Excel and PowerPoint - Part 2

To continue where I left off from the previous post. How do you animate a graph in PowerPoint when the graph is just window into Excel and not an actual PowerPoint graph?

Answer: You mask it with a bunch of white boxes and you set the exit animation. This method makes it look as if the chart is appearing, when in actuality it is the mask white box disappearing.

Obviously this isn't a perfect solution because things like axis lines are broken up and stuff, so it isn't really elegant, but it does the job.

If anyone has questions about anything Microstoft Office related, don't hesitate to ask it here.

Excel and PowerPoint

For the past year and a half, I have been working in a department that creates lots of powerpoint presentations. When I first got there, they had good presentations, but the data in them was not linked to all the data that was in their multitude of spreadsheets. So, how do you link all the data from the spreadsheets to the data in PowerPoint so you don't have to copy and paste data every time something changes?

NO ONE KNOWS! Seriously... Of all the great things that Microsoft Office provides, they don't let users link a cell or group of cells from Excel directly to a PowerPoint chart. This really stinks and Microsoft should fix it.

However, there is a solution that I use that does almost the same thing. The problem with my solution is that you can't get get chart animation quite as easily.

1. Get all the data from whatever source you have and put it into Excel
2. Remove the grid lines by choosing Tools --> Options --> General
3. Create the chart in Excel with all links to the data in Excel - I usually create the chart on a separate page.
4. Select the cell range around the chart (not the data). You are basically creating a "window into excel" and you are going to paste that window into PowerPoint. It's important to remember that your window is referencing a specific range in Excel. If you insert lines or columns, PowerPoint won't know that the chart might be in a different place now, so you may have to re-link it. This is why I usually put my chart on a separate worksheet from the data.
5. Go into your PowerPoint slide. Edit --> Paste Special... Links... Linked to Excel Workbook.

Voila! You have a spreadsheet chart in your PowerPoint presentation. Anytime the data changes, just right click on the link in PowerPoint and click "refresh".

Some people choose to embed the spreadsheet into PowerPoint. This works sometimes, but if you have a huge spreadsheet with 50 charts and graphs, that's a very large file. If you embed it 50 times into PowerPoint, that makes for an enourmous PowerPoint presentation. In addition, if your data comes from an external source (something that Excel linked to) it can cause refresh problems.

Now, how do you animate the chart if you don't want to show the whole thing all at once?

Come back soon for the continuation.

Download em all

I've been a big user of Firefox for several years now. I know, there's been big news lately that it's got the most security holes of any browser. Well, that is really because the Firefox people actually post every threat and security hole that they have. Think of it this way, if you were to buy a safe, would you buy the one that is constantly updating their "safe technology" every time they find something that someone could curcomvent? Now, I'm not saying that other browsers don't plug security holes, but they also don't publish every single one that they find.

But that's the long way of getting to this topic. I found my self in the past few weeks wanting to learn some more about programming and I found an awesome website "learncpp.com." It's basically the C++ learning books (and then some) that cost 49.95 online for free. I love it but didn't want to log onto the internet everytime I wanted to read something from it. Plus, we never know how long these sites are going to last for anyway.

Along comes the "Download em all" add in for firefox. The thing is great. I can download everyting from the site with just a click of a couple buttons. The site was set up in main chapters and sub-sections. Each time you wanted to view another subsection, you would click on "next" and it brings you to the next page.

Well, download em all is able to download all those "next" pages into saved html pages on your computer. Really cool.

If you ever find yourself needing to download a bunch of stuff from the same site, you should check it out.

Notepad++

I was looking the other day for a good free program that I could use for program code editing and I found a real gem. Notepad ++ is a really great program if you like doing any type of programming from HTML to C++. I've used many programs in the past. I love Microsoft Visual Studio, but am not willing to shell out the $1,200 (or some rediculous amount of money) for the program. That's what brought me to see if there was a program out there that at least highlighted stuff for me. It doesn't have "predictive text," but with the huge number of add-ons that someone has probably done that.

Anyway, last week, I was troubleshooting a report at work. The report was based in SQL language and had over 22,000 lines of code. Last year the report worked great, this year it kept crashing and actually bringing down the entire server sometimes. I was told that "nothing had changed" on the database side between last year and this year and it must be a probelm with the report. Well, the report hadn't changed either so I went to the SQL to investigate. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to manually check 22,000 lines of SQL. So along comes Notepad ++ with it's compare add-in. It is awesome. The compare add in compares two files together, so I saved down the last years report SQL and this years report SQL to text files and compared them.

The add-in analyzes each line of the text file and shows the files side by side. Any line that is completely different on one side or the other gets highlighted and a line gets inserted in the other file to allow you to keep the matching lines side by side. Any lines that look almost the same get highlighted in a different color with the differences highlighted in a darker shade. All lines that match 100% don't get highlighted. With 22,000 lines of code, after running this add-in it took me about 2 minutes to find the problem. Turns out that "nothing has changed" was not quite 100% accurate. There is a setting called "Full Outer Join" that isn't a good setting to set as a default for the entire database, that somehow changed from last year to this year.

If you are looking for Windows notepad on super steroids, give notepad++ a try.

New sayings

Each day as I interact with Kristen, Alanna, and Annabelle, I keep thinking that I should turn this blog into a "saying of the day" blog.  I'll tag them all with "dialog" and you can choose dialog in my cool new "tag cloud" (see to the right)...

I'll do it as much as I can think of it from now on.

Saying of today.

Me to Alanna (as she's in the tub) - do you want 5 or 10 more minutes?

Alanna (in the tub):  Dad, I'd like more than 10 minutes.

Me:  Well, you can have 10.

Alanna:  Dad, would you like to do something on the computer for 10 minutes while I spend my 10 minutes in the tub?

So, I am.  But am watching the clock very closely cause we both know that 10 minutes can turn into more than 10 minutes when I'm on the computer :)

Another cool program

Add Evernote (www.evernote.com) to the list of productive free software. I really like this program.

Interesting websites that I've come across

Since I haven't posted in quite a while, i thought it might be useful to list the websites and applications that I've found or started using recently that have some sort of interesting quality.

www.gyminee.com - a website that helps you track weight loss, calorie intake, and come up with exercise programs.

www.google.com/reader - an RSS feed reader that allows you to read many news feeds from tons of websites, quickly and easily

mail.google.com - gmail keeps getting better and better with free POP and IMAP so that I can read it on my Windows Mail program as well as new and helpful features being added monthly it seems.

www.facebook.com - it's just fun

www.anyvite.com - you can invite freinds to a gathering and set up a mini-blog for the event.  Friends can accept your invitation without having to register on the website to say yes / no / maybe.  Plus, after the event you can add pictures and video.

www.igoogle.com - a personalized web page of google with tons of gadgets to choose from.  A good homepage for some

www.go2web20.net - a list of "web 2.0" sites.

www.todoist.com - a nice small to-do website (I still like Outlook better though)

del.icio.us - bookmarks stored online and syncronized with my firefox

APPLICATIONS

Launchy - press alt-space to bring up the launcher, which indexes your desktop and computer and can launch pretty much anything with a little tweaking.  I have set up (for instance) a launcher called "gtf" and "gte" which brings up google translate and translates the phrase that I give it.  For example if I want to know what "ca va" means in english, I type alt+space gtf [TAB] ca va and press enter and it immediatly brings me to the google translate website with the translation of ca va.  It's very useful for those long french e-mails that I get every so often.

OpenOffice 3.0 - looks much better than it's 2.0 counterpart and is a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite.

Playon by MediaMall - lets you stream Hulu, CBS, Netflix, ESPN through your computer to your PS3 and watch it on your TV

Yeah, that's it for now.  I'll write more if I think of others.