Archive
Tag "Microsoft"

The excel­lent Google Docs ser­vice has already thrown the gaunt­let in the Office doc­u­ment edit­ing space. If your needs are to have a basic Word or Excel doc­u­ment with­out auto­matic pag­ing, or foot­notes, or Table of Con­tents, and such, then Google is already a pretty sound option to do your doc­u­ments and save them as DOC or PDF files.

The best part is the live col­lab­o­ra­tion that Google or the likes of Zoho have made pos­si­ble. Online col­lab­o­ra­tion among team mem­bers was some­thing in which Microsoft has also dab­bled, but in its typ­i­cal man­ner of releas­ing "Enter­prise" fea­tures. No sur­prise that that has never really become the norm out­side some cor­po­rate microcosms.

Today, Google has upped the ante in the war for online doc­u­ment edit­ing by launch­ing the tem­plates. Sim­ple addi­tion to their rapidly grow­ing arse­nal, but a shape of things to come. From wed­ding invites to busi­ness let­ters, it's an eas­ily expand­able ser­vice. The API and "open source" exten­si­bil­ity think­ing of Google will make sure that you or I can con­tribute our own tem­plates to the gallery. Nifty.

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So I finally got around to installing Office 2007. This is what it looked like:

Office 2007 - First Look

Office 2007 — First Look

Now I don't know about you, but to me this bloo-ey look is hideous.I am not on Vista yet, by choice, so that sky blue gra­da­tion thing going on the top was not my cuppa. Why soft­ware designed for a cer­tain plat­form can­not honor a user's gen­eral sys­tem UI pref­er­ences is beyond me, but Office 2007 does insist on hav­ing it's own look and feel. As though the new rib­bon clut­ter was not enough.

I wanted to get rid of those rib­bons to begin with. So I down­loaded the the free ver­sion of Rib­bon Cus­tomizer. They offer some Pro ver­sion but it does things I don't par­tic­u­larly care about. Alter­na­tively, there is Tool­bar­Tog­gle, but on their site I did not seem to catch a free ver­sion, and I was unwill­ing to pay for this stuff.

The Rib­bon­Cus­tomizer install is pretty straight­for­ward and when you start Word 2007 after its instal­la­tion, here is how Word looks. There is an addi­tional item in the View menu at the end:

Word 2007 after RibbonCustomizer

Word 2007 after RibbonCustomizer

I clicked on the obvi­ous menu option to make Clas­sicUI my first menu tab. This is what this does:

Classic 2003 interface

Clas­sic 2003 interface

That's a good start, but I now wanted to clean up some other stuff. For­tu­nately, Microsoft chose to include the addi­tional "Min­i­mize Rib­bon" fea­ture, which con­tex­tu­ally hides the rib­bon when your focus is on writ­ing inside the doc­u­ment. So let's do that:

Minimize the Word 2007 ribbon

Min­i­mize the Word 2007 ribbon

Now to get rid of the forced Blue. Click on the "More Com­mands" option in the menu shown in the screen­shot above. Choose Sil­ver and make other adjust­ments to your taste:

Choose silver

Choose sil­ver

Now this is what Word 2007 looks like, with min­i­mized rib­bon, clas­sic 2003 UI, and a some­what less intru­sive sil­ver gradient:

Phew. I also rec­om­mend set­ting the default "Save" options as your reg­u­lar Word ".doc" instead of the new ".docx" (or other .xlsx and .pptx equiv­a­lents) as that is a bit more stan­dard even today in 2008.

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Very use­ful util­ity for the file opener/saver dia­log boxes in Windows.

Here's a nifty lit­tle util­ity that allows you to set most often-used fold­ers on your PC and access them quickly from a FILE OPEN dia­logue box.

File­Box Exten­der
filebox.gif

These lit­tle icons appear in all the File –> Open boxes in Win­dows. Which is very handy. Among the sev­eral cus­tomiza­tions you can make to this oft-used file dia­log box is the abil­ity to auto­mat­i­cally sort the file names by name, date, size, or type, and the abil­ity to see the file names in Details or Thumb­nails views. (Btw, the skin you see in that screen­shot above is from Fly­aki­teosx).

How to Change FbX But­ton Images

You can tell a util­ity is well coded if you can cus­tomize it to your tastes. I have changed the icons that come with the tool as default (which are some­what Win3.1-ish). This is sim­ple. In the folder where you installed File­Box eXten­der, there's a sub-folder named ICONS. Inside that are sev­eral stan­dard for­mat Win­dows icon files (with the exten­sion .ICO). Copy a pair of these files into the main pro­gram folder, and then rename them to FAVORITE.ICO and RECENT.ICO. Now exit and restart File­Box eXten­der. (In some cases you will have to reboot your machine — exit­ing and restart­ing the pro­gram may not be enough to effect the change). That's it. Your new icons should now appear.

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Have slow load­ing Word doc­u­ments, or pass­word pro­tected Excel spread­sheets for which you have for­got­ten a pass­word? Who'd have thunk of this solu­tion to your MS Office woes..

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A hack to upgrade with­out, ahem, upgrading.

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Two great tools that pro­vide the info in great detail.

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In a first for the big tyke, Microsoft has donated its Win­dows Installer XML (WiX) to SourceForge.net, the open source devel­oper net­work! WiX is a toolset that uses XML code to build Win­dows instal­la­tion packages.

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Here's a cool, handy macro to auto-generate a Table of Con­tents for any Excel file.

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Neat lit­tle tip to see size of your folders.

Want to see the size of your fold­ers and not just files in your Win­dows XP Explorer listings?

If you are inter­ested, Sequoia View is a very use­ful tool to do some nifty things with your fold­ers. Other than that, this fol­low­ing note is now show­ing its age. If sort­ing and such is not nec­es­sary, a sim­ple mouse-over your fold­ers in Explorer will show you a tooltip with an approx­i­mate size of your direc­to­ries. The menu option Tools --> Options --> View --> Show file size in folder tips should let you con­trol the behav­ior of this tooltip.

Well it's prob­a­bly a sim­ple fea­ture that the Win­dows team at Microsoft for­got to include, so Mark Dormer has a solu­tion. Just down­load his tiny DLL file:

Down­load Mark Dormer's Fold­erview DLL

It's an EXE file. All you really have to do is:

  1. Copy the file to your c:\windows\system32 folder.
  2. Exe­cute the fol­low­ing com­mand in Start –> Run dia­logue box and you're ready to roll:
    regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\dirsize.dll
  3. Now open Explorer in details view, you wont see the col­umn yet. Right click on a head­ing in the right pane and select "Folder Size".

Cou­ple of Caveats

  • Cal­cu­lat­ing folder size is a tur­tle on very large fold­ers with lots of sub­fold­ers. There's no index­ing built into this.
  • As much you and I would like, this tool doesn't do sort­ing of fold­ers based on the folder size. You may want to give another util­ity a try, the Folder Shell Exten­sion.

Cou­ple of Tips

  • To apply this set­ting for all the folder, click Tools, Folder Options. In the View tab and click Apply to all folders.
  • To remove the fea­ture, sim­ply un–reg­is­ter the DLL later with the fol­low­ing com­mand (ignore error mes­sages if any) – 
    regsvr32 /u %Systemroot%\System32\Dirsize.dll

Hope this helps.

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Here's a handy macro to make a new work­sheet inside your Excel file, then tra­verse through each and every sheet in the file, col­lect­ing all func­tions and for­mu­las used in the whole file. All these for­mu­las are listed on a sep­a­rate work­sheet in the same file.

Here's a handy macro to make a new work­sheet inside your Excel file, then tra­verse through each and every sheet in the file, col­lect­ing all func­tions and for­mu­las used in the whole file. All these for­mu­las are listed on a sep­a­rate work­sheet in the same file.

The code is below, feel free to use it but please attribute when­ever you use it, thanks –

Option Explicit
Public Sub ListFormulasInWorkbook()
Const SHEETNAME As String = "Formulas in *"
Have fun!
Const ALLFORMULAS As Integer = _
xlNumbers + xlTextValues + xlLogical + xlErrors
Const maxRows As Long = 65500
Dim formulaSht As Worksheet
Dim destRng As Range
Dim cell As Range
Dim wkSht As Worksheet
Dim formulaRng As Range
Dim shCnt As Long
Dim oldScreenUpdating As Boolean
With Application
oldScreenUpdating = .ScreenUpdating
.ScreenUpdating = False
End With
shCnt = 0
ListFormulasAddSheet formulaSht, shCnt
' Enumerate formulas on each sheet
Set destRng = formulaSht.Range("A4")
For Each wkSht In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets
If Not wkSht.Name Like SHEETNAME Then
Application.StatusBar = wkSht.Name
destRng.Value = wkSht.Name
Set destRng = destRng.Offset(1, 0)
On Error Resume Next
Set formulaRng = wkSht.Cells.SpecialCells( _
xlCellTypeFormulas, ALLFORMULAS)
On Error GoTo 0
If formulaRng Is Nothing Then
destRng.Offset(0, 1).Value = "None"
Set destRng = destRng.Offset(1, 0)
Else
For Each cell In formulaRng
With destRng
.Offset(0, 1) = cell.Address(0, 0)
.Offset(0, 2) = "'" & cell.Formula
.Offset(0, 3) = cell.Value
End With
Set destRng = destRng.Offset(1, 0)
If destRng.row > maxRows Then
ListFormulasAddSheet formulaSht, shCnt
Set destRng = formulaSht.Range("A5")
destRng.Offset(-1, 0).Value = wkSht.Name
End If
Next cell
Set formulaRng = Nothing
End If
With destRng.Resize(1, 4).Borders(xlEdgeBottom)
.LineStyle = xlContinuous
.Weight = xlThin
.ColorIndex = 5
End With
Set destRng = destRng.Offset(1, 0)
If destRng.row > maxRows Then
ListFormulasAddSheet formulaSht, shCnt
Set destRng = formulaSht.Range("A5")
destRng.Offset(-1, 0).Value = wkSht.Name
End If
End If
Next wkSht
With Application
.StatusBar = False
.ScreenUpdating = oldScreenUpdating
End With
End Sub
Private Sub ListFormulasAddSheet( _
formulaSht As Worksheet, shtCnt As Long)
Const SHEETNAME As String = "Formulas in "
Const SHEETTITLE As String = "Formulas in $ as of "
Const DATEFORMAT As String = "dd MMM yyyy hh:mm"
Dim shtName As String
With ActiveWorkbook
' Delete existing sheet, create new
shtCnt = shtCnt + 1
shtName = Left(SHEETNAME & .Name, 28)
If shtCnt > 1 Then _
shtName = shtName & "_" & shtCnt
On Error Resume Next
Application.DisplayAlerts = False
.Worksheets(shtName).Delete
Application.DisplayAlerts = True
On Error GoTo 0
Set formulaSht = .Worksheets.Add( _
after:=Sheets(Sheets.Count))
End With
With formulaSht
' Format headers
.Name = shtName
.Columns(1).ColumnWidth = 15
.Columns(2).ColumnWidth = 8
.Columns(3).ColumnWidth = 60
.Columns(4).ColumnWidth = 40
With .Range("C:D")
.Font.Size = 9
.HorizontalAlignment = xlLeft
.EntireColumn.WrapText = True
End With
With .Range("A1")
.Value = Application.Substitute(SHEETTITLE, "$", _
ActiveWorkbook.Name) & Format(Now, DATEFORMAT)
With .Font
.Bold = True
.ColorIndex = 5
.Size = 14
End With
End With
With .Range("A3").Resize(1, 4)
.Value = Array("Sheet", "Address", "Formula", "Value")
With .Font
.ColorIndex = 13
.Bold = True
.Size = 12
End With
.HorizontalAlignment = xlCenter
With .Borders(xlEdgeBottom)
.LineStyle = xlDouble
.Weight = xlThick
.ColorIndex = 5
End With
End With
End With
End Sub

Have fun!

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