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General discussion

New books out for IDEA

There are a couple of new books out for IDEA.  One is "Fraud and Fraud Detection" by Sunder Gee who is one of my friends and a long-time IDEA user, trainer and consultant.  If you are having difficulty coming up with ways to use IDEA on your data you should pick-up a copy of the book as it will be a great help.

Article in Wall Street Journal on Benford's Law

I just saw on Mark Nigrini's facebook page that there was a Wall Street Journal article last week on Benford's Law that quoted him.  You can find the article here.

For anyone who doesn't know Mark Nigrini, he is one of the father's of how we currently use Benford's Law and also has worked with IDEA on their Benford's Law routines and advanced analytical analysis.

How do I fix this Date Issue

I have a very annoying issue with IDEA. I'm importing tables through SQL server and the dates come as numeric, a 6 digit number that starts with 7.
I realize there are a gazillion functions to convert numeric to date, but none of those actually work. They run but I end up with "ERROR" in place of the date records, in the date fields. 
Any other solution mentioned here or by IDEA doesn't work. But the issue can be fixed in Access or SQL Server, but not within IDEA.

Joining the site

For anyone new that wants to join the site, I have had change the settings so that I now have to authorize any new members.  The reason for this is that the site has been flooded with false applications for users that want to flood the forums with spam.  By doing this I hope that these spam users will not get access to the site to post their spam.  If I happen to delete someone who wants to join the site please contact me directly and I will set you up.  Sorry for any inconvenience.

Did you know you can create games using IDEA?

I was over at IDEA this week and one of their programers showed me a game that he had created using IDEAScript so I thought I would take on the challenge.  So here is Sudoku that you can play on IDEA using IDEAScript.  The game has four levels of difficulty, it allows you to solve the game if you give up and also check and see if you have completed the game correctly.

You can find the script here.

Excel Object Models

Hi Brian
Just wondering if you can direct me to some resources on Excel Object Models and IDEA.
Have to say I've been having tons of fun with IDEA since meeting you, and have been able to use Scripting to take tasks that were taking up to a week, and completing them within 5min... started using forms as well which has been very cool!
Thanks
Edward