Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I have had a lot of articles, news and other tech information filling up my browser and its time to de-clutter before Christmas.

Microsoft Excel

INDEX -MATCH - a much better lookup function combination than using VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP. Charley Kyd writes a very good instructive post on using this combination. We use this a lot where the failings of VLOOKUP make it impossible to use.

MSDN announces the new developer roadmap for Excel and VBA. Interesting reading and has lots of useful links.

Power Pivot is an amazing AddIn for Excel 2010. I have written about Power Pivot before. Dick Kusleika has written a simple function to determine whether an Excel Workbook contains power pivot data.

Microsoft Outlook

Conditional formatting and highlighting your emails based on content, subject, sender etc.

Roy MacLean asks some interesting questions about storing data in Outlook. I love Outlook and think it is a very good tool, however there are lots of limitations with using it. Mind you I don't see any other email client out there that can do everything that Outlook can do or even half as well in most cases. Still Roy has some good points.

Everything good or interesting I have found lately – loosely organised. And a photo I took recently.

Social Media and Web Design

Darren Rowse talks about how churches should use Social Media

Robin Good on Website Accessibility: How To Make Your Website Highly Accessible And Standards-Compliant. Article written by Drazen Dobrovodski.

Add Facebook Plugins to your Blog

From Digital Inspiration - Zero to a Million Users. Adam Smith and Drew Houston, founders of two successful Internet startups – Xobni and Dropbox – share secrets that helped their products win two million users in two years with mostly word-of-mouth marketing and no advertising spend.

Clearing the browser from all the links to cool tools and content for today.

Microsoft Stuff

• Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 BETA – Includes enhancements for Windows 7-based computers
• Seadragon.com – Convert Any Image On The Web Into A Deep Zoom Image
• Deep Zoom Composer Updated To Fix An Export Related Bug
• Streaming Media in Windows 7 – Streaming your collection over the Internet – unfortunately this doesn’t work if your Windows 7 machine is joined to a domain
• Sneak peek of what’s coming in Windows Live Movie Maker
• Live Video Streaming: Guide To The Best Broadcast Services To Stream Your Video In Real-Time
• What's new in Windows 7: Tour Windows 7
• Get a Live-Updating Bing Wallpaper Windows 7 Theme – i did this it worked really easily
• Megawoosh Slide for Microsoft Project – this is a funny little video that has gone viral in Europe. Heads up from Duncan’s blog.

• 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