Free Book: Learn C#
A quick and easy online guide to C#. Also comes with a short preview of the changes C# 2.0 brings.
Learn CSharp
Add comment November 22nd, 2006
From Excel spreadsheets to persuasive presentations
CX NOW! is a powerful dashboard tool from BusinessObjects. Check out their demo. Prices start at 195$
Add comment November 13th, 2006
Excel as a database, Part 2
Neopoleon : Excel as a database
“As a developer, you’ve probably, at some unfortunate point in your life (possibly several points, actually), been handed an Excel file that has been crammed full of “data” by someone in marketing and told to “do something with it.”"
1 comment November 8th, 2006
A tale of Excel
“Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.”
Joel Spolsky writes a very interesting essay on software development, management and, of course, Excel.
Add comment November 8th, 2006
Why you shouldn’t use Office Automation
A short note from the author:
Considerations for server-side Automation of Office
“Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when run in this environment.
If you are building a solution that runs in a server-side context, you should attempt wherever possible to use components that have been made safe for unattended execution, or find alternatives that allow at least a part of the code to run client-side. If you choose to use an Office application from a server-side solution, you will find that it lacks many of the necessary capabilities to run successfully, and you will be taking risks with the stability of your overall solution.”
Further incentives on quitting Office Automation would be useless.
Add comment November 8th, 2006
5 reasons why Excel 2007 is better. Or not.
5 reasons why Excel 2007 smokes the web2.0 competition… and why it may not matter is an interesting peak into the improvements Excel 2007 is supposed to bring in December. ZuluInSiliconValley points out
- Conditional Formatting
- More rows
- Previewing
- Ribbon and menu bars
- Charting
vs
- Sharing
- Search
Add comment November 8th, 2006
Excel as a database
“Why do people keep putting data in spreadsheets that obviously belongs in a database? Oddly enough, part of the reason came to me in a fairly unlikely place, reading to my kids before bed. We had just plopped on the couch to read a book when my kindergartener made me back up and read the cover of the book, pointing out to me the author and the illustrator. That was an enlightening moment; from a very early age we start learning the structure of documents. Title, author, and date of publication, page number, etc, etc is reinforced at every grade level.”
This article points out one major mistake that most users do when using spreadsheets: mistaking them for a database.
Add comment October 31st, 2006
Happy Face
Contextures.com shows how you can display different images based on an cell value input. Via DashBoardSpy
Add comment October 31st, 2006
.NET University
The course can be completed in one day, or over four separate sessions. Content includes four 75 minute lectures and four 30 minute labs. The actual time needed to complete the labs may vary, depending on the attendees’ programming experience.
Graduates will have a good high-level understanding of the new capabilities of .NET 3.0, and are welcome to take the content and re-present it to their peers, in either an official or unofficial capacity.
Add comment October 26th, 2006
Remove the macro security warning
Excel has the ability to put code in three places. If the code is in a standard module the key to stopping the dialog is to remove the entire module(s), not simply delete the code in it. To do this:
- Open the VBE (Alt+F11)
- In the project explorer look for the name of the workbook. Below this you should see a folder called …
Read the rest at Nick Hodge
Add comment October 25th, 2006
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