ThoughtAsylum

I’ve been trying a number of applications recently on my Windows mobile device (Samsung Omnia) and it started grumbling again that I’m low on main storage memory.  I’ve made it much happier now so I thought I’d share some of my tips with you on how to keep your storage memory free.  Some of the tips may only be applicable if you have certain items of software installed.

I was recently asked to look at a problem a colleague was having with an Excel spreadsheet where they wanted to use a drop down list in the cells of one column and then a drop down list in the next column that was dependent upon the selection in the previous column. This is something I’d come across before and a little browsing of the help file refreshed my memory and I gave them a solution based upon data validation and the use of the INDIRECT function.

I posted earlier about a better way for producing dynamic lists in Excel.  One of the “tricks” I used to simplify things was using the text values of the items in a primary list to identify a secondary list to use.

It seems that drop down lists are the in thing at work right about now.  One of my colleagues dropped by with a query about creating drop down lists in Word 2007.  So this is how to go about doing it…

After spending a bit of time looking at service desk records today I had the opportunity to look at a particular request where a SharePoint user wanted to include links to files on other web sites in a document library without uploading the file onto the SharePoint site.  This is actually a really nice idea as then if the other site is updated (assuming the URL remains the same), the latest version is always accessible via the SharePoint site.

Microsoft Exchange is a fairly ubiquitous system for handling e-mails and I made a surprising discovery today whilst amending a user’s mailbox storage limits … they don’t get updated straight away.

Have you ever wanted to use the browse for a folder dialog box from your VBScript?  Well maybe you can make use of this function?  It’s an amalgamation of various other scripts tailored to my own needs so hopefully it’ll suit your purposes too, but if not just tweak it until it does.

Armed with my folder browser script I finally finished rounding out my script to clone / duplicate a folder structure.

A few days ago I was speaking to one of my users about creating some PDF files from Microsoft Word and securing them so that they can’t be copied or printed.  Rather than using expensive software from Adobe or a generic creator like CutePDF I recommended using the add-in for Word 2007 that Microsoft provide as it provides some useful accessibility options (thanks to JISC TechDis for highlighting that one to me).

A little while ago I posted about some ways to reclaim memory on a Windows Mobile device.  The reason for this was that the main memory on my Samsung Omnia was almost at zero and it had been a fairly common occurrence.  I’ve spent a little while recently trying to get a Skype client working on it and installing it to anywhere but the main memory seemed cause a few issues.  Today however I’ve had a good day working on the phone and I’ve managed to not only get the latest version of the Skype client running from storage rather than main memory but also found a few additional ways of getting some more control over the main memory.

Having spent a good part of the last couple of days doing some housekeeping and updating on my Samsung Omnia I had a bit of an issue late last night.  The Omnia is aimed at doing everything (hence the name), but last night I owned an Oblivia.  I’m not sure quite what happened but I think a disagreement between Windows Vista and my Omnia may have been to blame.

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation I’d been trying to put together for the best part of six months and this evening I’ve sent it on to the users who attended and who were unable to attend but showed an interest.  I realised at this point I hadn’t actually blogged about it so I thought I might put together a little post about it.

I came across a bizarre issue today in Microsoft Word. A user had a document containing a set of information laid out in a tabular format where the text in each cell was being condensed and overlaid so that the text was all being placed one character on top of another

I deal with a fair few academics and if there’s one thing they love about the Internet and the World Wide Web it’s YouTube and the vast resources it offers.  Giving multimedia presentations is obviously a great way of getting people engaged, but an issue is that when visiting an institution you can’t always guarantee that you will have access to the Internet so being able to download a video from YouTube is a huge benefit.

Since I had my Omina problems the other week (it’s about to go in for repair as there are still some strange hardware issues) I lost lots of basic information on the phone.  One of the things I lost was the ring tone.  I can’t remember what I had before, but I like to have something simple and professional that won’t cost me and won’t embarrass me in the office.  I don’t want the latest polyphonic chart hit blaring from my pocket as I sit at my desk.

I recently came across a site called TED. It’s a web site for the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference.  The web site itself has a showcase of videos clips from conference speakers and is worth a look.  The thing I want to quickly post about however is something I think is quite innovative … an interface I’ve not seen anywhere else (yet).

Unfortunately due to illness it’s taken me a couple of extra days to put this together, but at the weekend I attended The Gadget Show Live (GSL) at the NEC, Birmingham.  The Gadget Show is a UK television programme shown on Channel 5.  Each series has a weekly show and it showcases new technologies and compares leading products against one another.  it’s usually a good watch and the journalistic comparison is presented at a layman level and at the same time tends to offer some insightful points on practicalities of individual items.

Today has been a very busy day!  An early start saw me pulling together a variety of thoughts and pieces of information in preparation for the Higher Education Academy’s ICT team away day.  This was the first away day the team had ever had and there was certainly some apprehension as to how the day would pan out.

I’ve recently been helping some colleagues develop some reporting templates and they had a very particular requirement around drop down lists (which I’ll probably post about at some point in the future).  One issue that did occur however was that the dynamic lists that were incorporated into the workbook were added to and even though I had mentioned to the users about using Excel’s name manager to redefine the range of cells with that name, they forgot and inevitably the workbook would end up back with me to rectify.

When I’m asked about setting up a new wiki for a group, I often recommend PBWiki as it has a number of good features and for education it can be used for free.  Since I work within the HE sector this is a simple and quick solution for many of the cross-institutional groups and many people are familiar with it.

Today I was taking part in an online presentation from Dr. Simon Ball of JISC TechDis; one of his regular HE updates.  They use an online presentation system known as Instant Presenter to deliver the presentations on a roughly quarterly basis and they last for about half an hour.  A genuine whistle-stop tour.

Here’s a little tip for anyone who owns a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader.  It has a couple of expansion slots on it for an SD card and a Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo, and whilst these are intended to allow you to expand the number of books you can carry around there’s a bit of extra functionality you can draw upon here.

I have a problem with my mobile phone number … I can never remember it because I rarely tell it to anyone any more.  So when I do need to tell someone and there’s no one around who can tell me what it is from their phone I have to resort to looking it up on my own phone.  The quickest way I’ve found to do this is to punch in a special Vodafone code.

Today I came across an issue in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS).  I was trying to upload some Microsoft PowerPoint slides into a slide library in a My Site and everything had gone fine with the first presentation, but the second one I tried came up with an error:

It’s been rather busy of late and I’ve only just got chance to start posting again.  So I thought I’d best begin by posting about the weekend of the 8th, 9th and 10th of May.

Recently I’ve been working a little bit with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  It is recommended that Internet Explorer is used to interact with this web based system as it provides the widest and tightest integration and range of features.  Unfortunately I have a strong preference for Mozilla Firefox over Internet Explorer.

I’ve been tinkering recently with some things around portable applications which I will probably post more about in the hopefully not too distant future.  One of the things I’ve been trawling around for and busily configuring are various free web server packages that are “portable”.  Unfortunately it has taken a fair bit of effort to actually track down and configure something that is portable enough.   The problem for me is that I have a particular need to locate the web server within a particular sub folder and in the case of most software packages this is not an option.