Welcome to IDEAScripting.com

Hello and welcome to www.ideascripting.com.

It has been awhile that I have been thinking that IDEA lacks a web site that is run by the users for the users.  When you look at many other popular software products you can usually find sites that support the product but are not run by the software company, I am hoping that this site will become the number one site in support of IDEA.

Maybe I will start by introducing myself.  My name is Brian Element and I work in the Canadian Federal government.  I have been using IDEA since 1989 and I started out learning IDEA on the DOS v2.  I have used IDEA extensively for financial audit, value for money audits, as part of Internal Audit and for Internal Control work.  I have also been a part time trainer for IDEA for the past decade giving the Intro and Intermediate course along with giving the scripting course in the past year.

My vision for this site is to have a place where users can come and ask for help along with having content that a user can download and use right away.  My focus in the past year has been on the scripting side so I wll be making my scripts available to anyone who wants to download them.  Along the way I have been creating special purpose functions for scripts that do one thing that seem to crop up over and over again, such as getting a filename.  So anyone developing a script could use these functions and just insert them in their script.  Also I plan on adding the visual basic functions that work in IDEAScript, the language browser has some of the functions but it does not have all of them, I hope to test out the different functions and show how they can be used in your script.

I am also hoping to get other trainers and IDEA experts on board to help answer your questions along with posting content and writing articles, blogs, etc.

As this site is for the user, I am always open to suggestions of things that should be added, things we could talk about, etc.  All you have to do is post a suggestion in the forum or send me an email.  Also if you feel that you would like to contribute content to the site please let me know.  I will always be looking for interesting things to add to the site and it does not necessarily need to be about IDEA, it could be about fraud, analytical tests, etc.

So welcome and I hope you enjoy the site.

Brian