Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

WHS

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 was released just the other day, and I took the opportunity in the weekend to install it and then reconnect all the PCs to it. They all worked flawlessly. The most exciting thing is now my 2 Vista 64 machines are now connected and being backed up. Previously one wasn’t being backed up at all though there was no data on the machine, and the other which is my workstation was being backed up to an internal 500gb drive.

If you have a Windows Home Server I recommend downloading the upgrade as it also fixes the data corruption error previously found in a few small number of installs with multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Office

A bunch of great things have come across my desk lately – haven’t got time to write about them all so here’s the links. go read them yourself.

Outlook signatures – how to back them up from one pc / profile to another

Latest release of Live Mesh – the news from the Liveside blog

Office Live Update 1.1

Virtual Machine Remote Control Client Plus

Open Source Mission - Bible Translation Wiki and Andree Yee – as introduced by Marcus Goodyear

CCBlogs – we built this site! go read the cool theological discussions that are happening here.

Not sure if I shared this one before or not. I built this social site for the basketball team I coach using Ning software – its great. Use it for free to develop a great social site for your organisation. Can be public or private.

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.