Stop Excel Using Scientific Notation on Numbers

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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):

Read more

WordPress 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.

Productive 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.

Google 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.

Google 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.

A 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 )

Windows Start Menu Shortcuts

In my last article, “Windows Logo – Top 5 Shortcuts“, I gave you a few ideas on how to use the Windows Logo Key in key combinations, for example, to lock your computer. The last tip was to just press the Windows Logo Key. Of course, doing that only shows you the Windows Start Menu. This article will show you how to use this as the start to a few excellent shortcuts in Windows. (If you like, you could open the picture at the bottom of this article to see where on the Start Menu I am talking about).

Get a list of your 10 (or fewer) MOST used programs, like Internet Explorer, Outlook, FireFox, etc… and then for each one, follow the steps below:

• Find the shortcut to the program in your Start Menu
• Right-Click on the Shortcut and click on “Pin to Start menu“

It should now appear in the Top section of your Start Menu. If you know how, you could just drag-and-drop a shortcut onto this section of the Start Menu.

• Right click on the Shortcut and click on “Rename”
• Starting at “1″, rename the shortcut so that it has a number before it. For example, you could change “Internet Explorer” to “1 – Internet Explorer“

Now, to use these new shortcuts, all you have to do is press the Windows Logo Key to open the Start Menu, and THEN press a number. This will automatically select one of these shortcuts, assuming that the number is unique on the Start Menu.

The picture on the left (which will open up into a new page for a larger version if you click it) shows you what my Start Menu looks like. I’ve left the Mozilla FireFox, Outlook and Internet Explorer shortcuts in focus so that you can see what I am talking about in more detail. As you can see with my FireFox shortcut, I’ve used the letter “Q”. This is for 3 reasons:

1 – I ran out of numbers
2 – “Q” is not a common letter, and no programs I use start with this letter. If there is more than 1 program that starts with your shortcut number or letter, pressing the key will just highlight one of the shortcuts
3 – I press the “Q” with my left hand, which is the same hand I use to press the Windows Logo Key on my keyboard.

Windows Logo – Top 5 Shortcuts

These shortcuts will speed up your day by a few milliseconds, but hey, every second counts in this “time is money” world. Using the key known as the Windows Logo Button or Windows Key, it’s the key on your keyboard with a little picture on it (the Windows Logo as shown on the left), generally next to the [ALT] key.

So, here are the top 5 shortcuts that use the Windows Logo Key. Any key being pressed will be in the square brackets [], for example, [E] means press the “e” on your keyboard.

1 – [WINDOWS LOGO] – [L]

If you use a computer at work or in a public place, this is a shortcut that you HAVE to learn. It locks your computer without you having to click on the “START” button and saying lock. It’s easy enough to do, so you have NO excuse for leaving your computer unlocked when you go and get your coffee.

2 – [WINDOWS LOGO] – [D]

This shortcut is the same as clicking the icon on your task bar to show the desktop (which will minimise all your windows/programs so you can see your desktop). This is useful if you have a lot of shortcuts on your Desktop.

3 – [WINDOWS LOGO] – [E]

This shortcut will open up Windows Explorer. Windows Explorer is obviously that program that allows you to browse around your computer. I’m sure you use it quite often for searching for your files on your computer…

4 – [WINDOWS LOGO] – [R]

This shows the “Run” dialog box. Useful if you use this as a way of running certain programs. An example is typing “cmd” (without the quotes) into the Run Dialog box to open up a command window…

5 – [WINDOWS LOGO]

Strange? Yes and no. Pressing this key by itself pops up the “Windows Start Menu“, which opens up a world of possibility on your computer

But, more importantly, it allows you to assign even more shortcuts to the Windows Start Menu, which I will show you in the next post.

Changing your command prompt in BASH

If, like me, you want to know what directory you’re working in on Linux, make sure you visit this page: “Prompt Magic”

It shows you all the beautiful things you can do to make sure your BASH command prompt looks pretty, and informative. You do this by setting your “PS1” environment variable, and the key value I would say you need is “w”, which shows your full current working directory.

My host had mine set to “W” which only shows the last directory of you current working directory, but having 3 (or more) WordPress installs, being in the “plugins” directory doesn’t help much if I’m moving things around a lot…

Just thought I’d share this one…

UPDATE: Guess I should show how it’s done… In your .bash_profile file in your home directory (which you can get to by typing the command “cd ~”), add (or edit if it exists) a line that says:

export PS1=”\w>> “

This should make you command prompt look similar to the following if you are in the /usr/bin directory:

/usr/bin>> _