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.

I have upgraded to a Windows Phone 7 - and the handset I chose is the HTC Mozart. It is probably the slickest phone interface i have ever used - and beats the iPhone 4 on most features. It certainly is streets ahead of the old Windows Mobile 6.5 phones - my previous phone was the extremely powerful HTX TouchPro2. Its only flaw was the slow TouchFlo3d interface.

Microsoft Office 2010

There are some nice new things to get used to in Office 2010. I’m loving and hating Outlook. The conversations are great and painful at the same time.

Thank goodness for Xobni or I think I would go mad trying to find some emails.

I do have two exchange accounts running in Outlook, hence the reason I had to go to the Beta. The good news is the RTM version is now only 2 months away.

I’m running 32bit Office 2010 at the moment. Here are some articles about the differences between 32bit and 64bit.

• Understanding 64bit Office
• Compatibility Between the 32-bit and 64-bit Versions of Office 2010

There’s a lot of confusion and misunderstandings out there – so first let me clarify what we mean by mobile web and give you some nomenclature to use.

First of all there are a number of different mobile platforms. These can be loosely grouped by the OS (operating system). There are also 3 specifically different ways to port web to the mobile environment.

Platforms

• Windows Mobile (Smartphone)
• Blackberry
• iPhone
• Nokia (Symbian)
• Android
• Others – e.g. Samsung, Treo, Siemens etc have their own proprietary systems in most cases.
• Java

  Each of these platforms is simply the operating system that the mobile device is using as its base system. What that system is will then predetermine what applications can run on it and how that works for the web. The best two in my opinion are the Windows Mobile and the iPhone because they are specifically built to replicate the desktop experience on the mobile device (though the iPhone I believe has some limitations with java support – that may be fixed now)

The other systems have carrying capabilities to run different web browsers on them – and this can also have an impact on what the mobile experience is like.

Browsers and access to web