Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Time to close some tabs. Here are all the good things found since the last round up.

I completely redesigned the front end of www.rasita.biz using panels and views. What do you think? Judith is now selling reptiles as well as her cooking eCourses.

Sarah Perez posted this on live mesh wallpapers. We got them!

Are you Mesh-obsessed? Well now you can show off your devotion to the new service by displaying the Mesh logo on your computer’s desktop. You can grab the zip file for yourself from here.

Sarah also has a Q&A session on Microsoft Office Web Applications.

Jon Karel Pieterse has updated two of his most popular downloads:

Name Manager (which I created together with Charles Williams, www.decisionmodels.com):

Most important change: the unused names filter now includes objects in its search, as well as VBA code. It makes the filter much slower, but way more useful in my opinion. Also, I have added the Greek character set so Name Manager doesn’t (wrongfully) think range names with Greek characters are corrupt.

Flexfind

I have updated the user interface of Flexfind so (in my opinion) it is easier to use. Also, I have mimicked the find all behaviour of Excel: if you select multiple items in the found items list, Flexfind will create a (multiple) selection of areas of the found cells.

Has your Excel application slowed down lately? Have you installed the Google Desktop Application?

They may be related. Dick from Daily Dose of Excel reports this article taken from Charles Williams web page.

This report comes from Charles Williams of DecisionModels.com fame. Charles knows a thing or two about performance in Excel.

For the last few weeks I have been trying to find out
why clearing a large range of cells caused Excel to hang on some PCs
but not on others. This does not happen with Excel 97, but does with
Excel 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007.

Andrew recently posted a piece of VBA code used to create dynamic ranges. Very useful.
Here is my original post on dynamic ranges posted back in 2004 repeated.
If you have used a range name before then you will know that it can be frustrating updating the reference of the range name if you want to add data to the range.
Here are some ways you can dynamically update the range by using the OFFSET function in the range name reference.
Assume for all these examples that column A has a mixture of text and numbers for several cells.
Click Insert - Name - Define on the menu.
In the Names in Workbook Dialog box type a range name (Eg test_range) and then try these different options.
1: Expand Down as Many Rows as There are Numeric Entries.
In the Refers to box type: =OFFSET($A$1,0,0,COUNT($A:$A),1)
2: Expand Down as Many Rows as There are Numeric and Text Entries.
In the Refers to box type: =OFFSET($A$1,0,0,COUNTA($A:$A),1)