over the course of 1 week.
We’re now in the 1st week of 2020. Take a moment to think about what you want to do this year, for yourself, not for work. What personal projects excite you? What new skill have you always wanted to learn if you only had the time? When can you start your working vacation?
Originally posted on my LinkedIn on May 24, 2019.
8 years ago, when I got my CPA at 23, I thought this would be the last exam I would ever write. There are tons of CFOs out there with just that so that would be all I need for my career.
2 years later, when I got my MBA at 25, I thought that would be the last exam I would ever write. I now have a more well-rounded business education outside of Finance and Accounting.
3 years later, when I became a Certified Salesforce Platform Developer at 28, I thought that would be the last exam I would ever write. I certainly wouldn’t still be writing exams into my 30s. I can now show that I can do everything required in Finance Operations for medium to large enterprise companies.
3 years later, today, I became a Certified Salesforce CPQ Specialist at 31. I no longer presume to know what skills I’ll need to tackle the problems of the future. What I do know is that whatever is ahead, I’m ready.
Edit on 2/21/15: This appears to have been a problem that was created by a recent Office update that broke ActiveX controls. For a step-by-step guide to fix your client please see the link here: http://excelmatters.com/2014/12/10/office-update-breaks-activex-controls/ Special thanks to the amazing testers who volunteered to help track this down!
Some people are reporting seeing the following error when opening the game:
I have received reports of this occurring in both Office 2010 and 2013 however I am unable to recreate the bug on my testing machines. I am now asking for volunteers who are using systems that are encountering the above bug to provide feedback on updated versions so that I can try to tackle this. If you’d like to volunteer please let me know at 
with your operating system and excel version and I shall add you to the tester list.
Thank you for your patience and your assistance with this bug.
I am very pleased to announce the first launch of my new mobile game Glyphs! Make sure to download it free! It’s currently available on Android devices in Canada, launching to more platforms and territories soon! Like the Facebook page to find out when Glyphs is coming to you!
You may have heard about the recent viral game 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli. It’s a perfect blend of addictive and frustrating. It’s a simple game where you match 2-like numbers placed next to each other to create a new tile of their sums. The goal is to get a tile of the value 2048.
Well now there is a version playable entirely in Microsoft Excel! Co-developed by Peter Bartholomew and Petros Chatzipantazis, they bring all the fun of 2048 to a spreadsheet! You can download the excel version of 2048 for free here! The VBA is all open source so if you’re an advanced Excel wizard, have a look at the code to see how this all came together.
Candy Number Crunch Saga is a stock trading simulation game that runs entirely in Microsoft Excel!
Candy Number Crunch Saga takes place in the not too distant future where King.com (KING) has had a successful IPO. The burden is on you, brave stock trader, to invest wisely and become richer beyond your wildest dreams!
Key Features:
This game was made in my spare time over the course of 4 days for Candy Jam. The game is open-source so feel free to explore the source code!
Download here: http://carywalkin.itch.io/candy-number-crunch-saga
Candy Number Crunch Saga is available on PC Excel versions 2007, 2010 and 2013. Mac Excel versions are not supported.
So this is a very nice New Years Eve surprise!
From The Globe and Mail:
In a year that saw BlackBerry’s fortunes take yet another turn for the worse, it was often easy to feel pessimistic about the state of technological innovation in Canada. Fortunately for us, people like Cary Walkin exist.
Mr. Walkin, a chartered accountant, decided to build a dungeon-crawler role-playing video game all by himself. Now, this on its own would be a fairly impressive endeavour. But no, Mr. Walkin took things a step further by building this video game entirely within the confines of Microsoft Excel.
Now you may ask: Could Mr. Walkin have spent his time and ample talent doing something more worthwhile than building a video game using only spreadsheet macros? We say no. Keep on fighting the good fight, Cary.
I was going to hold off on uploading this until I had more animations in the game but I felt the desire to share. So this is a early preview of what will be coming in the future. Please forgive the choppiness and lack of audio, in the future I will use better screen capture software.
This post has been written by guest author Jordan Goldmeier of Advanced XL.
Disclaimer: The following tutorial requires Conditional Formatting which is a feature of Excel 2010 and greater. If you are using an older version of Excel, please note that formatting will not work correctly for you.
This article is part of a series called “VBA4Play”, written in conjunction with Excel game developer, Cary Walkin, for his blog. Many thanks to Cary for inviting me to write a few tutorials for his series.
This post is a continuation of my first post for Cary Walkin’s VBA4Play series, Development Principles for Excel Games and Applications, and Cary’s first post, VBA4Play Part 1: Movement and Collision Detection. If you have not read either of these posts, I strongly suggest you read them before moving forward.
Today, we’ll be focusing on how you can turn regions of your spreadsheet into a map for a game. This will be similar to the illuminated pathway featured in the bottom-right of the spreadsheet maze shown below.
Cary Walkin.CA 