Stop Excel Using Scientific Notation on Numbers
Excel is brilliant!
It is so brilliant, that it’s helpful.
Excel is SO helpful THAT IT SUCKS!!!
Probably for 99.9% of the general population, all of Microsoft Excel’s cool features that help you format your data into something legible are something really cool. But I think Excel should have a “data only” setting.
What do I mean by “data only”? Have you ever tried debugging data in excel using all the cool functions, etc. to find duplicates, or sort the data only to find that Excel has gone and removed a leading “0″, or changed the number into Scientific Notation?
Apparently Excel has a 15 digit precision limit. But most of the time, I’d prefer it if Excel just treated the number as text until I want it sorted. Am I being TOO fussy?
Anyway, I found a great way to do this in 4 easy steps (once you’ve imported the data as text – see the comment below made on June 7th 2010 for reasons!):
Read MoreWordPress 2.6 is out and it’s Turbo Charged
It’s finally here. And a month ahead of schedule.
Why am I so excited for a new release of WordPress?
If you read my “Google Gears and WordPress” post, you’ll see. Working from a South African internet connection (the miserable iBurst to be exact), I REALLY appreciate the fact that it is now MUCH quicker to do things like place images and links inside my posts.
What else is new in this version of WordPress?
Here’s a video to highlight the major changes:
- Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
- Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
- Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
- Word count!
- Image captions
- Bulk management of plugins
- Full SSL support
For descriptions of these, visit the WordPress Development blog.
Read MoreProductive Browser Homepage
Based on the post “Make about:blank Your Homepage” I thought I would share my own productivity tip that you can use your browser’s home page for.
I agree with Ionut Alex Chitu in that having a browser home page that connects to the internet is not a great thing. Especially in the following (my) situation:
VPN
Depending on day and time, I might be on a VPN, so I’ll need to enable my proxy.
When the browser starts, it will try and go to whatever home page you have set, and if you haven’t enabled/disabled the proxy, it fails, and that’s annoying.
Slow Internet
I’d LOVE to set my home page to a page like iGoogle with a whole bunch of gadgets giving me all the info I need.
But, the internet here in South Africa can be quite slow, even on a “broadband connection“.
So starting FireFox and sitting and waiting for a home page is not something I enjoy doing. My whole reason for USING FireFox is so that I can multi-task!
What homepage do I use?
I created my own home page. All it is is a local .html file containing all the links I need to get to the sites I use the most.
Here’s a screenshot of my home page:
As you can see, I’ve divided my links into different categories.
For example, the left column is all devoted to the app I support, and there are categories for the Production, Test, Dev and Local versions…
It loads just as quickly as about:home, but it makes my bookmarks easier to click. And I’ve set FireFox to open my home page when I open a new tab, so they’re always there.
Read MoreGoogle Reader Mobile
Something I do a lot of is read blogs. I do this mainly via Google Reader, as highlighted in my post “Google Reader – Step 1 & 2“. I also do this using my iMate K-JAM phone, a Windows Mobile 5 phone. It’s not a bad phone, though I use it more for it’s browsing and wifi capabilities…
So, if you think you’d like to read your blog feeds while waiting at the bus stop, or in a waiting room, or during your work meetings, then just point your browser to “http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/“. This is Google Reader optimised for mobile devices. It’s a really basic version of Google Reader, with no real features, just real content (assuming the blogs you subscribe to are full of “real content”).
Apparently the Google Reader team are really good at watching out for mentions of their product in the Blogosphere, so I think I’ll take this opportunity to mention 1 “bug” and 1 MAJOR feature request.
Bug:
If you’re reading a certain category (tag) and you get to the last post, you will see a link to the next post, but it’s pointing to the current post. Not anything major, just a bit strange (and a let down once I realise I’ve reached the end 
).
Feature Request:
Please could you add a date stamp to each post. Just a simple “2007/03/08″ at the top would suffice. I don’t always read every post for every blog I subscribe to, and sometimes I wonder how far back I’m going when I try do a “catch-up” session. It would make life SOOO much easier for me to be able to see a date for each post.
Read MoreGoogle Reader – Step 1 & 2
The very first step you should do before using Google Reader to read your blog or website subscriptions, go to the Google Reader page. If you already have a Google Account (for example a GMail account) then you can sign in using that. Otherwise, create a new Google Account by following the steps on the website.
Once you’ve signed into your Google Account and you’re on your Google Reader homepage, you’re set to go.
Next, you should subscribe to a feed to see what it’s like. How about we try subscribing to this site using Google Reader’s simplest method.
- On the left, in Green, you should see a link saying “Add Subscription”. Click this link
- A field should appear allowing you to enter some text. Type in “www.geniosity.co.za/musings” and click “Add”
And there you have it. On the left you will see a list of your subscriptions. Obviously, you should only have “musings” at the moment. Now, every time I add a new article/tip to this site, you will see it by the fact that there will be a number in brackets next to the name of this site (musings) showing you how many unread articles I have.
Just a note, for this site, currently I show the entire article in the feed, so you won’t have to visit this site to read the whole article, but some sites just put a summary/intro, and you will have to visit the site to read the rest of the article.
Read MoreA simple RSS explanation
What does RSS stand for?
That’s an easy one, it stands for Really Simple Syndication.
Why do you care?
Ever been hooked on a website (possibly mainly blogs) that gets updated almost daily and found yourself visiting the website in the hope that there is new content there?
Well, RSS is a way for a website to package the new content, for example a new post on a blog or a new article on a news site, so that it can be read by an RSS reader without having to visit the site directly. The website doesn’t necessarily need to put up the entire article into the RSS feed as it could put a summary of the article, but due to how RSS is created, you would see that there is a new article, and when this article was made available.
How do I know that a site has a feed?
Also really simple. If you’re using Mozilla FireFox or the new IE7 (Internet Explorer 7), you should see an icon (now the standard feed icon) similar to the orange icon on the right, in your browser’s address bar. Of course, it won’t be this big though. I fully recommend FireFox, especially since they released FireFox 2 with it’s enhanced RSS Feed capabilities (and all those other spiffy reasons for using FireFox that I show you on this site).
Of course, all of this is a VERY simplified explanation and I fully welcome further explanations in the comments, but it is a general introduction to a FANTASTIC RSS reader by Google named… wait for it… you GUESSED it, Google Reader. And I’d like to show you how to use this to be more efficient when reading blogs and other sites that provide RSS feeds. So stay tuned (by subscribing to my RSS feed )
