Author: Debra Dalgleish

Taking an Online JavaScript Course

Learn JavaScript for $9.95! That sounded like a pretty good deal to me, since most online courses an much more expensive than that.

When I got the JavaScript Live Course email from SitePoint.com, I followed the link to see what the course was about. There was a video with the course leader describing the content and delivery, and a link to see the course outline.

In the 3-week course there are 4 online sessions per week, with a live Q&A session each Friday. There’s also a private online discussion forum where you can get help with the practical exercises.

So, I signed up. Maybe I’ll learn a few things about JavaScript that I can use in my business. What’s really of interest to me though, is seeing how someone runs an online technical course. How will everything work? Will they hit any snags? What will the customer experience be like? What materials and training methods work best?

The answers to those questions are certainly worth much more than $9.95, and might help me plan an online course of my own.

Are you signing up? If you are, let me know, and we can sit in the back row of the class, or work on homework assignments together.

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Printing a Web Page

You might find something online that you want to print, such as instructions for doing something in Excel, or a tasty looking recipe.

Usually that page has a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to print, like ads and header and footers.

A while ago I discovered Print What You Like, where you can enter a URL, then clean up that page for printing. However, I could never find that page when I needed it, so I rarely used it.

Printliminator Utility

Today I found The Printliminator, a similar utility, which runs from a bookmarklet.

  • Just drag the bookmarklet to your Bookmarks toolbar, then click it when you want to clean up a page.
  • Highlight a section, then click to remove it
  • OR, press Alt and click, to remove everything except the selected section.

There’s also a set of buttons, including one to remove all graphics, and a button to Undo the last step.

Printliminator tool for web page printing
Printliminator tool for web page printing

Video: Printliminator Utility

This short video shows how the Printliminator utility works, in case you’d like to see the tool, before you start using it.

Print What You Like Bookmarklet

When I went back to find the Print What You Like page today, I saw that it has a bookmarklet too. Maybe it’s new, or I missed that the last time that I looked.

Anyway, I hope you find this useful, and I wish they’d invent a cleanup tool for email too. Then I could crop off those long paragraphs that warn me about saving the environment by not printing.

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The Spreadsheet Day Poll

When should we celebrate Spreadsheet Day?  A few dates have been nominated, so it’s time to pick a day, and Jimmy Peña suggested a poll. The nominated dates are:

Jan 26 – Ed, based on Lotus 1-2-3 release date

Feb 29 – Mike Alexander, “I vote to have Spreadsheet Day on Leap Year. In part, because it pays homage to the old Lotus leap year bug. But mainly because it only comes once every 4 years, and I’m fairly lazy.”

Apr 1 – Jon Peltier, “I want to overrule Debra and vote for April 1. The most fitting day of the year.”

Aug 1 – Debra, because it represents A1, the first cell on a worksheet, and avoids the April Fools stigma

Sep 5 – Chandoo, “It spells XL on phones when you type 95”

Oct 17 – Ken Puls, “The first copy of VisiCalc for the Apple ][ (Version 1.37) went out the door on October 17, 1979.” (http://www.benlo.com/visicalc/visicalc4.html)

What Date Will You Vote For?

Please vote for the Spreadsheet Day that you think is best, or suggest another date.

  • [Update] The Spreadsheet Day Poll has closed. Thanks for voting!

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Excel Readers Around the World

On the Google Analytics dashboard there’s a world map, that shows where my Excel blog readers are located. Not surprisingly, most are in the USA, and the rest are concentrated in a swath of English-speaking countries, from Canada to New Zealand.

GoogleBlogMapDash

The map never changes, so I usually glance at it and move on. Today though, I clicked on Canada and it showed a dot for each city with readers. Hello, Yellowknife! And apparently they don’t have the Internet anywhere Sault Ste. Marie and Winnipeg, or maybe they have the Internet, but no Excel users.

Coincidentally, the second city in from the right is Sydney, Nova Scotia, and the second city from the left is Sidney, British Columbia.

GoogleBlogMapCanada

The line of dots along the border reminded me of a comment that David Letterman made last week, after the Olympics. He said the USA wouldn’t have to invade Canada to overtake it, they could just move the border 1° north.

If you zoom out from the map, you get a regional analysis of the visitors. No surprises there, with most readers from the Americas.

GoogleBlogMapWorld

And finally, I checked a larger version of the dashboard map, that gives better detail on the world countries. The only surprise here is that no one from Greenland has visited the Contextures Blog in the past month. I’ll have to get the marketing team to look into that.

GoogleBlogMapCountry

So, are there any surprises in your Google Analytics maps?

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How Long Have You Been Using Excel?

On the weekend I received a very nice email from someone who has been using the Excel tutorials on my Contextures website. She’s been working for a long time, and only recently started learning how to use Excel and Word.

I don’t remember exactly when I started using Excel, but it was definitely on a Mac, and probably around 1987. That puts me in the 21+ years of Excel category.

How about you? How long have you been using Excel?

Let me know in the comments, thanks!

Stop Looking in the Outbox

Does this ever happen to you? In Outlook, you create an email, hit Send, then wander off to do a few other things. Hours later, you get a phone call from the client who’s waiting for your message, and you realize that the email is still in the Outbox.

The only solution to the stuck email seemed to be copying its contents to another message, deleting the original, and sending the new message. Who has time for all that, especially when a client is waiting?

Stay Away From the Outbox

After unsent Outlook messages happened to me a few times, I finally figured out that the problem occurred if I clicked on the Outbox folder, before the message was sent.

So, I try to avoid clicking on the Outbox folder, but I accidentally click on it now and then.

Advice From the Experts

An Outlook message got stuck in the Outbox again today, so I Googled to see if anyone else had the same problem, and had posted a solution. The Google search turned up a page on the Slipstick site, owned by Outlook expert, Diane Poremsky – Email Won’t Send – Common Causes.

Her advice? Stop looking in the Outbox. 😉 Well, that’s the recommended quick fix. There’s also a longer article on the problem: After viewing the Outbox, the messages in it won’t send.

Apparently some add-ins mark the outbound messages as Read, if you peek in the Outbox, and that prevents them from being sent. Maybe I have one or more of the add-ins that are in that long list.

Okay, I’ll Stop

Anyway, it’s reassuring to know that other people have the unsent Outlook messages problem, and I can avoid it by staying out of the Outbox.

Next time I accidentally hit the Outbox (oh, I will), I’ll try marking the message as Unread, to see if that will fix the problem, and let me send it.

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My Blog is Gender Confused

On Twitter today, someone mentioned www.genderanalyzer.com, and reported that it guessed her blog was likely written by a man (59%).

So, I decided to test my website and blogs, to see how they’d be assessed. Here’s the description of how the analyzer works:

It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has been trained on 11000 blogs written by men and women.

I figured that the Excel sites would lean to the male side, because of the technical material. Probably more men than women are blogging about computer stuff.

And I was right – here are the scores:

  1. We think http://blog.contextures.com is written by a man (82%).
  2. We think http://www.contextures.com is written by a man (84%).
  3. We think http://www.pivot-table.com is written by a man (84%).

It’s interesting that my Contextures website is slightly more manly than my Contextures blog. 😉

This blog though, is gender neutral, despite having a female name.

  • We guess http://debradalgleish.com/blog/ is written by a man (55%), however it’s quite gender neutral.

So – how does your blog/website rate?

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Please Don’t Send Your Giant Files

Just like you, I get a fair amount of spam and other junk in my email inbox every day. There are regular requests for Excel help too, that I’ve written about before.

Some of those Excel help requests come with a file attachment, but most files are fairly small – in the 50-200 Kb size. I’ll admit to opening some of them, if the help request is interesting, and the problem is well described.

Today I got an email with a 2 Mb Excel attachment, from someone I’d never heard of, let alone had any prior interaction with. He was offering me an “interactive workbook” that I could put on my Sample Excel Files page.

Through careful research, he learned that my name is “Hi”, so that impressed me. (Many people believe that my name is “Sir”, so “Hi” is an improvement.)

I deleted the email immediately, so I can’t quote it exactly, but it had only a short paragraph with a vague description of the attachment. There were no details about sender or the file that made me want to take a look.

Sharing Your File

There are some files on my Sample Excel Files page that other people have created. You can learn amazing things by taking a look at someone else’s work.

Both Ron Coderre and Roger Govier have generously provided so many sample files that I created separate pages for them. Dave Peterson has contributed several files too, like his popular Navigation toolbar. But even they wouldn’t send a random 2 Mb file without asking if I’m interested.

If you have an Excel workbook that you’d like to share on my website, please let me know. Maybe it would be perfect for my website visitors.

If we haven’t met, or emailed, before, tell me a little about yourself, and the kind of file that you’ve created. I try to keep the sample files pretty small, so they’re quick and easy for people to download, so I probably won’t be able to use your file if it’s too big. 

Does This Happen to You?

Do you ever get giant Excel files that you didn’t ask for, and weren’t expecting? How do you handle that?

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