Friday, August 29, 2008
Sneaking a Peek inside the Chart Advisor Add-in
I recently wrote a post about the new Chart Advisor add-in from Microsoft's Office Labs, and Dave Lee (one of the developers) was very kind to post a couple of comments that added to my understanding of the add-in. If you don't already have it, I suggest that you download the Chart Advisor and give it a test run. This add-in has the potential to be a big help to those who struggle to choose the correct type of chart to represent their data.
In this post, I'm going to write about a few interesting things that I've learned by poking around in the XML files that configure the add-in. Please
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Monday, August 25, 2008
Office Labs Chart Advisor for Excel
Microsoft’s Office Labs has released an interesting new add-in for Excel 2007 (only!) called Chart Advisor. The purpose of this add-in is to help you to decide on the best chart type to represent your data. It is supposed to be a kind of charting expert system. I suspect that Jon Peltier will rip it apart, and that should be fun. Still, it seems to be an interesting idea so I thought I would provide an overview here. Note: I have updated this post at the bottom to reflect a recent (28 August 2008) update to the add-in.
The general concept of Chart Advisor is that you select some data in
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Saturday, August 23, 2008
The UltimateSteal Is Back
In the Spring, maybe earlier, Microsoft had a deal offering college students an opportunity to purchase Office Ultimate 2007 for only $59.95. That deal was extended until May, but has since expired… or so I thought.
College students can once again purchase the entire Office Ultimate 2007 suite for only $59.95. That is less than half of the price of Office Home and Student 2007, and less than 10% of the full retail price! This suite includes almost every available Office 2007 application: Access, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Publisher, OneNote, Groove, InfoPath, Outlook, and Accounting Express.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Duplicate Post Issue is Fixed
Last December I changed TVMCalcs.com from a static HTML site into a dynamic site using the ExpressionEngine content management system. I had tried several others, including Drupal and Joomla, but EE is more flexible, easier to learn, and extremely robust. I’m sure that I could have made any of those others work, but EE just made sense to me almost right away and the folks in the EE forums are extremely friendly and helpful. I highly recommend it if you are a webmaster looking for a CMS.
In any system that is new to you, there are always little details that slip by and eventually become
