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:

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:

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:

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.

The problem with the PrintScreen key is that it captures the entire screen to the clipboard and then more often than not, the image will have to be pasted into a graphics program in order to crop and resize it – and for those on a tight budget, that means Microsoft Paint!

Windows Vista includes a utility called The Snipping Tool, first introduced in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. It is a screen capture tool, that allows users to take screenshots of windows, rectangular areas or a free-form area. Once captured, the image can then be saved as either a jpg, gif or png.

On a recent edition of MacBites, we were discussing screen capture apps and I made the point that if you wanted to capture a menu, as soon as The Snipping Tool gets the focus, the menu (in the application that you want to capture) disappears from the screen.

To illustrate this point, the company that I work for is just about to embark on a global rollout of Vista. Our team is responsible for delivering the training and to accompany this, we are currently building a Vista knowledgebase – a set of PDF files that can be downloaded from our web site. Each team member has been assigned a number of knowledgebase articles to create. One of my articles is about creating Watermarks in Word 2007.

Having clicked the Watermark button on the Ribbon to display the Watermark menu, I then clicked on The Snipping Tool, which was already running. However, as soon as I did this, because Word lost the focus, the menu disappeared from the screen.

I have, to my delight (well I won’t go that far!!) discovered a fix for this…

1. Run The Snipping Tool (or if it is already running click New so that it is in capture mode)

2. Click the Cancel button on The Snipping Tool

3. Open the menu or item to be captured (in my case, I clicked the Watermark button on The Ribbon)

4. Press CTRL + PrintScreen

5. The Snipping Tool will now take control and you can capture the appropriate area as normal

Below is a simple worksheet with 2 hidden rows…

If you select rows 1 – 7, issue the Copy command and then Paste the selection elsewhere, you get all the rows including the hidden ones…

In order to copy a range that includes hidden cells, but exclude the hidden cells when pasting, perform the following steps…

Select the range to be copied

From the Home tab, select the Find & Select button and select Go To Special from the menu

The Go To Special dialog box is displayed…

Select Visible cells only

Click OK

Issue the Copy command (Ctrl+C or from the Home tab, select the Copy button). Excel marks the cells to be copied with multiple selection marquees…

Position the cursor where you want to copy the block to and Paste (Ctrl+Vor from the Home tab, select the Paste button)

I could never get on with Outlook’s calendar but since I started using iCal (and even more so since I got an iPhone), I’ve become a calendar junkie….or maybe I’ve just got more organised!

I like to have my work calendar available when I’m away from the office but the problem is that, as with most corporates, we use Outlook. I’m also handicapped by having an over-zealous IT department that locks down the PC’s, prohibiting installation of any useful 3rd-Party add-ins.

To display my Outlook calendar appointments in iCal I use a part-manual-part-automatic solution.

In Outlook, I use the Export command to save the calendar as a CSV file (This CSV file contains details of the appointments such as date, time, meeting details, etc). I then log into my Google calendar and use the Import command to import the CSV file. That’s the manual part.

Although iCal can be set up to sync with Google calendar, I do this via a great little application called BusySync. We use BusySync to synchronise our iCal calendars at home, however, the application now allows you to “subscribe” to a Google calendar – so any changes that are made to the Google calendar are automatically reflected when viewed through iCal.

I have a Google calendar called “Mike Work Schedule” and I’ve configured BusySync on my iMac to check this calendar every 60 seconds. For this to work, my iMac (which is at home) must be switched on with BusySync running (it runs in the background).

The iPhone is automatically updated via MobileMe.

My work calendar is updated on a regular basis (often several times a day) as meetings and training courses are scheduled, cancelled and re-arranged. In an ideal world, I’d run the export-to-csv-import-to-Google at the end of every day. (I even tried, unsuccessfully, to automate it with VBA) but when you’re running a course, writing a web app or in a meeting until 4:30, the last thing you want to do is spend another 5 minutes updating a calendar. Well, it was 5 minutes at the start of the year…

Unfortunately when you import the CSV file into Google calendar, it doesn’t do any kind of comparison with the existing appointments so you are likely to end up with duplicates and any appointments that no longer exist in your Outlook Calendar are not deleted from the Google calendar.

To get round this problem, prior to running the import, I had to manually delete all the entries from the Google calendar. I also had to ensure that every time I ran the export from Outlook, I defined 1st January 2008 as the start date. As the year wore on, the number of appointments in my Outlook calendar increased and consequently each export took longer to run.

So, back to today’s problem…I configured Outlook to export all appointments between 1st January 2008 and 31st December 2008. The export started and the progress bar began to, well, progress. However, after 20 minutes it was still, er, progressing. I needed to use Outlook to access some emails but the Export dialog box (the one containing the progress bar (or in my case not-much-progress bar) is not only modal, but has no Cancel button, nor a cross in the Title Bar. My only option was to press Alt-Ctrl-Delete, select Task Manager and kill Outlook.

Then I had an idea. I have a desktop PC running Windows 2000 and a laptop running Vista (the company is moving to Vista next year and our team is responsible for supporting and training users). I switched on my laptop, fired up Outlook 2007 and set up and started the export. I could leave this running for however long it would take and continue to work on my emails on my desktop machine.

Well, less than 2 minutes later, the export processs was complete and I had a CSV file containing all my appointments for 2008 ready to import into Google Calendar.

So now I have 3 reasons to fire up my Vista laptop:

• Outlook 2007 has RSS-reader capabilities
• Mobile Me web edition has partial support for IE7
• I can export an entire years worth of Outlook Calendar appointments in under 2 minutes

Finally, as the year draws to a close, may I take the opportunity to wish you all a Happy Christmas and a Geek-Filled New Year!