Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Sometimes it feels like so much has happened since the last time I wrote on here that I don’t have time to stop and get it down. And that makes it worse because then there is even more that has happened.

So this is not so much an attempt at a catch up as just a rambling post covering various things that have happened to me recently.

Football

We played a night game Saturday night. We won in the last few minutes after a pretty tough contest. They got an early lead and then we had to peg them back. I played defence for 3 quarters with one entire quarter off the ground. I did give away a 50 metre penalty in the last quarter with a few minutes to go and we were leading by 5. Fortunately he missed his kick at goal and we rushed it through for a behind. We ended up winning by 4 points.

This weeks GGB is Rebellious Arab Girl, Mona. Her survey is below.

Geek Girl Profile -

Name: Mona
Screen Name: RebelliousArabGirl
Personal Blog: http://www.rebelliousarabgirl.net
Social Networks: Twitter, MyBlogLog, Mashable.
Current Employment: Sr. Multimedia Programmer
Location: Canada

What is your motivation for blogging?

I had too many reasons to say NO! to everything wrong that I saw in my life and needed to be addressed and questioned.

I went to a Microsoft training session on SBS2008 yesterday. Was very good. I am super excited about some of the cool new features and functionality coming and can’t wait to get my hands on it. We will definitely be doing a server upgrade and switching over to SBS 2008, Exchange server 2007 and Sharepoint Services 3 when we are able to later this year.

Wayne Small, the SBS MVP taking the technical presentations yesterday, posted on his blog that there is a free Visio plugin available that will create a schematic of your network. The Solarwinds LANsurveyor Express plugin is free until 30 June only.

Here are my before and after diagrams. The before is one I made myself, and doesn't include a client PC that is now in my network that was picked up by the auto map maker.

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.