Category: Technology

Categories
Productivity Quantified Self Technology

Nothing To See Here – Just Rescuing Time

I have gotten into a nice grove of writing a blog post a day – mostly describing some script, macro or hack that I have implemented. Today I have (rather belatedly) discovered RescueTime which will log and report on your online activities.

This has ironically distracted me from thinking about my blog whilst I install it on my phone and my chromebook. In return, I’ll investigate the API over the weekend and write up anything interesting that I find.

Let me know in the comments if you have any cool hint’s, tips or sample code that you would like to share with me.

Categories
Facebook Google+ Productivity Technology Twitter

Review a random Google Contact every day

I have all of my contacts loaded into Google Contacts but the problem is, I’m never convinced that they are up to date or even sure if I should still have the person’s contact details listed.

To address this I created the following script which will send me an email every day with a randomly selected contact.

I can then review the contact’s details, compare it with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and then either update their contact details or send them an e-mail to catch up with them.

Continue reading “Review a random Google Contact every day”
Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Outlook Macro – Lookup

How often are you in Outlook and you receive an e-mail from someone and you want to know a little bit more about them. It may be as simple as looking up their phone number so that you can get back to them.

This lookup may be on your own intranet site or using LinkedIn, Facebook or Twiter.

The following Outlook macro will allow you to do this.

Continue reading “Outlook Macro – Lookup”
Categories
Productivity Technology

Keep Recent Folders Delete Older In DOS

There are often scenarios such as rolling backups or rolling logfiles where I create folders which have the date in the folder name.

HINT: Using the format YYYYMMDD means that an alphabetic search is also chronological!

In most cases I only want to keep a certain number of these folders and delete the older ones. The following script will implement this deletion process.

Continue reading “Keep Recent Folders Delete Older In DOS”
Categories
Productivity Technology

Format Date in DOS Command Line

For any dos batch files that I run on a regular basis I commonly want to create a folder or a text file with the current date in the file name. I’m a purist and I like my dates formatted as YYYYMMDD so that an alphabetic sort is also chronological.

The following script will place the current date into a variable in the required format.

Continue reading “Format Date in DOS Command Line”
Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Track Changes In Excel

One of the main reasons that I use Microsoft Excel is to keep lists to share with multiple people. Microsoft Word has great versioning and colabarative editing capabilities, Excel not so much. The main problem I have is knowing when a particular row has been changed and who changed it.

The following macro implements this.

Continue reading “Track Changes In Excel”
Categories
Microsoft Office Technology

Filter Cells In Excel With Strike Through Formatting

I have just finished reviewing an excel spreadsheet where a number of the rows were formatted with strikethough : like this.

The formatting was valid and the rows have to stay there – but I have no need to review those rows. In excel you can filter rows, by contents or even by colour but not by format.

Enter a VBA user function:

Continue reading “Filter Cells In Excel With Strike Through Formatting”
Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Uselfull Excel Macro – Make Contents Page

I commonly have large excel spreadsheets with many tabs or worksheets within the same workbook.

I use the following Microsoft excel macro to generate a contents page.

NOTE: I’m assuming the “Contents” worksheet will be the first and the list will be generated from A2 downwards.

Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
    For i = 2 To Sheets.Count
        Range("a" & i) = Sheets(i).Name
        ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=Range("a" & i), Address:="", SubAddress:="'" & Sheets(i).Name & "'!A1", TextToDisplay:=Sheets(i).Name
    Next i
    Columns("A:A").EntireColumn.AutoFit
End Sub
Categories
Me Quantified Self Technology

Hacking Sleep – What Works For Me

The Problem

For a long while I have struggled with the amount a quality of sleep I get so I decided to address this. For years I was using a FitBit Ultra and this allowed me to track the quality and duration of my sleeping. I have made a number of changes to slowly address this problem.

I knew I had a problem when my really loud buzzy alarm clock and the TWO alarms set on my mobile phone failed to get me to wake in the morning.

Continue reading “Hacking Sleep – What Works For Me”
Categories
AutoHotkey Productivity Technology

Tools I Use – Auto Hot Key

I have decided to start a small series of posts where I share some of my tools, tips and tricks as to how I make my work and personal life a bit “better”.

The first of these tools is AutoHotkey.

“Fast scriptable desktop automation with hotkeys. Creating your own apps and macros has never been easier”

Continue reading “Tools I Use – Auto Hot Key”