Author: Debra Dalgleish

Cut Through the Twitter Clatter

Some Twitter users follow thousands of people, and join in hundreds of conversations every day.

I follow just over 100 people (actually 123 – I like that number). Some of them are chatty, and others rarely post.

Even with that small number of people to follow, it’s hard to keep track of things. You can only see about 20 tweets on the front page when you log in, and that’s about all that I have the energy to read. So if something’s moved off the front page before I log in, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever see it.

A while ago I downloaded TweetDeck, and have been using it to read and post things in Twitter. You can create groups, so it’s easy to follow the people you’re most interested in, and skim through the other posts.

I highly recommend it. And no, this isn’t a snapshot of my TweetDeck. It’s from the download site.

TweetDeck

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Wrapping Up the Excel Giveaway

On the Contextures Blog, I ran a week long Excel giveaway, with a nice collection of prizes from some generous sponsors.

The entries included some hilarious Excel horror stories, and a few creative Excel Hallowe’en costume suggestions. I enjoyed reading them, and the giveaway page got good traffic, so others must have enjoyed them too.

After the giveaway deadline passed, the real work began. I copied all the names, emails and comment numbers from the blog, and cleaned them up in Excel.

For a similar giveaway in July, I created a macro to draw the prize numbers and winning comment numbers. It worked very well, so I used it again for the fall giveaway.

Finally, I wrote the prize announcement post, and will email all the winners and prize sponsors with details on how to collect their prize.

A giveaway is a fair amount of work, but creates interest and traffic for a blog. I hope the prize sponsors saw some increased traffic too. If so, they might be willing to sponsor another giveaway, when we all recover from this one.

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Vanity URLs for Facebook Pages

It looks like Facebook has finally lowered or removed the minimum number of fans required to register a vanity URL for a page.

When the vanity URL feature was first announced, a page needed 1000 fans. Then they reduced it to 25 fans, but only for a short time. Without warning, the limit was increased to 100 fans, so my pages weren’t eligible.

Today I noticed a vanity URL announcement at the top of a page, so I went back to www.Facebook.com/username to try again.

This time I was successful, and now my Facebook pages have vanity URLs:

http://www.facebook.com/Contextures

and

http://www.facebook.com/PivotTables

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Online Tool To Help Publish VBA Code

On the Contextures website, I’ve got many pages with sample VBA code for Excel. When I feel ambitious, I colour the code before I publish it, using green for the comments, and blue for the keywords.

For example, here’s some sample code from my Excel Comments Programming page.

CodeFormatted 

Free Conversion Tool

However, formatting the code takes quite a bit of time and effort, so I don’t do it for all the pages.

With the zHTML conversion tool, it will be much easier to post nicely formatted VBA code. It’s available as a free download, or as a free online tool.

Paste in your VBA code, click a button, copy the HTML code, and paste it into your website or blog.

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How to Price Your Software

On my Contextures site you can download my free pivot table add-in, PivotPower. So far, I haven’t created an Excel product for sale, but a few of my Excel colleagues have.

One of the challenges is in setting a price for the software. How do you decide what to charge?

To help you through the process, you can download a free pdf file of the book Don’t Just Roll the Dice, by Neil Davidson, of Red Gate Software. If you prefer a physical copy of the book, you can buy it on Amazon.

Create a Facebook Page For Your Business

Instead of using my personal Facebook page for business news, I’ve created two pages for Excel related updates.

One is for Contextures, and it has general Excel news and automatic updates from my Contextures blog.

The other page is for Pivot Table news, and has automatic updates from my Excel Pivot Tables blog.

How to Create Your Own Pages

It’s reasonably easy to set up your own Facebook page, but a few of the links and buttons are pretty well hidden. This blog post gives you step by step details for creating a Facebook page and adding the basic components. It will get you off to a good start, and you can fine tune it later.

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Excel Giveaways 20091021

I’ve just announced the Very Scary Fall Giveaway for Excel Nerds on my Contextures Blog. Lots of great Excel utilities, books and ebooks to give away, thanks to my generous Excel friends:

Ken Puls has also announced an Excel giveaway today, for WinAutomation licences. You can read the details in his blog article: WinAutomation