logo Ever get Excel spreadsheets from clients or opposing counsel? More and more attorneys are having to deal with spreadsheets as part of their law practice, and the results can be ... unpredictable.

This is where my fellow legal tech aficionado Ben J. Kusmin, Esq. steps in.

If you don't already follow Ben over at ExcelEsquire.com, you should.  Because he's talking about some really important things you should know about those spreadsheets you're getting from others, reviewing and possibly producing to other people. There are all kinds of hidden jewels (and traps) in those bad boys.

Case in point: I was handed a USB drive one morning last week and told to print the contents. This USB drive was produced by an expert witness who showed up to his deposition and basically said, "Oh, you know that duces tecum you attached to my deposition notice? Here's my response."

Nestled amongst the literally thousands of pages of PDFs were three spreadsheets, and one of them was a doozy. It wasn't formatted for printing (I fixed that in a hurry), but I noticed something else while I was digging around: the data was filtered.

It wasn't done in an attempt to deceive; it was simply how he analyzed the data. But I had to have some basic Excel skills to spot that and to alert my attorneys to it so they could question him about it during his deposition.

Would you have spotted that?

Ben outlines several such "gotchas" that you need to be on the lookout for. Click here for that article, but more importantly, follow Ben's blog. It (and he) could save you a lot of embarrassment someday.

For those of you who are following the Facebook Live series on Styles, we continue tomorrow morning as usual with my attempt to answer some questions you're having. Questions like this:

I prepared a document, properly formatted with styles. But when the document was opened by a recipient on his computer, all the formatting changed. I did not use the normal style, but my styles were based on normal, and I think the problem was that their normal template is different from mine. It was not a problem of my styles having "automatic update" checked.

Do you have any wisdom about this?

I don't know about my having any special wisdom about this, but I did share a link to an article by the late Shauna Kelly about why these things happen. And I'm going to be sharing the results of my own experiment to see how Styles (particularly Normal) react when documents are moved from computer to computer.

So join me tomorrow at 7am (CT US) sharp for another 13-Minute Thursday!

13-Minute Thursdays

A reminder for those of you who can't (or prefer not to) view these on Facebook: I'm uploading all of these (with captions, for those who've requested them for stealth viewing) to YouTube. Click here to view the entire playlist (the YouTube versions have been edited slightly to take out some of the awkward pauses).

BTW, the Facebook replays also now have closed captions uploaded, for those of you who want to do your stealth viewing over there.

P.S.: Did I mention these videos aren't going to be up forever? Yep, they'll be expiring shortly after the series finishes. If Styles is something you've wanted to learn, don't dilly-dally - go ahead and get your questions in now, and stay tuned for an announcement at the end of this Styles series.
 
 

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