Category: Excel Consulting

Shrink Long URLs With Google URL Shortener

When you’re adding a link in Twitter, or in an email, you might not want to include a really long URL. In the past, I’ve often used a site like bit.ly or is.gd to create a shortened version of the link, and use that instead of the long link.

Now there’s a Google URL Shortener, that’s built in to your Google account, so I’ve just switched to using that. It’s easy to use, and I can quickly see all my shortened links, and track the clicks.

[Update: 2023-07-02]

  • Google URL shortener is no longer available, so now I use BL.INK to create short links, and highly recommend it. I bought a lifetime deal from AppSumo in 2021, and it was a great investment!
  • Or, if you don’t create many short links, Bitly has a free version that you can try. I used Bitly for a while, after Google’s shortener shut down, and it worked reliably.

Google Short Link Example

For example, I created a short link for this Contextures Blog post.

Create a Shortened URL

To create a shortened link:

  • Copy the long link
  • If you want to track the click on the shortened link, log in to your Google account
  • Go to the Google URL Shortener page, and paste the copied link into the URL box

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  • Click the Shorten button, to create the shortened URL
  • Copy the short URL, and paste it into your tweet or email (or anywhere else you need a link)

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Track the Shortened URL Clicks

To see the details on clicks for the shortened links:

  • Log in to your Google account, and go to the Google URL Shortener page
  • In the list of your shortened URLs, click the Details option for any of the links

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  • You’ll see the information about the clicks on the selected URL, such as Referrers and Countries.

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Save

Spot the Differences

Today I was looking through my photos, and found this shot of my office peripherals table, taken in November 2001.

DebOffice2001

I had two large phones, a huge scanner, an answering machine, giant router, and a business card Rolodex file. You can see the top of a filing drawer under the table, and the corner of my Apple printer at the left.

There’s a modem sitting on top of the scanner, but I’m not sure why it’s there. And yes, despite its enormous size, that’s just a scanner, not an all-in-one machine that also does the laundry and cooks dinner.

Today’s Peripherals

Here’s a picture of the same table, taken today, almost 9 years later. The current scanner is much smaller, as are the two phones. Each phone has a headset plugged in, which makes it easier to talk and type at the same time.

DebOffice2010

The filing drawer is gone, and you can’t see it, but there’s a UPS under the table. It has saved me from considerable aggravation any time the power has flickered, because it keeps the computer and monitor running while I save and close my open files.

A new modem is under the printer table, and an external hard drive, lamp, BlackBerry and iPod have been added. The business card file is still there, but moved to the printer table. Funny that it has survived, while lots of high tech stuff has come and gone.

Your Office

What did your office look like 9-10 years ago? What does it look like now?

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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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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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Online Collaboration

Recently, I tested WiZiQ for an online meeting with a client, and wrote about the experience. In the comments, Pierre suggested edufire and andy recommended showdocument.

I took a quick look at both sites. Edufire looks like it would be great for running training sessions and small classes. ShowDocument lets you upload and work on files, so that could be a good way to work with a client, without having to install anything.

Bob Ryan commented that he plans to use DimDim for his business. I set up an account there, and ran a trial meeting, which worked well, but my screen settings seem slightly different, after using their screen sharing option.

For yesterday’s meeting with my client, I tried Office Live Meeting (OLM). Before the meeting, I set up a practice session, the tested the controls and settings. You can upload files, and share the screen, or a portion of the screen. Also, you can share a specific program, so that’s the option I used most of the time.

OLM was my favourite online meeting tool so far. I could pass the controls to my client, so we could both test the Access database that we were discussing.

I had to use Internet Explorer, instead of Firefox, and there are some components to download and install. But, most people have a computer that’s full of Microsoft products anyway, so that might not be too big a hurdle.

Dick had volunteered to be a guinea pig, if I tested WiZiQ again (thanks, Dick!). I’ll be trying OLM again, to see how some of the fancier tools work, so may he’ll agree to join that test session, if I set something up for later this week.

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More Online Meeting Tests

Last week I tried WiZiQ for an online meeting with a client. There were a few snags, that I mentioned in the class evaluation form that popped up when I finished my session.

The next day, someone in the WiZiQ customer support department emailed me, with a few suggestions for improving the audio. He also asked for details on the problems that I had with my uploaded Excel files.

In a followup email, he said that only a one-page portion of an Excel sheet will be visible onscreen. Most of the sheets that I create for clients are considerably bigger than that, so uploaded files won’t be too useful.

I did another test later, with my desktop running a session, and the laptop attending as a guest. That went better than the session with my client (due to better settings, not better guests!), so I’ll try WiZiQ again later.

For a free service, it seems pretty good. It will be a good place to practise this type of interaction, before moving to a paid service.

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