software | Thomas' Work Space

Inserting Word Building Blocks from Template using Ribbon or QAT

2016/06/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

Either insert from Ribbon / Insert / Quickparts:

Or for extra speed and convenience, you can have your template store access to your building from the Quick Access Toolbar:

Demo video is here.

Categories: office-software, training Tags: building-blocks, MS-Word, qat, quickparts

How to prevent OneNote from crashing when hovering over search results

2015/10/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

Problem: In a strange new development, my OneNote crashes (multiple times, until things eventually become stable again) when I search my notebooks from the upper right search box. Specifically, as soon as I hover my mouse over the search results display.
My environment: OneNote 2013 32-bit on Windows 7 64-bit. These are notebooks on a network share, and they are updated from multiple machines. Not aware of any recent changes to my mouse settings or drivers.
My Workaround: Navigate the search results using the keyboard. This seems to prevent those crashes.

Categories: office-software, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging Tags: 2013, ms-onenote

Yet another couple of glitches solved in setting up Outlook 2013 with Gmail IMAP for GoogleApps

2014/12/19 plagwitz Leave a comment

I googled and followed this useful guide. However, a couple of glitches remained:
Connection to Incoming mail server fails if you really just put your username:
1. put instead of username@companygoogledomain.com:
Test send of email message through outgoing server fails if you just followed instructions:
2. Click on button: “More” / tab: “Outgoing Server” / do check box “My outgoing server requires authentication ” and log on (I now prefer to be explicit, after the initial mixup of usernames for incoming and outgoing), enter your full user@compgoogledomain.com and password. No need to enable SPA, though.
Viola (and quousque tandem…, sigh ).

Categories: e-infrastructure, office-software Tags: 2013, gmail, imap, outlook

A little addendum about data types to the +N(“comment”) in-cell formula comment trick in Excel

2014/12/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

You are relying with this well-documented trick on the fact that addition of 0 will altering a numeric value.
However, what is not mentioned: not all work in Excel involves the number data type.
1. Try adding your comment or zero to a string data type, and you will get a #VALUE error.
2. Boolean, however, works also, since – as you can see when you have Excel evaluate your formula – if you try adding 0 to a Boolean data type, Excel casts the prior Boolean FALSE to 0 or TRUE to 1, and casts the result of your addition (of 0 = nothing) back to the same initial Boolean for further evaluation.
3. So just put your +N()-comments in those part of your formula that involve either number or Boolean data type, and avoid adding to strings, for example:

=IF(
    OR(
        ISBLANK(
            [Related issues]
        ),
        (            ISERR(
                FIND(
                    “#“,
                    [Related issues]
                )
            ) )
    ) +
    N(
        “do nothing if no related task in col:related issues“
    ),
    ““,
    IF(
        NOT(
            ISERR(
                FIND(
                    “,“,
                    [Related issues]
                )
            )
        ) +
        N(
            “do nothing if no 2nd value in col:related issues“
        ),
        CONCATENATE(
            MID(
                MID(
                    [Related issues],
                    FIND(
                        “,“,
                        [Related issues]
                    ) + 2,
                    LEN(
                        [Related issues]
                    ) –
                    FIND(
                        “,“,
                        [Related issues]
                    ) + 1 +
                    N(
                        “extracted the 2nd value from col:related issues“
                    )
                ),
                FIND(
                    “#“,
                    MID(
                        [Related issues],
                        FIND(
                            “,“,
                            [Related issues]
                        ) + 2,
                        LEN(
                            [Related issues]
                        ) –
                        FIND(
                            “,“,
                            [Related issues]
                        ) + 1
                    )
                ) + 1,
                4
            ) +
            N(
                “extracted the 4# of id of related issue“
            ),
            MID(
                MID(
                    [Relatedissues],
                    FIND(
                        “,“,
                        [Relatedissues]
                    ) + 2,
                    LEN(
                        [Relatedissues]
                    ) –
                    FIND(
                        “,“,
                        [Relatedissues]
                    ) + 1
                ),
                FIND(
                    “ “,
                    MID(
                        [Related issues],
                        FIND(
                            “,“,
                            [Related issues]
                        ) + 2,
                        LEN(
                            [Related issues]
                        ) –
                        FIND(
                            “,“,
                            [Related issues]
                        ) + 1
                    )
                ) + 1,
                2 +
                N(
                    “appended to or from to the 4# of id of related issue“
                )
            )
        ),
        ““
    )
)

This splits, extracts and copies values from a none to multi-value column for better sortability:

Categories: e-infrastructure, office-software Tags: comments, MS-Excel, worksheet-formulas

Stop ":Zone.Identifier:$DATA" files from being created…

2014/11/19 plagwitz 1 comment

… by running gpedit.msc as admin and setting "user configuration / administrative templates / windows components/ attachment manager / "Do not preserve zone information in file attachments" to "Enabled No. "

I observed these files in the drive my virtualbox win 8.shares with the linux host.
The answer is out there , of course, just not with all the search terms. A more thorough security discussion is also available.
Just seems not applicable to a share what virtualbox makes appear as a network folder to Windows while it really is not, which causes also other misleading security warnings also :