Whereas delegates have to book if they want to attend a classroom-based course or a virtual training session, the eLearning courses (which have been created using Articulate) are hosted on our team’s website and can be accessed at any time by simply clicking on the name of the course on the website’s Course Catalogue page.

Unfortunately we don’t have access to a Learning Management System so in order to track usage of the eLearning, I added an additional table (tblTracking) into the Customer Relationship Management system that I built. The CRM system stores it’s data in a SQL Server database and integrates with the website to allow delegates to see what courses are available, when they are running and ultimately book a place.

When a user clicks on the name of a course on the website’s Course Catalogue page the following happens…if the selected course is an eLearning course (indicated by a value of True in the ysnELearning field in the tblCatalogue table) a record is added to the tblTracking table. It records the user’s Name (this is actually their Windows logonID and is automatically captured), the name of the course and the date.

As all my colleagues are familiar with Access, I’ve created an Access database that is linked to the SQL Server database. The Access database lives on a file share that we all have access to and provides an easy way to query the database.

In the screenshot below (which uses fictitious data), you can see that User1 has accessed the Excel Functions course and the File Management course. In fact this user accessed the Excel Functions course twice – once on 15th June and once on 18th June. This in itself is useful information as not only can we track usage of the eLearning, but we can also see whether people are accessing individual modules more than once. Users could do this for a variety of reasons – maybe they just want to run through it again or maybe they were interrupted part-way through and decided to start again from the beginning.

Another request from my Manager was to produce a list of users who had accessed each module but exclude users who had accessed the same module more that once.

To do this I created a new query:

I added the Name, Course and Date fields and then clicked the Totals button to display the Total row in the Query Grid. The Total row entry for strName and strCourse was left as Group By but the dtmDate was changed to First. This instructs Access to display the first date it finds for a combined Name/Course and so gives the desired result:

Several months ago, whilst helping somebody setup and run a meeting using Webex, I discovered a problem – if the presenter is using Vista (and most of our company is now) and they display the chat panel and/or the participants panel, the other participants will see on their screen, a grey box with a yellow “cross hatched” pattern.

The size and location of this cross-hatched pattern is determined by the size and location of the panels on the presenter’s screen.

This issue only arises when the presenter is sharing their screen and of course, unless a participant shouts “Something’s covering part of the screen and I can’t see the presentation”, they’ll be non the wiser.

I’m lucky in that I have an external monitor. OK, it’s not a super-duper 22-inch one, it’s an old 17-inch one that I’ve had for a few years. But nevertheless, when I’m in the office, I have it permanently connected to my Vista laptop.

When I’m running a training course or delivering a presentation via Webex, I share my laptop screen and drag the participants panel and chat panel over to the external monitor so that I can have these permanently displayed. This allows me to monitor the chat and see who is attending/dropping out of the meeting without spoiling the attendees view of the presentation.

On another note, I wondered if it is possible to set Webex to screen share an external monitor? If I select Share Desktop, it will only share the primary laptop monitor. If I select Share an Application, and the application is on the external monitor, other participants can’t see it.

After some research, I found that the version of Webex that we use (Webex Meeting Centre), doesn’t support screen sharing multiple monitors.

When he did this yesterday, Paint Shop Pro displayed the following error message: “unable to get the data from the clipboard”. I was able to replicate the problem and so began some Googling (in the old days we’d call this web research). Reading up on various forums and knowledgebase sites, it appeared that many other people had reported this problem too, stretching back to 2006, so it doesn’t appear to be a recent problem. However, nobody had come up with a workable solution.

So…I suggested to my customer that he paste the screenshot into Microsoft Paint and save as a TIFF from there. This works like a charm.

It’s not often that I’d recommend Paint, but in this instance it did the job.

To get from here…

To here…

Right click on the text box and select Format Shape

In the 3-D Rotation section, set the X value to 190:

For each feature I’ve created a short video which can be accessed via the links below (Youtube links):

• Windows 7: Libraries
• Windows 7: The Problem Steps Recorder
• Windows 7: Jump Lists
• Windows 7: Aero
• Windows 7: Shake and Peek
• Windows 7: Gadgets
• Windows 7: Snap to Sides

Before starting the installation, there was some groundwork to be done. I have several virtual machines set up, each one with a different name:

“Base” contains just the Operating System
“Office 2003″ contains an installation of Office 2003
“Office 2007″ contains an installation of Office 2007

All these machines (or Images as I call them) have Windows XP installed as the Operating System. Rather than starting from scratch with a new VM, I made a copy of “Base” – my logic being that to add some realism to my presentation, most people will be upgrading – either from XP or Vista (gone are the days of the DOS prompt – unless you’re an uber-geek of course!)

For anyone who has never used Fusion, each virtual machine is represented in the OSX Finder as a single file so making a copy of a VM is as simple as copying the file. Once I had a copy of the “Base” VM, I renamed it to “Windows 7″ and opened it (in Fusion)

The Windows 7 Ultimate DVD was already in the DVD drive of my MacBook Pro and Fusion was configured to “take control” of the DVD drive. Once Windows had loaded, I opened My Computer and double clicked the DVD to begin the installation process. I worked my way through the first few screens until I was stopped dead in my tracks…

At the point that I had to select which drive and partition to install Windows 7 on, the following message appeared:

“Windows cannot be installed to this disk. Windows needs the driver for device VMware SCSI Controller. Click ‘Load Drivers’ and load the required device driver.”

I didn’t think that I had any SCSI devices on my MacBook Pro and even if there was, I had no drivers anyway. Frantic Googling of the message resulted in a link to a file on vwmare.com – http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp.

Tip: When I tried to download it using Safari, it opened what appeared to be a text file directly in the browser. Using Firefox resulted in a successful download.

The file vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp is a “virtual floppy drive” file and contains the required driver.

Back to the task in hand…abort the installation and shut down Windows. The virtual machine should be powered off i.e. – not put into Suspended Mode. (Depending on your settings in the Fusion preferences, a virtual machine is either powered off or put into Suspended Mode when it is closed).

Click the Settings button on the Fusion toolbar (ensure that Fusion is not running full screen so that the toolbar is visible)

Click the Other Devices icon

Click the + sign at the bottom left and select Add Floppy…

Select the file vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp and click Open

IMPORTANT: Ensure that the Connected checkbox is NOT checked. If it is checked, when the virtual machine boots up, it acts the same way as Windows acts when there is a real floppy disk in a real floppy drive – in other words, it tries to boot from the floppy disk. In this case the “disk” is not bootable, which results in the following screen:

I think I pressed “any key” a few times after which I then restarted the virtual machine (actually this was the second time that I restarted the virtual machine – the first time resulted in the NTLDR is missing message – which is how I realised that the Connected checkbox should not be checked at this point.

Once the VM has been restarted and Windows XP has loaded, the floppy disk needed to be connected. As before, click the Settings button on the Fusion toolbar, click the Other Devices icon, highlight Floppy in the list of devices and tick the Connected checkbox.

Even though there is a message indicating that the settings cannot be changed until the virtual machine is switched off, the floppy drive is connected without the need to power off so the Settings dialog box can be closed.

At this point the VM was ready for Windows 7 to be installed. The Windows 7 Ultimate DVD was still in the DVD drive of my MacBook Pro so I opened My Computer and double clicked the DVD to begin the installation process. Again I worked my way through the first few screens. When I got to the point where I had to select the location of SCSI Controller driver, I clicked Browse and selected the A:\ drive. Windows duly found the Controller and the installation continued.

40 minutes later I had successfully installed Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro.

The next problem came when I tried to activate Windows as I found that I had no Internet connection. Fusion was configured correctly (to use NAT):

However, the Windows 7 Device Manager indicated a problem with the Ethernet Controller:

I found the solution here. In a nutshell…

With the VM shut down, open Finder and find the actual virtual machine file (the .vmwarem file). Right click on it and select Show Package Contents. Inside the Package, find the file with a .vmx extension and open it in a text editor. Add this line

“ethernet0.virtualDEV = “e1000″ (without the quotes)

I added it at the end of the file

I restarted Windows and hey presto, I had a working network adapter and an Internet connection.

She had selected the text to be used as the link and then selected Insert > Hyperlink. In the dialog box she selected the slide to be used as the link destination.

So far so good but the first indication that something was wrong was that the Preview box that displays a preview of the destination slide was blank. Nevertheless she clicked OK, but on testing the hyperlink, it did not work.

When I looked at the destination slide, the title contained a comma. I removed the comma and ran the Insert > Hyperlink process again. This time it worked.

Googling “Powerpoint hyperlink comma” confirmed my suspicions. Apparently PowerPoint uses a comma in its internal code when it references a slide and if the title contains a comma, PowerPoint gets confused.

If you must have a comma in the slide title, the suggested workaround is to create a copy of the title placeholder, leave the copy on the slide and drag the original placeholder off the slide. Delete the comma from the original placeholder.

However, my workaround is simpler: remove the comma, create the hyperlink…add the comma back in.

According to one of the sites that I looked at, this bug was first discovered in PowerPoint 97 and still exists!

To see a short video demonstration of the problem and suggested workaround, click below:

To test it out, I created a short advert for the “Practical Pivot Tables” online seminar that I delivered yesterday:

For more information about screenr, please visit their website

In PowerPoint 2007, whilst running a slide show, if you press CTRL+T it displays the Windows Taskbar.

The screenshot below shows other shortcuts – I found this when I accidentally pressed F1 whilst running a slideshow)

For example, I might be out somewhere on a Saturday morning (with my iPhone, of course) and I get an email about an Apple event or an Adobe seminar. I want to be able to check immediately what I’m doing on that day so I know whether I can book the day off. And if I’m going to have future appointments available, I might as well have a record of the past available too.

I did a lot of research on this but most of the solutions involve things that I can’t do due to corporate IT restrictions – for example connecting my iPhone to Exchange Server.

The solution that I came up with was to upload my Outlook calendar to Google Calendar and then subscribe to the Google calendar. I actually subscribe to the Google calendar via BusySync – but only because iCal’s support for Google calendar is fairly recent – I could just as easily subscribe straight from iCal.

Subscribing to a Google Calendar via BusySync or iCal is easy. The time-consuming part is linking Outlook to Google Calendar. Although there are Outlook addins to sync with Google (Google Calendar Sync is a popular one), I can’t install them so the process is quite manual…

Google Calendar imports files that are in CSV format and luckily, Outlook can export a calendar to CSV format. In Outlook 2000, this is done from the File > Import and Export menu. Once the export is complete and I have a CSV file on my Desktop, I log into my Google account and import the CSV file into the calendar called Mike Work Schedule – this is the one that BusySync is subscribed to.

Simple? Not quite. This is best illustrated with an example…

The Export Wizard in Outlook, which guides you through the process, allows you to select a range of dates. As I started this import to Google process at the end of April 2008, I decided to include all appointments from 1st January 2008 to 30th May (so that I had a record of all past appointments and some future appointments – my calendar changes regularly so there was no point exporting too far into the future – I decided on 4 weeks-worth of future appointments).

I imported the resulting CSV file into Google Calendar.

Two weeks later (15th May), I decided it was time to update the Google Calendar. I ran the Export Wizard in Outlook and specified 1st May – 15th June. My thinking behind this was that the previous export was done on April 30th and therefore January 1st – April 30th was “historical data”. Although the Google Calendar currently included appointments for 1st May – 30th May, it was likely that some of these had been amended or even deleted in Outlook.

I imported the CSV file into Google Calendar and the result was not good! There were duplicate entries for 1st May – 30th May (as these dates were included in the first import). In addition, some appointments that were no longer in Outlook were still in the Google Calendar. The reason for this is that the import of the CSV is just that – an import, not a sync.

I came up with two ways to solve this problem. One way was to manually remove all entries from the Google Calendar for the period that I was importing prior to running the import – but that was time-consuming and labourious.

The second way (and this is the solution that I have used) is to delete the contents of the whole Google calendar prior to running the import. Consequently, every time I want to update the Google Calendar, I have to export from January 1st to a date that is a few weeks past the current date. Therefore, as I get further into the year, the export takes longer. Once the export process has started, the dialog box in Outlook with the progress bar on it is modal, with no X to close – so the only way to abort is to ALT+Ctrl+Delete.

Rather than having one huge, ever-expanding Google Calendar and an export process that takes longer each time, when I got to the end of 2008, I created a new calendar in iCal called Mike Work 2008 and used Calibrate to move all the events from the Mike Work Schedule calendar to the Mike Work 2008 calendar. This now gives me a historical record of my work appointments for 2008. BusySync is still subscribed to the Work Google calendar and the process continues for 2009.

Resources

To export calendar appointments in Outlook 2000:

• Select File > Import and Export
• Select Export to a file
• Click Next
• Select Comma Separated Values (Windows)
• Click Next
• Select Calendar (the folder to be exported)
• Click Next
• Click the Browse button to specify a location and type a name for the CSV file
• Confirm that you want to export Appointments from the calendar
• Click Finish
• Set the date range for the export
• Click OK

To delete all entries from a Google Calendar

• Log in to your Google Calendar
• Click the Settings link on the left hand side – just under the My Calendars section
• Click the Delete link for the appropriate calendar (on the right hand side). The first calendar that you create is known as the Primary Calendar. If you click the Delete link for this calendar, a message appears asking you to confirm that you wish to delete all events for this calendar. If you click the Delete link for any other Google Calendar, you actually delete the calendar so you would have to recreate it prior to importing the CSV file.

To import a CSV file into a Google Calendar

• Click the Add link on the left hand side – just below the Other Calendars section
• Click Import Calendar
• Click the Choose File button and select the CSV file
• Select the calendar to import into
• Click the Import button

BusySync
For information about BusySync, please visit their website. Elaine Giles has written an excellent review of BusySync on her blog.