Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Ok so that title was a little contrived – and only because my wife bought the classic Jules Verne book yesterday along with Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Louisa Alcott’s Little Woman and Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

This article has a bunch of cool Microsoft Excel related content from all around the world.

10 worst Microsoft Excel practices. Michiel has created this list, but I certainly wouldn’t rank them the same way.

My Top three would be:

• Linked spreadsheet files (workbooks)
• Merged Cells
• Combining reports and data tables on the same worksheet – Michiel’s number 9. The other two don’t even make his list.

Allen Wyatt has a great article providing some VBA code to detect errors in conditional formatting formulas. This is a very practical solution to a very real problem.

Doug Klippert has posted some code from Peter Beach an Excel MVP that will create a list in Excel of all the folders on a drive and their sizes.

Andrew Engwirda has added some cool chart tools to his free Excel Tools. (News flash – he might come back to work for me! – Stay tuned)

Dick’s Daily Dose of Excel has two interesting posts (well lots actually but two I picked out) – the first written is on displaying image galleries in the ribbon written by Ron de Bruin, and the second titled Elle’s birthday.

Joseph has a very good explanation written for the new Excel 2007 tables of how not to break your summing formulas. The same concepts apply in Excel 2003 for the auto sum function using the Sigma button the toolbar.

Oh and that’s a photo of Kitty pretending to be interested in spreadsheeting techniques. Kitty is a business analyst working for Jethro.

That is I have been featured in a geek profile over at Grandy’s site called The Girly Anti-Geek. She wrote and asked me to complete a survey – now i know what our geek girl bloggers go though when we ask them! Its quite  nerve-wracking answering all these questions to be posted on someone else’s site.

Thanks Grandy!

We posted our article on Ada Lovelace day about Susan Bradley – also known as the SBS Diva.

This article is merely to point those interested readers to other similar articles.

The original blog post that started it all on the finding Ada website.

The mashup list of articles (which appears to have been spammed somewhat – though I assume that Suw Charman-Anderson will fix that shortly.

A Yahoo pipes Mashup using a world map to locate the source of the Ada Lovelace articles.

Some articles I noticed and read:

• Nick Hodge interviews Kate Carruthers
• Kate Carruthers writes her own Ada Lovelace article
• One of our geek girls, Catherine Eibner writes her Ada Lovelace 2009 article about another of our geek girls, Bronwen Zande
• Damana Madden writes about Suzi Edwards
• Jenine (the tech girls are chic author) writes her article
• Alison Young writes about several women
• Sleepy Dumpling’s article

Yesterday was an incredibly stressful day for me. I am usually pretty unstressed and have great coping mechanisms for dealing with stress. I am able to easily recognise it and usually am able to manage it well. Stress for me is usually around deadline completion for clients. However yesterday I wanted to rip off the heads of _insert large animal here_ and throw things and scream like a 14 year old teenage girl having a tantrum.

Why?

Our internet stopped working early in the morning.

OK – so why is that bad, and why did it stop working? Well when you build a business that is based on having the internet running as much as it is based on the power running, not having either is very stressful. Made more so when you can do nothing about it. Now in the case of the internet, we have a very good relationship with our supplier, the best ISP in Australia Internode. We have a silver level business grade account with a dedicated service line, short phone queues (typically under a minute to be answered) and very good techs who provide great assistance. However yesterday they could tell me nothing about why the internet suddenly stopped connecting! We knew that the router was working – it was brand new and we switched between it and another one just to check, we eliminated potential network issues here by isolating the network and connecting directly, and they had no known reasons from their end for it not to be working, yet while the modem would handshake and attempt to authenticate it could not get authentication to occur.