Then came 2007 which gave us the Ribbon in its place. The Ribbon consumed as much real estate as three rows of toolbars, and gave us a lot less commands one click away. The story we heard was how Microsoft was trying to make the experience easier for new users… making commands more discoverable. The revised system was supposedly more logical than all the commands buried under menus in the old structure.

To some extent, I’d agree that Microsoft accomplished their goals here. The applications are much less intimidating than they were for new/less experienced users. The issue is that it smacked the power users pretty badly. I still feel that I’m less efficient with the Ribbon than I was with the toolbar hierarchy, and I’ve written the book on how to customize the user interface. The only reason I got into ribbon customization in the first place was to try and get some of that efficiency back that we lost under the new paradigm.

Interestingly, as we can see with the copy/paste icons in Office 2010, Microsoft is starting to move toward and icon basis again, without as much text:

I wonder if this is to make it easier to port the application to other languages? I also wonder how long it will be before we start seeing a Ribbon with no text on it at all? After all, it just wastes space when you know what the commands do.

Now, here’s where I get confused… I installed Internet Explorer 9. And here’s the basic install:

This is discoverability? I’m not saying I want a full blown Ribbon here, but you can’t tell me that these two philosophies are the same? The menus are gone, granted that’s consistent, but where are the favourites that I used to be able to have one click away? I actually had to download a toolbar for it. In fact, I’ve found the lack of discoverability of controls to be so frustrating that I went and installed Firefox. Unfortunately this seems to be the new thing.

I don’t get the completely opposite directions here. In one app we’re putting in big, bloated user interfaces to be in the users faces. In the other we’re trying to remove it all and make them hunt for it. What gives?

I keep my OS pretty current, and installed Windows 7 SP1 as soon as it was pushed out in Windows Update. Today we go to install Microsoft’s Remote Server Administration tools so that I can connect to Hyper-V to build and manage my Virtual Machines, and it won’t install. What the hell? I get a nice little error message telling me “This update is not applicable to your computer.” Like hell it’s not!

After some searching, I found out that someone has come up with a route around this issue to get it to work correctly, which you can find here.

Microsoft has acknowledged it as an issue. In their KB’s wording: “Microsoft has confirmed this to be by design, as RSAT was designed for Windows 7 RTM version. A newer version of RSAT is slated to be released in the future.” Their advice is to uninstall SP1, install RSAT, then reinstall SP1 again. To me that sounds more dangerous than the route I went to fix it.

Personally, I don’t think this is good enough. If this is truly “by design”, then someone needs a smack upside the head. Microsoft wants people to keep their software current, and these are the exact people getting smacked!

I get that software is tough to deploy, but if the route I went is all that’s needed to fix it, surely someone could roll up a quick hotfix to release in a few hours.

I found this a little frustrating, but gave up on it. I expanded the model completely, protected the sheets and let the users have at ‘er.

Tonight at VBAExpress.com though, I was posting on a thread where the user had included the following in their code:

Sh.EnableOutlining = True

Wow! So obviously there IS a way to enable the outlining tools when the worksheet is protected, right? I ran the macro I had modified for the user and sure enough it worked. Cool!

So then I opened up a copy of my model and:

• Ran the following code: Activesheet.EnableOutlining = True
• Protected the worksheet

I didn’t work. What the hell?

After a little sleuthing I found out what the issue was. In order for the EnableOutlining to take effect, you must run the code that protects your worksheet with the userinterfaceonly:=true argument.

The unfortunate part of this is that userinterfaceonly:=true doesn’t stick between sessions. So that nice macro free workbook is now going to have to be saved into an xlsm format with the following code in it:

Private Sub Workbook_Open()

Dim ws As Worksheet

 

Application.ScreenUpdating = False

For Each ws In ThisWorkbook.Worksheets

With ws

.Protect userinterfaceonly:=True

.EnableOutlining = True

End With

Next ws

Application.ScreenUpdating = True

End Sub

 

That shouldn’t be necessary in my opinion, but whatever. A macro laden file is a small price to pay for the functionality. Man I love VBA!

I was writing an article up for how to customize the Office Ribbon in Excel 2010, and thought I’d build a custom Auditing Tab. Using the built in groups is REALLY easy, but there were commands there I didn’t need. So I figured that I’d try to make some custom groups, insert the commands I wanted, and see how it worked. Even better, I know that you can now export the customizations, so I could even share them!

To build a custom Ribbon tab:

• Right click the Ribbon and choose “Customize Ribbon”, or go to FileàExcel OptionsàCustomize Ribbon.
• Click New Tab
• Select the tab and choose Rename
• Go to the “Choose commands from” dropdown and choose Main Tabs
• Find the groups you like, select them and click the Add>> button

To add a new group to a tab, first select the tab then:

• Click New Group
• Select the group and choose Rename
• Drill down to the commands you like (left window), select them and click the Add>> button

Overall it’s not too complicated really.

So here’s the setup I did for my Auditing Tab… (I shrunk it so that you only see stuff pertaining to that tab):

As you can see, I created custom Formula Auditing, Other Tools and Sort & Filter groups. (I don’t know why I use the default Sort & Filter as well a custom one, but there you have it. At any rate, it doesn’t change this… the tab looks like crap!

The icons for Trace Precedents, Trace Dependents and Remove Arrows are all large and very blocky looking. Same with the Sort buttons on the custom group. Why is it that they are shown nice and small on the built in group, but not the custom one? And isn’t it interesting how Microsoft broke the 1 or 3 to a row rule with the Sort group? Makes it very obvious here!

If you want the customization file to try this yourself, click here.

Personally, I’m happy enough with the way the built-in groups work, but I think there should have been a bit more control on the sizing of the icons here. It seems that the need for my book (RibbonX – Customizing the Office 2007 Ribbon) isn’t dead yet, but honestly, it should be!

• I’ve got some funny looking code samples
• I’ve got a weird A character showing up all over
• I’ve lost my navigation to the RibbonX TOC

I’ll try and fix this up over the next few weeks (kind of busy), but my main priority is going to have to be my main site, which still has some issues and needs a pretty major upgrade…

Back in 2003 I built a database to track our liquor inventories at work. It’s fairly simple in that it has a table of product details like name, price, size, cost, etc… and a table that records my inventory counts. We used a little Palm Pilot with a built in Symbol scanner to collect the scan date, UPC code and quantity on hand. As we estimate our partial bottles that sit on the bar, we record decimal quantities on hand. (i.e. 2.1 bottles.)

This has worked really well for the last few years, but as with all technology, it wears out. While the database is fine, the Palm Pilot is another matter. The screen calibration went so far off and despite several resets I couldn’t fix it, rendering it useless. The bad news, of course, is that the unit we used has been discontinued for about 2 years, and my last replacement unit… well… it’s now in the trash.

Fortunately I already had a new device on hand to use. We’d installed a new system in another department last year that came with a handheld ruggedized scanner. Very nice little unit made by Unitech (HT-630). We were so impressed that we bought a second one. One reason was that we now have a backup unit, but the other is that the vendor (whom I know fairly well) convinced me that I could use this as a replacement for my aging Palm units. “Oh yeah,” he told me, “it’s fully programmable. You’ll have no problem knocking up a little program for it. There’s a whole programming environment, you build the job, upload it and you’re good to go. It won’t be a problem for you.”

I love that people have that much faith in me sometimes… then there’s other times where I want to phone them up and…

At any rate, I’ve been meaning to get around to programming this new unit, but just haven’t been able to make it a priority. But since our little Palm Pilot blew up, that kind of forced the issue. And naturally it had to happen two days before quarter end. Great. So last Thursday/Friday I spent time trying to get this thing working in time for them to count inventory on Saturday. Nothing like a little pressure!

The odd thing is that this unit is programmed by building a flowchart. I’ve never seen the like before. To me flowcharts are used for documenting how the program works, not telling the program how to work. Very odd. The shot below is from the program I released on Friday to count inventory. (Yeah… I DID do it, but I wouldn’t say it wasn’t a problem!)

This was a real trip to work with. Ever seen a flowchart that is allowed to go multiple directions at once? I haven’t. To me flowcharts have a decision point between every directional choice, but this little program actually flows data along one arrow and the input screens along another one.

And well creating the flowchart is all good, you then have to configure every option of every node in the chart. You can’t copy an existing node that is setup correctly either… each option of each box has to be configured. Each link, each input, everything. This is just one of at least 14 screens to configure. Each line you see (incoming and outgoing) increases that count by 1, (image below has 20 screens to do) so it’s very tedious:

It took me about 1 ½ days to built this program. I spent a ton of time spinning my wheels trying to figure out how to make a lookup file work, then trying to figure out how to write the data to the text file, then trying to figure out how to upload the program to the unit, and then I thought I had it. Then I reviewed the collection file and figure out that it was submitting a full record every time a single piece was captured. So I’d get four records for every UPC code, one with the correct quantity, three with the prior… arrggh!

I also capture the count date and month end date. I was really happy to see that you could use a formula too, so I figured that I could use a formula to convert the count date to the month end date. I quickly jumped into the formula screen… and after staring at that for about 4 seconds I clicked the Help button:

Seriously? “Write pieces of C code”? Try web searching for some help there… even when I did find something, I couldn’t figure out how to make any sense of it!

In Excel this would be easy…. =If(Day(CountDate)<15,Eomonth(CountDate,-1),EOMonth(CountDate,0))

If anyone has any idea how to write that in C code, I’d be really grateful. There is no manual with this software and the “Help” files are about as useful as… well… they’re not. I ended up ignoring the formula and elected to capture the count date twice. I just have to edit the text file and replace one of them with the month end date right now, and I’m good to go.

At any rate, I DID get the program working in time, and deployed it out there. The staff are ecstatic as it is much simpler to use than the last one. Yay, it’s time to celebrate!

Almost.

Today I was trying to import the text file into the existing table in Access. Access is causing me a hell of a hassle as it wants to populate the AutoNumber index field with my text file data. I don’t get that. It was never an issue before. I even put headers in my data fields, but no luck. I may have to resort to VBA to use a SQL insert statement in a loop to get this licked.

Worse though is that I messed something up. All of the decimal counts have been truncated to whole numbers, which makes my count file useless. I HATE having to deploy new technology in a hurry without proper testing. Our only recourse now is to estimate our inventory this month end and deal with fixing the technology issue for next month end.

At any rate, this has been an interesting learning experience. Programming C using flowcharts… it’s just plain weird.

I tried to record the creation of a conditional format in 2007 and here's what I got:

The first line was even highlighted red. Seriously, it could get the rest, but not the formula?

For reference, I found the install very slow compared to XP or Vista. It seemed to take forever and a day to install it. Oh, and just as a note, you need to license code before it will boot into Windows (duh!). I had to run to my wife's computer to grab a code from MSDN as I kind of forgot that little part.

I'd already installed this on a desktop PC, and found some interesting new features that look nice:

• Screen Magnifier tool (no more need for the magnifier that comes with my mouse software?)
• Sticky Notes (stick right on the desktop)
• Live Preview of application pages/windows from the task bar
• Clipping tools (competes with SnagIt/GrabIt)

Interestingly enough the screen magnifier and live preview did NOT work well on my laptop, where they did work on the desktop.

I'll also say that the version of IE8 included with Win7 sucks. On both the desktop and laptop it crashed repeatedly. I ended up restarting IE8, clearing 2 error messages and going straight to Firefox.com to download a useable web browser.

Windows Live Mesh will not install on Windows7 at this time. That's a bit of a problem for me as I keep some pretty critical documents there to make sure I have a backup of them.

Upon shutting the laptop down last night I also ended up triggering the blue screen of death… I haven't actually seen one of those in a long time.

Of course, I had to work today, so I pulled the Windows 7 drive out and put my old Vista one back in… and just about had a heart attack! The BitLocker drive encryption screen came up. I've never actually seen that before, as it doesn't actually appear to do anything when you turn it on. The momentary panic passed though when I verified that the key I had tucked away was the right one, and I'm up and running again.

In the recent update, the vendor decided to add the year, but not in a good way. Now my data looks like this:

MAY9/09

MAY10/09

MAY11/09

 

Unfortunately this does NOT translate well into a date format automatically. You'd think that it would convert when you pulled it through the text import wizard, but it doesn't. Had the dates had 2 digit days consistently, or a delimiter of some kind between the month and day I believe it would have worked. As it is, the MDY format messes up the dates with 2 digit days and ignores the single digit days completely, giving me an even bigger mess. But pulling them in as text means that they can't be used to drive date dependant formulas, and sort like this:

MAY1/09

MAY10/09

MAY11/09

MAY2/09

MAY20/09

 

This is very irritating, and many users would tell you that this isn't trivial to fix. I worked up the following formula so that I could convert the dates into real dates:

=DATEVALUE(LEFT(A9,3)&" "&MID(A9,4,FIND("/",A9,1)-4)&", "&2000+RIGHT(A9,2))

(It assumes that the date is in A9)

This works by feeding the DateValue function the date in a "MMM DD, YYYY" format, which it can interpret. Here's the breakdown:

• Month: LEFT(A9,3) &" " returns the left 3 characters of the text string followed by a single space
• Day: MID(A9,4,FIND("/",A9,1)-4)&", " returns the string in the middle starting with the 4^th character, returning the number of characters between the slash and the 3^rd character, plus a comma and a space
• Year: 2000+RIGHT(A9,2) returns 2000 plus the right two characters

Hopefully we're not using this spreadsheet in 2100... I can safely say that it won't be my issue if we are. J

We have lodged a complaint with the vendor as this is stupid. Any financial program that exports financial data should export dates in a format that is compliant with the biggest spreadsheet program out there. I should not have had to waste time writing a formula like that above.

The bigger part of irritation for me is that it is coming during every month end reporting period, causing us grief on getting to work. Yesterday, as we're busy preparing for our quarter end (which has an EXTREMELY tight deadline), high winds knocked the power out… and now it's snowing.

Grr….

Oh well, we'll get through it. We always do, but I think it's time for spring to come along now!