My CPD Spreadsheet

For a number of years, we have been required to record our CPD activity on a paper A4 sheet sent out diligently every year in about March by the Central office. Unfortunately, the amount of space left to record enough to remember what you had done is limited, and being paper, it's impossible to link your activities to any project or list hours spent.

Holly Wilbourn, the CIAT Central office member of Staff who looks after the CPD policy, has written two excellent articles outlining what we need to do for CPD, issue 89 and, more recently, issue 96, May/June 2011

But it always falls back on your records, and for me writing notes on an A3 paper folded chart just did not do justice to the work I was doing to keep my CPD up to date.

So for a while, I looked at using FileMaker to record my activity in a database. This was the leap forward I wanted; no longer limited to a paper system, the relational database allowed me to compare and link my. activity notes have projects where I could see at a glance how many hours I had spent and have a running total.

But as luck would have it, I lost much information in a hard drive failure. I had a lot of it recorded in the form of blog reports on my company web page, but it was not linked to specific projects or showed the total hours.

This tragic event made me sit back and review the current Market for both bespoke systems and off-the-shelf systems currently available. The off-the-shelf systems were both expensive and limited in that I had to do it their way, and I just did not like the feel of their multi-screen approach.

Spreadsheets seemed to offer a way forward that had the same power as the old FileMaker database, and using Google's online docs, and their spreadsheet offering gave several other benefits, such as cloud safety, online get at it anytime, from any machine, and a sharing or multi-user capability not easily available in Filemaker, plus a control system to prevent none invited participants from seeing or using the spreadsheet.

So I set about replicating the FileMaker program in a Google spreadsheet, using the multi sheets now available to split the various information, and the current CPD program was born,

The first sheet is simply the record of activity, where I list all my CPD with a date, my name, subject, what project list I wanted to add it to, my method of research or activity, the hours I spent on that activity and the quality of the event, with a simple formula to alter the hours into a weighted hours column. A general comments space to record simple notes and a link to a more robust Google Doc file where I could add more expansive notes, plus links to my Picasa photo album and a similar link to Evernotes. More on these later.

Next came the Project list, looked at by a drop-down box in the activity sheet, here I list all the things I wanted to research or needed to look at in relation to any work-related projects, I added a priority column to show just how important this is to me, a column to show the total hours I spent on that project, taken from a filter formula looking at the Activity list, and a description of the project, and a goals column to set just what I wanted to achieve. The use of a priority rating was outlined in Holly Willbourn’s excellent article in the May/June issue 95 of AT, where she outlined the need to rate all activity against the critical need. So I have rated each project on a 1-4 basis, 1 being a high priority, down to 4 beings, well, it's interesting  !. For the description column, I have planned to add a date or give the project a time scale; perhaps in later versions, I can add this with a formula to rate it, but for the time being, the description and goals columns will suffice.

I am always interested in what I have done on a month-by-month basis, so I added a simple monthly sheet, to list activities per month, taken from the activity day field, with a running total at the bottom. Should I extend the list to display a five-year plan, as Holly suggests, it will prove the basis for some interesting charts showing me just when I tend to be more CPD active.

Next, I wanted to see just what activity related to each project, I could see the total hours but not the activity, so I have added a specific sheet dedicated to showing just activity related to a specific search, again using a drop-down box looking at the project list.

One of the share functions now added to Google Docs allowed me to extract the required HTML code to embed it into wherever I want, to show others what I have been studying and offer some hints to help my readers to find their own project CPD list. I think this is extremely important; sharing sources, and talking about my CPD in this way, allows others to improve upon the spreadsheet and adapt it to their own needs and methods of working.

Using Google spreadsheets allowed me to add functions I just did not know how to add in my old FileMaker program. One perfect example is the sharing side in Google Docs it’s so simple. It simply requires the participant to have a google account, so they can log in, if I’m online, I can see who is adding data and assist if required, and the natural logs kept by Google Docs show me who has been on and when.

The multiple-user approach is extremely interesting to small practices, I have now looked at extending the spreadsheet to allow others to add their activity onto my spreadsheet, hence the addition of my name in the activity column, a simple filter would single out individual users.

Printing is excellent; as you might expect from Google, a landscape layout allow the full width of the spreadsheet to be printed onto several sheets, with the Project list and total hours completed. I have added a title sheet to my version just to make it clear whose CPD record it is, and show the dates, plus my overall goal for the year

Although the Central office looks at a small representative sample, it's in the best interest of every office to collate the CPD activity of their staff to help in negotiating with their PI insurance. Heaven forbid, but should you need to claim on your PI, a simple printout will show the insurers that you have not been lax in promoting CPD in your office, it might also be an aid in reducing PI coverage if you show this is in evidence, prior to the renewal of the policy.

One area of the spreadsheet I thought might prove problematic was my notes, I had left space to add short descriptions of the activity, but anything more just was not practical. But Google Doc came to the rescue with their simple doc, in this, I can write as much as I want, I tend to use my iPad to make notes with the Element app, which saves pure text files to my dropbox account, here I can simply drag it into my google doc site and it loads up automatically, I use the web address to link it to my activity in the spreadsheet.

When I’m researching online, I often make notes within Obsidian, to simply record the web page and list it in a specific Obsidian folder, it has the website recorded, plus the data I found or saved, again a URL link into the spreadsheet activity is a great way to expand my notes. So is any photos I might take, I am a massive user of my iPhone to take photos or short videos of events, or construction, I might see, a simple photo or perhaps a short video saved in Google Picas, or your service of choice, again linked with a URL to the spreadsheet, aid the notes in ways you can’t imagine. A general URL column allows me to add only website URLs if I want, with little or no disk space problems.

As always, I progress forward. I started this article a while ago, and since then, I have discovered Obsidian. To say it turned my recording of information around is like calling an albatross simply a bird; if you ever see one, then you will understand as I did in the Antarctic. this statement. This is not the first time I have mentioned my use of Obsidian; I am heading towards a major article on its use and linking.

One last area I want to explore is the year-on-year activity; Holly is quite right in suggesting a five-year plan; perhaps a separate sheet to look at this is required, as yet I have not thought of a way to achieve this, but it's in my mind to do something come to the end of the year., and as I finish this article at the beginning of 2023. So are the ways to collaborate with other users; networking is part and parcel of CPD, and the spreadsheet might just prove the tool to aid collaboration among members., and friends.

The spreadsheet is freely available in its current format for free to any reader, please contact me, and I’ll send it on.