Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

WHS

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 was released just the other day, and I took the opportunity in the weekend to install it and then reconnect all the PCs to it. They all worked flawlessly. The most exciting thing is now my 2 Vista 64 machines are now connected and being backed up. Previously one wasn’t being backed up at all though there was no data on the machine, and the other which is my workstation was being backed up to an internal 500gb drive.

If you have a Windows Home Server I recommend downloading the upgrade as it also fixes the data corruption error previously found in a few small number of installs with multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Office

Data Filters are a very powerful way of analysing tables of data in Excel. Put simply they are a way of reducing the table down to just the items you want to see based on the selections you choose.

For example a simple table like this one, may have several hundred or thousand rows of data. However there may be only a few lines you are interested in. For example you may be only interested in people under the age of 18 or sales amounts that are negative (indicating a refund) or only see sales of red Ferraris.

Turning on the Filters

In Office 2003 Turn on the filters by selecting any cell in your table (contiguous section of data) and selecting Data, Filter, Auto Filter from the menu. (Keystroke ALT D F F)

The arrows will show up as in the next picture.

Joseph Chirilov has written a series of 3 posts showing exactly how to build a fully functioning media player inside Excel.

If you want to try this then follow his step 1, step 2 and step 3. I would be interested in hearing from anybody who does that.

While we are talking about Joseph's site I want to highlight two other posts that are there.

Andreas from BonaVista Systems has let me know that they are running an Excel Dashboard competition.

You can find all the details of the competition on their website.

Winners will choose from 3 great prizes, an Apple iPhone, a Data Visualisation workshop with Stephen Few, a copy of Stephen Fews book, "Information Dashboard Design".

Some of the rules include:

The solution must be in Excel 2000 or more recent, and not require additional software other than Excel and MicroCharts 3.

If you are not an existing MicroCharts user, you can download your 30 day trial version of MicroCharts at http://www.bonavistasystems.com/DownloadMicroCharts.html

Worth a crack!