Gadgetopia

Updating Excel From the Web: Really great article on Excel Web Queries. Users always want to get data in Excel for some reason. Web queries are a rock-simple way to let them do this. Web queries essentially let Excel read data in from an HTML table. Excel can call a ...

Worksheet-Server: Run and Consolidate your Spreadsheets over the Web (Excel, OpenOffice, Lotus, Star Office): Now this is something to behold. Build a spreadsheet with all the business formulas and logic you need, then upload it to this server it will be converted to a Web app. Check out the demo ...

I was doing something for my church last night when I came face-to-face with ADO's great support for extracting data from Excel files. So I got to thinking...how about Excel as a content storage system? Let's face facts, offices love Excel. Go to any office, and I promise you they're ...

Jon Udell: Exploring Office 2003: Here are some screencaps of the XML capabilities of Word and Excel in Office 2003. The mind reels at the possibilities. Here's something a little more in-depth on the topic from MSDN: Importing XML Maps, XML Lists, and Dynamic Chart Sources in Excel 2003: "Excel ...

Recreating the NY Times Cancer Graph: I hope I m not the only person who finds this interesting. The New York Times cancer graph is a beautiful piece of work. I wanted to see if we could reproduce it with everyday tools. The screencast is really interesting. I get the same ...

Deane wrote about Google Calendar a few months ago, but I didn't pay much heed to it until I downloaded a new version of Google Notifier yesterday. It's kind of an amazing service. I might actually use it. But what floored me was seeing a little link in the Google ...

Microsoft, eBay hook up software and auction data: Not a bad idea, I suppose. Developers can tap into eBay's data and offer them directly to Microsoft's programs, such as Excel and FrontPage, without having to go through a Web browser. Under the joint effort between Microsoft and Ebay, both companies ...

ActiveWords: If you don't like all the mousing around Windows, ActiveWords aims to eliminate it. ActiveWords adds words to Windows, providing a personal, portable, context free user interface with immediate response. Your words launch programs, jump to websites, send email, substitute text, and more. Receive information about any word or ...

The Daily WTF for today describes my own personal version of Hell, and it turns out that not only does it exist right here on Earth, but they're hiring: Information and tools to analyze data and administer policies reside in 3 Microsoft Access databases. One of the databases has a ...

Sounds like the long expected release of Office 12 for the Mac is well on it's way through the halls of Redmond's Mac Business Unit. The thing most potential customers are looking forward to is a version that will run natively on Intel Macs, but it will also have many ...

Here's a really handy thing: if you get an Excel attachment in Gmail now, you get the option to "Open in Google Spreadsheets," which means you don't have to download it. Very handy for a lot of reasons, and seems to work beautifully.

Amazon.com Research Services for Microsoft Office System: No more research for creating bibliographies or footnotes. The Amazon Research Pane download for Microsoft Office 2003 allows you to search for Amazon products from within Microsoft Word or Excel documents, and to insert product information and footnotes into documents and spreadsheets. The ...

E-mail worm bent only on destruction: How nice. It's like the aliens from Independence Day. The Kama Sutra worm -- also referred to as Nyxem.E and Grew.A -- is unnerving because, unlike other e-mail worms, it appears to be detached from any profit motive. It is designed to destroy all ...

Bold Redesign Improves Office 2007: These interface changes should go over nicely. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone -- every one. None of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen ...

Google Presentations Released: Google has just added its Power Point replacement, alongside its Word and Excel replacements. The first impression is that Google Presentations does all it’s supposed to do (and without resorting to Java or Flash, at least judging by the parts I checked – it’s DHTML/ Ajax technology). ...

German city picks Linux over Microsoft: We've known about this deal for a while, but what's interesting is the lengths Microsoft went to win and was still rebuffed. Microsoft offered last-minute concessions that would have made Windows and Office cheaper than switching. USA TODAY obtained city records that revealed Microsoft: ...

Tech magazine speaks to the MacGyver in us all: USAToday has a nice, little article about O'Reilly's new Make magazine. [...] the magazine offers dozens of simple and practical tricks and hacks. For example, the Imaging section tells you how to recover photos that have been erased from a digital ...

BW Online | Apple's Real Worry Isn't the Loss of IE: Good article on the future of the Mac and how it's tied in with Microsoft. "...far more daunting is the prospect of Microsoft abandoning the Mac version of its popular Office software. That's because Apple hasn't yet shown it ...

I read Joel Spolsky's book over the weekend: "User Interface Design for Programmers." This is an excellent guide to usability for client apps and for Web development. The strength of the book is that it doesn't start by presenting many hard-and-fast rules, but instead concetrates on general concepts that ...

One thing that continues to amaze me is how poorly people use Microsoft Word, considering its dominance in business word processing. The "barrier to entry" for a Word user is extremely low -- just open it and start typing -- so very few people bother to learn how to really ...

Web Design from Scratch: A good-looking site full of good-looking content about building Web sites. If you're a professional developer, I don't know how much you'll get out of it, but if not, it seems to be worth a look. This site is for everyone involved or interested in creating ...

Q&A: Microsoft Accelerator Boosts Six Sigma Practices: Microsoft is pushing a set of add-ons for Office and Project that make the software play nice within a Six Sigma methodology framework. For instance: A lot of Six Sigma teams spend an inordinate amount of time creating Microsoft PowerPoint reports, such as ...

Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0: This is a handy little tool. Once you have completed editing an HTML document in Word 2000 or Excel 2000, you can use the Office HTML Filter to remove the Office-specific markup tags from the final copy of the HTML document. I took a 45-page ...

My First BillG Review: Here's a funny recollection from Spolsky about the day Bill Gates reviewed his spec for a Microsoft Excel programming language. During these reviews, someone was present to count the number of times Bill swore. "Four," announced the f* counter [when Bill left], and everyone said, "wow, ...

That post I made about attribion got me thinking about the format and content of blog postings. The way I see it, there are basically three types of postings. Original Content, No Target This is where you actually write something yourself, and there's no "target" of the post no ...

PHPRunner - PHP code generator for your MySQL database: A few weeks ago, I talked about ASPRunner, which is a code-generation engine to build ASP pages to manage ODBC databases. At the end of that post, I whined that I wanted something similar for PHP/MySQL. Well... PHPRunner creates set of ...

I'm on one of my "shiny object" tangents lately. The latest thing is non-Microsoft software. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel the need to be all counter-culture-ish and find alternatives to the standbys. I've been browsing with Mozilla all week, and I don't think I'll go back to ...

A friend of mine sent me this joke today. Pretty funny. A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL ...

Here's something I've learned over the years: when modeling data to build a database, be very careful what fields you decide to include. Don't throw in extraneous fields just because "someone might want to store that piece of information someday, and it's no big deal to include it..." It is ...

I wonder how long it will before Web-based Office apps trump client-based apps in intranet environments. Slowly but surely, Google Docs has become my default choice when I have to write a document or a spreadsheet. How long before this infiltrates the enterprise? I got to thinking about this when ...

Here s a side-by-side test I ll bet you thought you d never see; a Mac Plus running System 6.0.8 up against a mighty AMD Athlon Dual-Core running Windows XP. (link) We focussed on running tests that reflect how the user perceives the computing experience. After all, most users don t know or care ...

Here's an obvious point: all content is not created equal. When you implement content management, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that content comes in vastly different levels of structure. Structured content is easy -- anything that you can input into an Excel spreadsheet is nicely structured. A list of products, ...

I ve talked a lot over the years about content modeling. Open and Closed Content Management is probably the most self-referenced post on this site. Recently I called content modeling one of the Four Disciplines of Content Management. But, lingering behind all the questions about how to model something is a ...