Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Windows 7 – the news keeps on coming in!

• How low can you go? What is the minimum hardware requirement for Windows 7? SO far the record is a Pentium II with a 266 MHz CPU, 96MB of memory, and a 4MB graphics card.
• Nick Hodge is in charge of getting 58 palettes of HP Netbooks preloaded with Windows 7 for Tech Ed 2009 delegates! – i could go – but I’m going sailing instead!
• Susan Bradley has webcasts on using the XP mode in Win7
• Upgrade and retail pricing was announced for Win7 for USA and Australia this week.
  

My apologies for no Excel tips in here lately. I have been asked to write some specific things that will take some time to put together as they involve explaining complex conceptual approaches to solving the problem as well as the specific excel solution. However they are coming – thanks Nicola and Traci. Anybody else want to send me ideas for posts or requests for help feel free.

Today I am just emptying my browser from a whole bunch of other peoples Excel posts I had found interesting and wanted to share.

This one actually answers one of Nicolas questions – kind of – what are the differences between Excel 2003 and 2007. While not specifically answering this question, Allen explains how to find the differences in VBA. Excel 2007 VBA differences

One of the most common problems we have in Excel is using dates and times in relation to calendar years and financial years. In Australia the financial year ends June 20 so financial years cross two calendar years. This also causes issues with the financial year quarters. DataPig Technologies has a post on the BaconBits Blog about Choosing Quarters in Excel.

Jan Karel Pieterse, a long time Excel MVP I have read for a long time, has a extensive Excel website. His comprehensive series on Using Range Names is very useful.

While working on a major coding project we needed to remove sensitivity to case. This article from OzGrid provided the answers we needed. Stop Excel VBA Macro Code Being Case Sensitive & Compare Text. Excel VBA Case Sensitive.

Smith: Unum's two million dollar man

Recently I found that Unum, a Fortune 500 company that provides long term and short term disability, group life and long term care insurance for more than 100,000 companies, uses OneNote 2007!  Looks like they save over $2 million by switching to OneNote by going to a paperless system.

Creating, Saving, Sharing Themes in Windows 7. An in depth how to from the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

From Sarah Arnold: Opportunity to win a Windows 7 Laptop if you are a Microsoft Partner

The Worldwide Windows Marketing Team has launched a Windows 7 partner video contest and I would love to see Australian Partners involved.

To get involved all you need to do is be a Microsoft Partner, create one or many 2-3 minutes video(s) and post it to DigitalForumTV.comfor voting by anyone with a Live ID.

Microsoft Mapping Roadshow – Melb, Syd, Brisbane - 9-12 June

Places are limited so if you do wish to register please do so ASAP at https://www.microsoft.com.au/events/register/home.aspx?levent=324573&linvitation

• Office 2010, Hello World
• Green IT is good for your bottom line
• iheart OneNote You Tube video
• HOWTO: Virtual Desktop Pools by Using Remote Desktop Web Access
• User Account Control Step-by-Step Guide
• Microsoft Online Partner Roadshow – all cities - enrol now!
• New EBS 2008 and SBS 2008 Click-through Demos Available For Partners!
• Most popular Windows Home Server Add-ins
• Publishing problem - HTML brackets stripped from post? – a live writer issue – caused by PHP5 settings on the host – we experienced this problem last week and made the changes below on the server to make it work.

For reference, the fix for cPanel servers is to create a file called all_php5 under /var/cpanel/easy/apache/rawopts/ and add the following two lines then recompile Apache:

• -with-expat=builtin
  -with-libexpat-dir=/usr/lib

For those who are not using cPanel but instead manually compile PHP, the fix is to add the following line after the other ./configuration options then build as usual:

• --with-expat=builtin --with-libexpat-dir=/usr/lib