Review of ACL Excel Add-in, Now FREE!

In case you missed it, ACL released the next version of their Acerno product, renamed it ACL Excel Add-in, and made it FREE!

So I thought I’d update my review.

For my original review of Acerno, see A Review of ACL Acerno. It still seems that I’m the only one who ever took the time to review the product (versus marketing blurbs, which are all over the ‘net), which appears to be a statement regarding its popularity.

Despite the poor popularity, since they updated it AND made it free, I decided to dive in for another look.

Note: This add-in is not just for auditors! Any one who regularly reviews data should consider using this simple, EASY-to-use software.

Please take the new & improved poll at the bottom of this post (also free).

ACL Tip: Beware of ORs and ANDs

Whenever you use OR and AND operators in ACL (or other software, for that matter), be careful to ensure that you receive the results that you are looking for.

Assume you have Table1, which contains 100 loan transactions. 10 of those transactions have a loan rate of 5% and 10 transactions have a rate of 6%. The remaining transactions have rates above 10%.

ACL Error: Not all Fields Imported via Script

Recently, I  ran an import script to import a delimited file into ACL, but the last 10 fields were not imported. And I didn’t know it right away, because I received no error message.

In addition (or should I say, in subtraction), the log did not indicate anything was wrong.

You Might be an ACL Freak if…

You might be an Audit Command Language (ACL) freak if more than 2 of the following are true:

• At work, you have a second computer just for running ACL.

Great Training at the 2014 ACL Conference

If you have ever wanted to go to an ACL conference, this is the year to do it.

Teach Yourself ACL UPDATED

If you’re trying to learn ACL on your own, Teach Yourself ACL, the widest read post on this blog, has been updated.

ACL revised their website, which broke many of the links. Those are now fixed.

Until ACL does the dirty deed again (they like to change links for some reason, without redirecting the old ones).

I also updated other items that ACL has changed since the last blog update in 2012.

ACL: How to Add a Conditional Computed Field

In ACL, a conditional computed field (CCF), is basically a regular computed field with some fireworks.

It looks and acts much like a regular computed field, but has some extra parts that do some extra work. Fortunately, the extras are NOT complicated, and after reading this post, you will find that will you use CCFs frequently.

So what’s the difference?