mthomas.co.uk - IT Tips, Tricks & Tutorials

Absolute cell references allow you to “fix” part or all of a cell reference in a formula. This can be a great time-saver when copying formulas, however, there is more to it than meets the eye… Read More

Suggested to a client that they buy a Mac. Well, he’d already decided that his next laptop will be a Mac, so I can’t really count that as a sale - but at least it confirmed it in his mind.

A question arose today about entering random text into a Word document. You probably know that if you type =Rand() into a Word document you get 3 paragraphs each containing 5 sentences where each sentence is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”

And if you type =Rand(X,Y) where X and Y are numbers, you get X paragraphs of Y sentences each where sentence is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. For example =Rand(8,10) will generate 8 paragraphs where each paragraph contains 10 sentences.

Well in Word 2007 you now have =Lorem() Read More

This was the top story in my RSS feed this morning. As someone who works for IBM and has spent the past 12 months trying to convert my colleagues to the Mac, I just had to smile at this one!

IBM’s Research Information Services division is investigating the possibility of moving a significant number of employees to Apple’s Macintosh platform according to a report acquired by RoughlyDrafted.

“In line with IBM’s external strategy of offering a true ‘Open Client’ that may be Windows, Linux or a Mac,” the document noted, “[Research Information Services] is focusing on providing an IBM application stack on multiple Operating Systems, rather than be confined to one or the other.”

The first phase of the pilot program was conducted between October 2007 and January 2008. During this phase, 24 MacBook Pros were distributed to researchers and used as the primary notebook, with the employees’ existing ThinkPads acting as backups if needed.

Of the 22 of 24 who responded, 18 said that the Mac offered a “better or best experience” compared to their existing computer, one rated it “equal or good,” and three said the Mac offered a “worse experience.” Seven reported having no or marginal prior knowledge of using Macs, while 15 reported having moderate or expert knowledge of the platform.

Using a combination of the ROW and MOD functions and Conditional Formatting, you can easily shade alternative rows in Excel, making a list of data easier to read. Read More

Later this year, the company that I work for will be upgrading to Vista/Office 2007. Earlier this year I produced a short video to show to my colleagues (we will be delivering the training), outlining the major differences between Outlook 2000 (the version currently used) and 2007.

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Tonight I attended an online presentation which was run by the North West Adobe User Group.

The excellent presentation covered 2 subjects - Adobe Acrobat Connect (an online collaboration and web conferencing tool) and Photoshop Express - a free online image editor (you also get 2GB of space to store your photos online when you sign up for a free Photoshop Express account). Photoshop Express is not meant as a replacement for the full Photoshop product, however, it has some cool features including a touchup tool, recolouring, red-eye removal and colour and sharpness enhancements.

The presentation itself was delivered via Connect and having used similar tools (Centra and Webex), I can say that Connect provides the best user experience by far.

The MOD function in Excel returns the remainder after a number is divided by a divisor.

As an example, start a new spreadsheet and enter 172 into A1. This represents the number of minutes that a piece of machinery has been running (this figure is manually entered after the user has noted the value by reading the machine’s “Activity Log” which outputs a value in minutes).

Enter a formula in A2 to calculate the number of whole hours:

=INT(A1/60)

As we only want to display whole hours, the INT function is used to return the Integer part of the result (172 / 60 = 2.866667).

The formula in A3 which calculates the number of remaining minutes is:

=MOD(A1,60)

In other words, 172 divided by 60 is 2 remainder 52

When using Outlook with MS Exchange, you can open another user’s mailbox (providing that they have assigned permissions correctly). This is useful if you want to check whether a colleague is available..or you just want to snoop at an ex-colleague’s whereabouts!

However, Outlook remembers the names of the previous few users whose mailboxes you have opened (Click File > Open do display the list) - handy if you want to check the same user’s calendar again but could also land you in trouble if you’ve been snooping! Read More

Unfortunately at work I am limited as to the software I can use. I occasionally have the need to work with photos and if I’m lucky I may find that the PC I’m using has Paint Shop Pro installed but more often that not I’m reduced to using Microsoft Photo Editor.

There’s a known issue where, when you open the program or double click a graphic file, Photo Editor will start minimised. When you click on the “entry” in the Windows taskbar, it does not restore to a window. When you open Task Manager, it is running.

To resolve this:

Run Regedit (Start > Run > Regedit).
Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Photo Editor/3.0/Microsoft Photo Editor.
Delete the key called “Initial Position”.

You may need to re-boot for the change to take effect