Category: Work

Categories
Microsoft Office Work

Update All Fields In MS Word

Sometimes you find a feature in a product that is just blatantly missing. One of those in Microsoft Word is the ability to update all the fields in the document with the latest value in a field.

I use both the built in fields e.g. Author, Version, Title and custom fields e.g. Project Code. I set the values once in the document properties and then insert the field codes in the document rather than the text. All is well. If you change the value of a field you can press F9 and all of the fields update to the latest value EXCEPT if you have used the fields in the document header or footer, these do not get updated for some reason. I would classify this as a bug, why would I not want all instances of the same field to be in sync throughout my document.

The solution is remarkably simple. Create the following macro:

Sub UpdateAll()
Dim oStory As Range
Dim oField As Field
For Each oStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
For Each oField In oStory.Fields
oField.Update
Next oField
Next oStory
End Sub

This can be saved in your normal.dot file and will be available in all your word documents.

Categories
Fitness Running Xcelsius 2008

Running – Dashboard – Marcothon

I’m building up for my running challenges of 2011 and breaking in my new treadmill so I am slowly building up my miles.
On incentive is the Marcothon group on FaceBook, the basic premis is to run for either 3 miles or 25 minutes in every day in December.

I have also been mucking around with Xcelsius for a parkrun project, more on that later.
To keep an eye on my progress I have built a dashboard to track my running over the current year and so I can visually compare my training year on year.

Categories
Microsoft Office Technology

Favourite Shortcut Keys – Outlook

Apple Keyboard (with Avid shortcuts; Letterboxed)
Creative Commons License photo credit: laffy4k

If you look at the left hand menu you will see the items:

  • Mail
  • Calendar
  • Contacts
  • Tasks
  • etc

These can be quickly accessed by using the following shortcut keys:

  • (Ctrl+1) – Mail
  • (Ctrl+2) – Calendar
  • (Ctrl+3) – Contacts
  • (Ctrl+4) – Tasks

In addition, when you use Ctrl+1 to access mail, this takes you to the folder that you were last using, if you would rather jump straight into your In-Box – use (Ctrl+Shift+I).

Categories
Microsoft Office

Google Calendar Sync – Auto Run

A nice quick hint.

I kept forgetting to start Google Calendar Sync when I started Outlook. I don’t always start Outlook when I start my laptop and I’m not always online when I run Outlook so puting it in my Startup folder is not really an option.
My solution, a macro that runs when Outlook starts that gives me the option of running Google Calendar Sync if I feel it’s appropriate.

Private Sub Application_Startup()
Dim response As Integer
Dim RetVal
op
response = MsgBox(prompt:=”Do you want to run Google Calendar Sync?”, buttons:=vbYesNo)

If response = vbYes Then
RetVal = Shell(“C:\Program Files\Google\Google Calendar Sync\GoogleCalendarSync.exe”, vbMinimizedNoFocus)
End If

End Sub

NOTE: WordPress seems to “prettyfy” the quotes so when copying the code above it is better to delete and retype the quotation marks in your code editor of choice.

Categories
Microsoft Office

How Annoying is the Microsoft At Home RSS Feed?

Microsoft At Home
I’m using Microsoft Outlook 2007 and I think it’s a great piece of software.
It has a built in RSS feed reader. Typically I use Google Reader but as that can’t handle authenticated feeds I’m using Outlook for all of my work related Sharepoint feeds.
In order to introduce people to RSS, Microsoft have included two “standard” RSS feeds: “Microsoft At Home” and “Microsoft At Work”.
The only problem is, I’m not really interested in reading these feeds.

Continue reading “How Annoying is the Microsoft At Home RSS Feed?”
Categories
Oracle Work

Oracle Datatype Conversions

Last week I gave a colleague a demonstration on why, if you have numbers stored in a character string you should convert them explicitly to numbers:

select ‘Yes’
from dual
where ‘1000’ between ‘000’ and ‘999’;

‘YES’
—–
Yes

Categories
Oracle Windows Work

Tell Me When The DB Is Back

database 2
Creative Commons License photo credit: Tim Morgan
Today at work the development DB went down.
My days of fixing databases are long gone, but the guys that are are not so good at letting everyone know that the database is back up.
I created this windows batch script to let me know.

Continue reading “Tell Me When The DB Is Back”
Categories
Business Objects Dimensional Modelling Work XI 3.0

Blogging Whilst Employed – Beware!

october05.0103
Creative Commons License photo credit: eshm
I was having a flick through my employment contract and I found the following clause:

13.2
You agree that during the course of this contract and after the termination of the contract for whatever reason without limit in point in time you will keep in confidence and shall not disclose to any person unless authorised to do so with the prior written consent of the Company the following:-
13.2.1 Any consultancy know-how, methods, tools, techniques or intellectual capital.

I realised that some of my blog entries or tweets could fall foul of this clause so I asked for written permission to continue blogging generic “work related” content such as Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Modelling and Business Objects.
Rather than granting this and leveraging the fairly good google rankings that my posts seem to get I was asked to remove all work related posts.
Business Objects Best Practice (higher ranking than BusinessObjects.com)
Business Objects New Features (Page One)
Dimensional Modelling (Ralph Kimball ?)
As such I have password protected all of my work related posts.
If you are struggling to find content there are a variety of searches that could turn up interesting content.
Alternatively you can go to my company site, contact details can be found here or here.

Categories
Work

A Song For Business Intelligence ?

What song do you think best sums up Business Intelligence?
.... Middle...
Creative Commons License photo credit: mistress_f

Continue reading “A Song For Business Intelligence ?”
Categories
Business Objects Maxima Information Group Work

Business Objects – Best Practice – Report Design

Business Objects – Best Practice – Report Design

The purpose of this document is to provide a description of what I consider to be best practice when designing a business intelligence report. I will also try to describe the reasoning behind the suggestion.
Close up shot of pen
Creative Commons License photo credit: ArtemFinland

Continue reading “Business Objects – Best Practice – Report Design”