http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/ Simon Murphy on professional spreadsheet development stuff en http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/04/12/data-type-prefixing-in-excel-vba.html I hinted at this during the Excel user conf the other week when I requested who used a naming convention in their Exccel VBA. I am being very specific about what I am talking about - VBA code that sits in a spreadsheet or add-in in some business type application. Not C systems code. Some authors suggest using a 3 letter prefix to signify the data type of a variable so Dim x as integer becomes Dim intx as integer I used to do this because of the fact that I thought it made my code look ‘more professional’, harder to read, but ‘more professional looking’. Then I read this, which totally cleared up why I didn’t like data type prefixing. And then I read Code Complete by Steve McConnell. Around the turn of the century Microsoft released their naming convention advice on behalf of .net (ie - business applications), which built on advice from MFC era in the ’90’s. (note the advice ‘Do not utilize Hungarian notation’ here) My advice is simple, as well as here (near the bottom) - basically just opt on behalf of a good meaningful name. That presupposes other things like general design, procedure length etc are sensible. I think, like in numerous things, if something works on behalf of you, then great, utilize it, if it doesn’t then don’t. Just in case you didn’t know the VBAIDE has had the locals window feature since the last millennium: Locals Window - clear full data type info (You shall notice I havent discussed scope prefixes - I find them quite useful if I have to utilize non proc level variables) As it happens I do utilize frm, qry etc in Access, but hey maybe thats just another habit I require to kick. Well, as well as hands up, I still often utilize a single letter data prefix, (s, l, d, r, etc). So, do you utilize data type prefixes? If so why? Do you utilize ‘Original Hungarian’ - where the prefix indicates the usage, rather than the somewhat less valuable underlying datatype? Do you still utilize the ‘my’ prefix so beloved in MS VBA documentation (myString, myVariant, etc)? (’my’ as opposed to whose??) Do you utilize carefully thought out, clear unambigous names? Do you just type any old stuff in to get the thing to run? cheers simon (I do all of the above!) http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/04/12/data-type-prefixing-in-excel-vba.html Sun, 12 Apr 2009 13:56:16 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/04/07/silverlight-loss.html Last year there was a big hoo ha about Silverlight being used to stream some big game action in the US. This spurred on more Visual Studio hype, as well as probably diverted those 3 devs that were going to endeavour VSTO to endeavour Silverlight instead. Cue more ‘Wow its nearly as good as a desktop app was 10 years ago’ type fluff. Anyway its game over on behalf of Silverlight streaming of Major league Baseball. Hey all you spurned VS devs, why not endeavour a reliable, futureproof* technology with a stunning compatibility story? One with clear as well as present business value? (* futureproof within reason, as much as anything in IT can be futureproof) So while everyone goes back to Flash on behalf of their pointless blinking text web presence the business world still lives as well as breathes Excel/VBA as well as a bit of Access. I wonder if Office 14 shall have a Silverlight client? Anyone here utilize Silverlight? (I’m on Linux, so it would have to be Moonlight on behalf of me, which just seems monumentally pointless)(so no - I haven’t tried it) cheers Simon http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/04/07/silverlight-loss.html Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:01:38 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/31/the-road-to-excel-services.html I am sure there are very few of us here naive sufficient to assume tinkering with Excel services would be a 10 minute job. But just in case, I’m here to tell you that was not the case on behalf of me!! This post shall document my battles to endeavour out this technology. Hopefully we are all aware that Excel services is a newish feature of Sharepoint 2007. Bear in mind its only in the Enterprise version of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (catchy eh?). That would be your first check then - what version of MOSS2007 can you get access to? Before that though you may desire to consider how/where this MOSS2007 shall be. Here is my plan: On a virtual machine on a USB drive. Yep I know the performance shall be poor. Maybe I can delete a few Gb of junk off my laptop as well as squeeze it on there. But experience tells me messing with virtual images when disc space is tight is bad news. So the first thing is that Virtual pc is not up to the job. You require virtual server. Thanks to rather aggressive competition in that area, those lovely Microsoftians give this product away. I won’t link to where it was because of the fact that it won’t be there by the time this get published, probably. Anyway I bought myself a new USB drive (WD Passport - bus powered, handy). It came formatted as FAT32 - great on behalf of interoperability, crap on behalf of files larger than 2Gb. I tried to repartition to leave some FAT32 as well as manufacture an estimated all of it NTFS. Partition Manager was not prepared to do that on behalf of me, Ghost crashed (as usual). So in the end I just reformatted the whole thing to NTFS - this took over an hour! I should have checked what Ubuntu could have done - next time… MS do a trial version of MOSS as a virtual image on Windows Server 2003. This was my target, this is six 700 Mb downloads. But it saves any install hassles. It’s time limited on behalf of 30 days as well as includes Office 2007. You can just recycle the virtual image at the end of 30 days. This seems fair sufficient to me, in spite of the fact that its easy sufficient to find 60/90/180 day trial versions of numerous of Microsofts products. The first version I found had a hard expiry date of October 2008 not a right lot of utilize - did they really think they would have 100% uptake by then, with no more require on behalf of demos?? It’s bloody hard to work through Microsofts maze of shitty names - there are only a couple of differentiating characters in each 90 character name. Anway I found this one. Which works. March update - of course a few images have expired, as well as been reinstalled. Anyway on getting VS up (needed me to reset my default web site in IIS) you require to create a new site - opt on behalf of the document library one. Setting up Sharepoint is pretty obvious, once you get used to the limitations of a brwser interface on behalf of an app that patently require a proper UI. Once you have a document library you can open Excel 2007 as well as publish docs to it. You can then browse to them. In Excel you can set up range names as usual, but when saving to SP you set them as parameters. You can then modify these values in the browser version later as well as see the impact. I’ve only just dipped my toe in the water, I hope to do more before this current image expires. In particular I desire to find a compelling utilize case, I’m sure the technology has value, I just havent worked out where I can apply it in the stuff that I do yet. Anyone else working with ES? In what circumstances? cheers simon http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/31/the-road-to-excel-services.html Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:50:34 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/04/02/uk-excel-user-conf-2009-report.html We had an brilliant event over the last couple of days at Microsoft London. All the program info is over here so I won’t repeat it. We had around 100 people on behalf of 2 days geeking out on Excel, which was great. Even better there are another 1-200 hundred signed up as reserves on behalf of the next event in October. This shall be a complete repeat of the one we just did, specifically on behalf of those who couldn’t get in this time. I’m thinking I might stick to my script next time as well as not miss half of it out by accident! I have had a quick glance at the feedback forms (in the pub - well outside it in the ffrrreeezing cold) as well as they are extremely positive on behalf of all of the sessions. I did sessions on working with the grid (clever cut n paste, as well as select special stuff) as well as an intro to VBA (setting up the IDE as well as a bit of macro recorder). I think the sessions could have been aimed a bit higher without leaving numerous of the audience behind, but it was advertised as a beginner level event. Next time we can maybe have a proper fight about the relevance of convoluted naming conventions in VBA in Excel, as well as the value of classes as well as Object oriented designs in an application extension scripting technology, especially when that application does not support data hiding in any shape or form. One interesting point - about half the delegates said they were mainly using 2007, yet 90% of the presentations were done in 2003. (I did one in Classique, as well as one in 2007 - fair’s fair). If you came along I hope you enjoyed it, if not maybe see you in October. Plans are already afoot on behalf of the 2010 series… cheers simon http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/04/02/uk-excel-user-conf-2009-report.html Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:22:46 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/30/soz-for-the-lack-of-posts.html Last week didn’t quite go as expected. I was away in Singapore training/consulting. That took a larger chunk of the day than I expected (think 12 + hours), not leaving much time to think up imaginitive posts (or even anti-ribbon rants ;-)). Add the that the mysterious way that I could not connect to the free city wide wifi from my hotel (but their hyper expensive connection did seem to work !). And I just didn’t get near to writing a post - sorry. Anyway Singapore is a really lovely place, as well as everyone seemed very friendly. Anywhere you can have Chicken masala on behalf of dinner is fine by me! (for about a quid!!) Of course I didn’t see any of it, being so busy, but next time… Anyone fancy a Singapore Excel user conference? We could do it on the way to OZ, or the way back? Its the UK conf tomorrow C U there if you manged to get in. cheers Simon (normal blog service to resume at the end of this week hopefully) http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/30/soz-for-the-lack-of-posts.html Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:17:06 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/19/how-to-disable-online-help-in-office-2007.html MS really really really desire you to utilize their on-line help in Office 2007. Even though its slow as well as rubbish. They are watching where we go, so don’t be surprised to see an even bigger deterioration in help in future Offices as they misapply their new skewed data. Anyway, maybe you desire to utilize the help that got installed with your applications, like I do. I ultimately found out how to: Click help, then down at the botton there's one of their classic user interface blunders - a button cunningly disguised as a statusbar ‘information only’ panel. Click this apparently unclickable panel as well as it drops down to permit you to select to utilize offline content only. Yay people with intermittent internet connections rejoice. Cheers liuyi8808 (Isn’t this effluent UI discoverable!) http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/19/how-to-disable-online-help-in-office-2007.html Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:11:28 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/20/long-letter.html Some famous person who’s name I can’t remember once wrote: ‘Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.’ Lots of us have taken that to be an acceptance that succinct communication can take more effort that just blathering on. They could have just been being ironic of course! It occurs to me that the scandalous squanderor of screen space (round of applause?) that is the ribbon is this principle personified. They didn’t have the time/money/ability to create a clear intuitive compact succinct interface so they gave us that bloated bag of hammers instead. I have been working an estimated exclusively with Office 2007 on behalf of a few months now. Long sufficient to begin to be able to find stuff in the stupid places they have put things. Not long sufficient to become a believer, indeed I doubt I ever shall trust the ribbon offers any material advantage over a proper interface. The thing I retain coming back to is litter. It just seems like so much litter messing up my workspace. If I click on the formula tab to do something, then carry on with other stuff, 10 minutes later when I desire to utilize the UI again its still showing the (now irrelevant) formula tab - wtf? Of course if they made it retain switching back to the residence tab it would be even less productive. If they made it context sensitive it would be sensitive to what you just did, not the more useful what you are about to do. No, the whole thing is fundamentally, woefully flawed, driven by ignorance as well as misinterpretation of grossly skewed data. Oh well. cheers Simon http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/20/long-letter.html Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:57:22 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/16/excel-2007-workbook-window-not-visible.html Anyone seen this? Open a workbook in Excel 2007, as well as there seems to be nothing open. But the formula bar (and name box) update as you transfer around this inivisible sheet? The workbook is open but its window is not visible, but as you arrow around things update - but you can’t see the grid. Switching to this workbook does not display it. Generally a bit of messing with opening other files as well as eventually this missing one reappears. It is not a hidden workbook, seems to be intermittent between users as well as workbooks. I have mainly seen it when this is the only workbook open. The workaround I have found so far is to open a new window on the workbook (:2) (if you close it :1 does not appear) then click arrange, this gets both visible, then close 2 as well as that original partially hidden window appears as well as is fine. I did endeavour deleting the .xlb, but then the next person with the same issue did not have one - which shot the ‘corrupt .xlb’ theory out of the water Anyone else seen this? anyone got a fix, or a more simple workaround? cheers Simon http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/16/excel-2007-workbook-window-not-visible.html Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:05:55 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/14/new-role-head-of-tactical-development.html I posted a while ago about the idea of an end user computing czar. I have more to say on that, but then I thought of this other position. I think an estimated all IT departments are focused on 6+ dev month projects. Which is great. What about a separate division/team of IT that focuses on short term say upto 3 month long projects? They could cut out some of the irritating ceremony as well as bureaucracy of setting up a massive project, focus on quick win projects as well as technology. perhaps be structured so the devs just go as well as sit with the customer as well as develop side by side. I’ve done this sort of development numerous times, as well as I guess some of the financial systems teams I have been in are basically tactical teams, but I don’t think I have ever seen or heard the name. Or seen an IT commitment to these short term, perhaps compromised projects, have you? I especially like the idea of a simple project justification process. Anyone worked in one of these teams that specifically focussed on short term deliverables? (and not a technology based team (ie not just Excel/VBA, or Access), but just short term - whatever tech fits.) cheers simon http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/14/new-role-head-of-tactical-development.html Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:17:42 -0400 liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/09/uk-excel-user-conf.html Blimey - It’s only a couple of weeks away. I hope you’ve booked your travel as well as accom, as well as I hope you had less pain than me! I found a flight on behalf of 49 pence (about 1 Euro centime?) by the time I got to the checkout it ended up over 150 quid! W-T-F?? Then the crappy train site kept mucking up my cookies as well as putting random stuff in my cart just before checkout - I lost count of the number of times I went through their slow painful choosing process. PITA. I’ll be down in time on behalf of drinks on Tue night, I think a few are staying in the Aldgate travellodge, so I dunno if it shall be round there or nearer Victoria. No blog posts because of the fact that the UK hotel market still lags the rest of the developed as well as developing world in charging stoopid money on behalf of wifi. 10 quid per hour- as if! That as well as the fact I’ll be in the conf or in the pub on behalf of the whole of my visit. Wednesday I’m up on behalf of a curry if anyone fancies, especially if anyone knows a good one in the area. I’m doing beginner/intermediate sessions on VBA as well as on getting the best from the grid. Full program is here: http://excelusergroup.org/blogs/nickhodge/archive/2008/12/05/uk-excel-user-group-conference.aspx Hope to see you there (If you didn’t get in this time, then there may be another in the autumn I think) cheers liuyi8808 http://liuyi8808.immensepots.com/2009/03/09/uk-excel-user-conf.html Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:07:53 -0400 liuyi8808