A few weeks ago we asked you for feedback about the Handbook Project and the guides we’d released so far. Lots of you replied and gave us really useful feedback – thank you!
Overall usefulness
Overall it seems that most of you are finding the guides useful. 85% of respondents said that all or most of the guides had been useful. When asked which guides had been the most useful answers covered the whole range of guides; meaning that each of your are finding different things useful which I take to be a good thing!
Suggestions for additional modelling guide topics
We asked you for suggestions on topics that you would like to see guides on. We used the answers to this list to create a Pipeline page. We’ve listed all the ideas there (including some new ones that we came up with during our F1F9 Handbookathon).
Feel free to add comments to that page to suggest more topics; and feel free to volunteer to create a guide if there is a subject on that list that you have expertise on. We have added some additional guidance on how to contribute to the financial modelling handbook project.
Making the handbook more useful
In answer to this questions lots of you said lovely things like “just keep going what you’re doing” or “just keep churning them out”. Thank you for that vote of confidence. We plan to. We also got lots of good suggestions for improvements which we were also grateful for.
1. Publish a pipeline. Lots of you suggested this. We’ve actioned that here. Now you’ve no excuse for not getting involved.
2. Drop the “generic pages”. Quite of a few of you suggested this (sometimes in quite colourful language e.g. “drop all that useless fluff at the beginning”, “enough of the marketing crap”). Seems that as modellers many you just want to get straight to the detail! I understand that. Our aim with the guides was to try to make them more visually interesting than these things often are and to make each one represent the project as a whole on a stand alone basis. We’ll give some thought as to how we might better meet both of these requirements but it may not change soon. (We’re all working on this project in addition to our day jobs!) My apologies to those of you who find that annoying.
3. More detail required. Some of you felt that the guides were a little simplistic. Noted. At the moment we’re laying the groundwork; covering the basics and the essentials. We’ll get into more detailed stuff as we progress.
4. Add videos. A few people suggested this. We’re not planning doing video guides at the moment. The thrust of the project is to write a book collaboratively. We’re going to focus on that one objective.
5. Receive the download link in the notification email – don’t make us come back to the site to fill in our details and wait for a second email. This is a no brainer. From now on when we publish a new guide we’ll put the download link directly into the notification email. Thanks to all of you who suggested this.
6. Less of your marketing. Ouch. Point taken. If you only sign up through the handbook site we won’t ever send you any F1F9 marketing. We’ll just send you notification emails about the handbook project. If you want you can unsubscribe at any time. If you sign up through the F1F9 site for F1F9 content we may send you the odd marketing email. Again we try to keep them useful and you don’t like them please, please unsubscribe! We’ve also added different subscription options, so you can opt out of the type of emails that you don’t want to receive. The last thing we want to do is send you something you don’t want.
Would you like to contribute to the project?
Lots of you said that you would but that you didn’t know how to or what topic to add. Now we’ve published the pipeline list you can see some topics that are available. We’ve also published some more guidance on how to contribute.
Kenny et al, thanks for continuing with this work, it’s very useful. Have you ever considered including Mac shortcuts and not just MS shortcuts.