Thanks, thats “exactly” what we asked for, but “this” is what we want !
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Category: Work
I use Microsoft Office 2008 on my work laptop. Whilst I am no touch typist; I wish I could take the productivity hit whilst I learn, I do prefer to use the keyboard for most functions, growling when I have to resort to using the mouse.
I was torn by the ribbon interface; for 80% of the things that i want to do i can find it very quickly, the remaining 20% often required a trip to help to find it. Another thing that I hated was that I “had” to use the mouse to access the ribbon features.
Then I pressed the “Alt” key !!!!!!!
This pops up an overlay on top of the ribbon interface that shows you which key to press to access http://pharmacy-no-rx.net each feature. Or should I say, EVERY feature. If you can see it on the ribbon, you can access it via a keystroke. I’m beginning to like this user interface.
The remaining bugbear is that I always use styles, nost commonly the heading styles and normal. In the previous version of Word I always assigned my own keystroke shortcuts to access them, but I was always over riding exisiing keystrokes and features.
In Word 2007 I have found that there are system assigned keystrokes:
Ctrl + Alt + 1 = Heading 1
Ctrl + Alt + 2 = Heading 2
etc
Strl + Shift + N = Normal
Productive typing here I come !
Had a “strange” problem last week that really stumped me for longer than it should have.
My colleague had run a query to list some data and was getting approximately 200,000 rows back. We were investigating why a unique constraint was being violated so I took his query and did a count distinct to try and find the duplicates. I got 30,000 distinct values.
This really confused me, I was expecting only a handfull of duplicates, if any. Then I noticed that the first query already WAS a distinct list !
select distinct col1_id, col2_id from tablea
select count(distinct col1_id + ‘-‘ + col2_id) from tablea
I concatenated the fields together so I am counting a single field, I included the separator so that I could differentiate 1-11 from 11-1.
See if you can spot what the problem is before you read on.
I know that I covered this in my video post, but I hated the quality of the video, so here is a similar post with pictures (click on hem to see larger versions).
You no longer need to splash out on fancy dashboarding software (although Xcelsius is good !) to quickly highlight when your data is changing. A new feature in Business Objects Web Intelligence (WebI) 3.0 allows you to add this feature to any document.
I have had office 2007 on my laptop for ages now. Like everyone I am still using the “old” file formats until the rest of the world catches up. On the whole I have been impressed by the ribbon interface.
I have just found my first major annoyance. Freeze Panes. You now have three options: Freeze Panes, Freeze Top Row and Freeze First Column. Freeze Panes works exactly the same as it did in previous versions, no problem there. I can just continue to use that option.
The problem is with Freeze Top Row; this option freezes the top row that is shown on the screen not the top row of the sheet. I know that’s what it does, it’s just that, it’s not what I expect it to do, and I can’t stop myself from clicking it !
I’m going to start a small series of posts showing you what’s new in Business Objects XI 3.0
I’m starting off small; with Conditional Prompts.
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Made Me Smile !
One of the great joys of working as a consultant for Eclectic / Maxima is helping them to grow using the technology and skills that we provide. Sometimes it is the simpler things like basic processes.
One particular customer when we first engaged with them had a poor history of doing change control and impact analysis. I’m pleased to say that they are much better now that they used to be, however I did have a big grin when I read the following e-mail:
I think we’ve come full circle as the only change we’re making here is to reverse the latest change we made.
The smile was not so much on the content of the e-mail; but the fact that the impact of the change had been analysed and the specification of the change had been attached to the e-mail.
My first attempt at a video hosted on YouTube:
This shows you how you can highlight the data that has changed in a report http://www.montauk-monster.com/pharmacy between refreshes, in much the same way as you can on a dashboard.
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Emley Moor Tower
I recently was fortunate enough to be doing some work for Arqiva on a day that they were doing maintenance up the tower and I got the chance to tag along.
The Emley Moor tower at 330 meters is the UK’s tallest free standing structure. On the inside is a ladder running all the way to the top with 865 rungs, I counted them all on the way up (kidding !) The lift takes just over seven minutes to get to the top.
The viewing deck is 275.3 meters up, the foundations are 6.1 meters deep. 7,000 cubic meters of concrete were used and the structure weighs 11,200 tonnes.
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Financial Statement
As you may have read in a previous post here the company I work for was sold by Glen Group to Maxima at the beginning of the year.
As I had shares in Eclectic, these were transferred into Glen Group shares. Unfortunately, as the purchase was a cash deal, I did not get Maxima shares but am left with Glen shares. As such I still get copies of the annual financial statement. Imagine my surprise to read on the front page.
Eclectic was the biggest company in the group and sat at the heart of the business in terms of turnover and profit. However, Eclectic performed below expectations, particularly in the second half, and when the opportuity arose we elected to dispose of Eclectic and inGroup and completed the sale in early January 2008.
Nothing “too” bad there.