Debra D's Blog

Recently, I received a cool looking gift from Microsoft – a Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse. The mouse lies flat for storage, and you bend it, to snap it into shape, when you want to use it.

It has a very small transmitter, that sticks out about 1/2″ when plugged into the computer’s USB port. When you’re not using the transmitter, just put it on the front or back of the mouse, and it magically (or magnetically) sticks there.

Instead of a scroll wheel, there is a slider, and that feature was very easy to use.

Testing the Arc Touch Mouse

The mouse was easy to install and use – I just plugged in the transmitter, and it was ready to go. On my first try, I didn’t bend the mouse far enough (one click, instead of two), so it didn’t work. After checking the Getting Started guide, I gave the mouse another click and it fired up.

The mouse handled well, for the most part, but it was a little sticky when trying to do some fine work. Maybe it gets better when the mouse has been used a little longer, or the operator has more experience.

Back to My Old Mouse

I worked with the Arc Touch mouse for a couple of hours, but couldn’t get used to it, so I’ve put it away for now. It would be better suited to someone with larger hands than mine, I think.

In my hand it felt too wide, and I was always conscious of the edges of the mouse. For now, I’ll stick with my little Logitech M305, which is a better size for me.

Have You Tried It?

Have you used the Arc Touch mouse? Did you like it and stick with it?

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Help! Would you please try to add a comment here, and let me know if you have any problems?

[Update] Thanks for the help — things seem to be working better now.

Flooded With Comment Spam

Over on the Contextures Blog, I’ve been flooded with spam comments. The Akismet plugin catches some of the comments, and puts them into the Spam list. However, there is still a long list of comments in the Moderation queue every day.

Most of those Moderation comments are spam, but I don’t want to accidentally delete any of the valid comments. I appreciate it when someone takes the time to add a comment, and don’t want to lose those.

I accidentally deleted one of Dick Kusleika’s comments yesterday, because something in his comment was on the “banned words” list. No, not his name – I had blocked “SEO” because of all the spam on that topic, and Dick’s blog is dailydoseofexcel.com.  Oops!

So, it takes a while to check through them, approving the real comments, and trashing the rest (carefully!)

Growmap Anti Spam Plugin

Today I installed the Growmap Anti Spam Plugin, which might prevent some of those fake comments from being posted.

It adds a check box below the comment form, and the comment is not accepted unless you check that box. That sounds easy enough, but sometimes things don’t work exactly as expected.

If you add a comment here, and have any problems, please let me know. ddalgleish AT contextures.com

Thanks!

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Last week, on a very snowy day, my sister, Nancy Nelson, drove to a nearby town, to do a presentation at an Electronics Day for grade 8 girls. One of the tech teachers at the school is trying to get young people interested in engineering and technology.

Nancy is an electrical engineer, and a professor at Conestoga College in Cambridge. Her program, that she talks about in the video, is “Integrated Telecommunication and Computer Technologies”.

The event was shown on the 6 o’clock news in London, and you can see Nancy in the video below. She starts talking around the 1:00 minute mark in the video.

At the end of the video, a couple of the girls are interviewed, and one seems interested in a technology career. The other girl has something more traditional in mind. I wonder if the split was really 50-50, or if the reporter looked for two girls with opposite views. Maybe they should all consider working with Excel!

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After a long hard day in Excel, this wine glass might be just about the right size. Did they name it “XL” in honour of our favourite spreadsheet program?

In case you can’t read the box labels, that are behind the glasses, they say, “XL Wine Glass – holds a whole bottle of wine!”

P.S. I wasn’t sure what category to assign to this post, so I picked “Computer tips”. 😉

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Sure, you can program in Excel VBA, but what other programming languages do you know? Maybe VBA is enough, but if you’d like to expand a bit, there is a free course in JavaScript programming that I’m trying out.

The course is online and interactive, and they’ll send you an email each week, announcing the new lesson. You don’t have to register on the website, unless you want to track your progress as you go along.

Easy Steps

To get started, I did the mini-course, “Getting Started with Programming”.

So far, I like the lesson setup and interaction. You read a short instruction step, type something in the interactive box, and get immediate feedback. In the screenshot below, I’m in lesson 5 of the total 8 lessons.

I lost track of the time, but best guess is that it took about an hour to go through all the lessons. In the CodeYear course, you’ve got a week before the next lesson arrives, so you could spread it out over a few days. Maybe those lessons will be tougher than the lessons in this intro course.

You’re Not in Excel VBA Anymore

The course is just starting, but I’ve already learned a few key differences between JavaScript programming and Excel VBA programming.

1. Variables are case sensitive. In Excel VBA, after you define a variable, you can type it in the code, and the case automatically corrects. I use that as a tool for catching misspellings. In JavaScript, that doesn’t happen.
2. End with a semi-colon. At the end of each line of JavaScript code, you have to remember to type a semi-colon. Unless, of course, the semi-colon is on the next line, with a curly bracket. This might take me a while to remember!
3. Arrays are enclosed in square brackets. In Excel, we use curly brackets instead.
4. Three equal signs for “equal to”. In Excel VBA, it only requires one = to check if one value is equal to another.

This should be interesting! If you sign up too, you can let me know in the comments, and we can compare notes.

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