Author: STL Team

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National Rail Strike – Latest News

UPDATE – 21 May 16:40

Planned industrial action has been suspended

Good news, the planned strike has been called off!

Many thanks to all our customers and staff for the support in ensuring we were prepared to deliver all our planned events!

Good news training team, you don’t have to spend Monday night in a hotel. 😉 enjoy your long weekend.

Regards

STL

Industrial action due to affect National Rail services on Monday 25 & Tuesday 26 May 2015

The RMT have announced that Network Rail workers are to stage a 24-hour national rail strike from 5pm on bank holiday Monday in a dispute over pay.

As with any potential disruption to our training schedule, we are taking additional measures to ensure all our courses run on the day affected (Tuesday 26th May). Whilst there is a possibility that the strike may be averted we will assume it is going to happen.

Our commitment – courses never cancelled

Again we are committed to running all our planned courses. In the last 10 years we’ve only had 27 out of 12,364 courses disrupted!  As you can see it is a rare event and we are confident that our training delivery will not be disrupted with this latest rail strike.

As we have done in the past, should the worst happen, we will reschedule the course with delegates agreement and offer a free course.

Your options:

  • Come along as planned safe in the knowledge we will be prepared
  • If you face travel disruption, you can reschedule your course, please see options here.

It is our understanding that should the strike go ahead provision will be made by Network Rail for rail ticket refunds, please see links below.

Useful resources:

Our status page

Latest national rail strike information from Network Rail

Network Rail status page

follow #IndustrialAction

BBC – Network Rail workers vote to strike…

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What are the odds like for the UK General Election?

The UK general election is almost upon us and it’s a tight race! It’s the most unpredictable election in memory and has already produced some lively debates and political speed-dating as potential alliances are considered.

There are so many sources from which to gain the latest on likely election winners, and one such are the bookies. There are some great websites with up to the minute odds on all the political parties and it got us thinking wouldn’t it be great to capture and analyse this information in Excel….

After several cups of coffee and Excel wizardry one of our Excel trainers has created a rough but working Excel 2015 UK General Election spreadsheet.  You can download the spreadsheet here.

What it does:
  • Automatically updates with latest betting odds every hour (you can refresh at any time)
  • View a chart to analyse the betting odds
What you can do:
  • By having the latest data you have the ability to create more charts to your heart’s content!
  • Capture the live data so that you can view it historically. How did the odds change over the week? Which party gained/lost the most (from an odds perspective!).
  • With a bit of VBA pokery you could even create lookup reports focussing on specific parties.

There is a lot of opinion out there on the general election but you could do worse than follow the signals of those who are putting their money where their mouth is!

Learn more:

If you would like to learn more about how we produced this spreadsheet; you may wish to track other live web data like stocks, competitor pricing and more, then just click here.

Acknowledgements and useful resources

http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/most-seats

Election 2015: Poll tracker

http://www.ft.com/indepth/uk-general-election

Betting odds explained

Learn more about available Excel training courses