I’m writing to you to make you aware of WinAutomation (www.WinAutomation.com), our software product (that includes a powerful macro recorder) that helps you automate your repetitive tasks (e,g. files, folder, database, web actions etc), so that you can save time, effort and labor.

In the name of full disclosure, the person offered me a pro version of their software if I’d like to blog a review of it. Actually, they even went further and offered me some licenses to give away to blog readers as well. It sounded like a pretty good deal to me, so I accepted.

Now, before I really give a review on this, I think it’s worth acknowledging that I’m not your typical user. When I feel like automating a task, I typically write the code to do it. I’d also say that the majority of those tasks are inside office, and I do very little in the way of repetitive tasks at the Windows Shell level.

WinAutomation does offer the ability to automate Excel to some degree and has an “Execute SQL Statement” ability to work with databases. Neither of those are any interest to me though, as I’d do both through VBA. I really don’t do any repetitive web actions either… unless you count opening bookmarks. So what could this offer me?

Basic Scripting

One thing that I was looking to accomplish was file sharing. I use Windows Live Mesh to write a critical file up from my laptop to the cloud and share it with a couple of people. The problem I had is that this file also needs to exist on the network, and I don’t want to install Windows Live Mesh on my file server. So I needed to come up with a way that I could copy this file to the network every time it was changed. WinAutomation does actually accomplish that need for me.

The interface doesn’t take too long to get used to, and in a short time I was able to knock up the following script:

Long story short, this checks if my network exists and copies the file to the network if it does, or notifies me if it isn’t copied. The script is set up with a trigger to monitor the source file and runs each time the file is changed. And I get a notification popup with the result:

This is pretty cool for me because LiveMesh syncs the file to the cloud, and WinAutomation copies it to my local server. With a Lenovo feature I can run an exe each time I log on to a specific network profile, and WinAutomation can compile the macro to an exe file for me.

Of course, if I don’t want to go the exe route, I can set up a trigger in WinAutomation to monitor the system’s “Application” event log and run the script each time a certain event is triggered. It gets a little tricky though, as you need to find an event that fires consistently after WinAutomation starts up, but it seems to me that the WinLogon 4101 event should work:

Variables

I am sorely disappointed in the variables that are offered. In the job above I really wanted to just set the files to variables at the beginning of the routines so that I could check properties of the files. I couldn’t seem to do that, though. For example I set a file into a file variable and a folder to a folder variable. Then I wanted to check if the file existed inside the folder… it was a non-starter, and pretty frustrating.

Macro Recorder

WinAutomation also has a Macro recorder. I tried recording a macro which:

• Opened Notepad
• Typed in some text
• Opened Outlook

The results are below.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed in this. Maybe it’s because I’m used to using VBA and controlling an Object Model, maybe because I actively avoid using SendKeys… I picked Notepad off my “Most Recent” list, so I really wonder what happens when it changes position. Based on what I see below the macro would stop working… I don’t claim to be smart enough to offer a solution though, but then I didn’t write the program.

Recording file/folder actions through Windows Explorer yields the same issues with mouse clicks and SendKeys as those above. I find it a little weird that there is no warning to the potential of failure if the window wasn’t open in exactly the same place.

I can give an example of where the macro recorder is pretty useful though, despite the limitations above. You can set up a keyboard trigger (CTRL + ALT + SHFT + F for example). This worked well for some data entry I had to do when I was fixing a loyalty program setup today. I had to enter a category number and then enter data in about 12 columns for each category. The rub was that only the category number changed, and the rest was consistent data. So I recorded a quick macro, hooked it to the keyboard shortcut and then just had to enter the number and hit the key combo to fill the line. Much better.

Setting Triggers

The program certainly does have some power to it, and the selection of objects that you can program is fairly large. I didn’t have too much trouble creating jobs through the designer to do most of what I wanted, although working with the variables seemed pretty clunky to me.

The hardest part of working with this software though is coming up with the appropriate trigger for your macro. Here’s a list of the available triggers for completed jobs:

So the thing is that you need to get creative with how you set up the trigger. And what you want may not actually be there, so you may need to look at another route. For example, I thought about setting up one job with a ping trigger… but the ping trigger here only fires when the host doesn’t respond. I kind of wanted it where the host did respond. So I’m left hunting for another way to figure out if the server exists.

One case in point… Assuming that you are not using Windows 7 or a Lenovo computer, (both have built in functionality for this,) you may want to set a different default printer when you connect your laptop at home vs work. Creating the actual macro is super easy as you can see:

The real question lies in how you set the trigger… one way is shown below:

In browsing my event logs though, it looks like you can have multiple entries in the event log for WinLogon, so maybe it’s better to monitor a specific outcome. This one will kick off each time the Windows license is validated, which I think only happens right after you log on:

At any rate, setting triggers is the toughest part of this program. It takes a bit of getting used to, and can be pretty frustrating when you first start. A little persistence pays off though, and really starts to unlock some deep power.

Conclusion

I went through some ups and downs as I was learning to work with WinAutomation, with it sometimes feeling impossible to make it actually return the true potential it should offer. Building macros is actually very easy using the drag’n'drop interface provided. But the real key is to not give up on the triggers portion and look at things in different ways until you find one that works.

To me the “SendKeys” style output of the macro recorder is a big disappointment, but despite that, it still offers the ability to knock up some quick data entry features in programs that don’t otherwise support any automation. That value cannot be overstated as it can save you tons of time.

The more I work with this program, the more I do find uses for it.

Free Licenses!

So… would you like to try it? They have generously provided me with 3 licenses to give away.

Here’s how it works…

1. Send me an email at ken at excelguru dot ca with the following subject: “WinAutomation Giveaway”. (If you don’t get it right, then you won’t be entered. )
2. I’ll take all the valid entries received between now and midnight Pacific time on Tuesday, October 27, 2009
3. All valid emails within the timeframe will be entered in an Excel spreadsheet
4. Each entry will get a RAND function beside their name
5. I’m going to sort them, and whomever comes out in the top three wins

At home though, it’s a different story. I find its way harder to get into a backup schedule at home, for a variety of reasons. Despite making sure we have backups at work, I’ve been notoriously bad about backing up the data on my personal machines.

This obviously leads to the inevitable “What If” questions… what if the house burns down? What if a computer was stolen? What happens if I lost my laptop? What happens if we have a catastrophic hard drive failure? What if… So last week I decided to actually deal with this issue.

Acronis True Image

I installed a copy of Acronis True Image (an older version) that Acronis was generous enough to provide to me a year or so ago. I managed to backup my laptop to an external USB hard drive, which was great. But there’s this thing about backups… as my friend John once said “The value is not in the backup, it’s in the restore.” To complete a backup test, I decided to restore it to another machine that I have in the office.

It was a no-go. Not the fault of Acronis, to be sure. I’ve heard great things about their products, and I’m sure it would have worked just fine. The issue is that I backed up 200GB of stuff, and the machine I could mess around with only has a 75GB drive. It just won’t fit.

So I’ve still got that backup, but it’s not really as portable as I want. And while the new version of Acronis has a “set it and forget it” feature, this one doesn’t. So that still leaves me needing to manually trigger backups which, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not very good at remembering to do. So I gave up on Acronis, looking for a better solution.

One thing I would say about Acronis is that I’m not really a fan of the restore interface. It strikes me much like the old Norton Ghost versions which aren’t quite clearly explained. I don’t use this product much, so what I’d like to see are screens that read something like the following:

• What file would you like to restore FROM?
  • Show the list of drives, but mark which are internal and which are external drives
• Where would you like to restore TO?
  • Show the list of drives, again mark which are internal vs external
  • Clearly explain that the drive you select here will be overwritten

I just really didn’t find it was worded quite like that, which made me a little nervous.

Mozy

So at any rate, I kept looking, and re-visited Mozy, eventually holding my breath and shelling out $9.90 for a month of backup to test it out for our PC’s.

Mozy seems pretty slick. It basically works like this:

• Flag the files you want to back up
• It compresses and encrypts them
• It uploads them to Mozy’s server
• They are available to restore

The actual backup interface is pretty simple, and you can pick the speed it uploads at if you want to scale up/down your upload speeds. The shot below is a backup in progress. Keep in mind that I don’t have much bandwidth here at home, since I’m running over a wireless G connection.

There is something misleading about the image above though… You’d think that pressing “Cancel Backup” would actually cancel the backup. It doesn’t. It stops it temporarily, as you can see below:

I also tested the restore. Again, the interface is pretty simple, as you can see below:

It took about two minutes to “find the file on the server”, and then the restore of the file was pretty much instant. The file works just fine.

Some of the things that really sell me on Mozy are:

• It has “set it and forget it” scheduling. Set the backup files and it just works away in the background
• It is on a remote server. So I don’t have to remember to burn discs or write to tape and take it away
• It only backs up the changes going forward, so it won’t consume all my bandwidth while I’m trying to use it

One thing to be aware of though, is that you do need bandwidth to upload your data to their servers. Dee’s backup is over 12GB, and has been working for about 2 days now to send it all along at about 800kbps. That may seem like a lot of time, but the peace of mind of having the family photos backed up is worth it.

My Verdict

I’m pretty frugal when it comes to my software, but so far, I’d recommend this one. I think it has some serious advantages over traditional backup methods, gives good peace of mind and, at $4.95 per month for unlimited backup for home users, it’s pretty affordable.

If you’re interested, you can find out more at www.mozy.com/home.  I was also made aware by email of a full review at onlinebackupsreview.com, where you can also save 20% with a Mozy Promotional Code.

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.

For lack of better content to test with, I figured I’d give a step by step guide to setting this up. J Okay, seriously, it also shows how easy it really is, and gives me a good excuse to try all kinds of formatting, such as Styles, images, URL’s, numbering, and smileys.

So here we go…

Creating a Blog Post – Part I

To start with, I simply went to the Office Menu, chose to start a New file, and chose Blog Post, then Create:

Registering Blog Credentials

At this point, I was greeted with a (hopefully) one time setup wizard to “Register My Blog”. (Basically tell Word where my blog is, and what the login credentials are to publish content.) Here are the steps to making it happen.

1. First, you need to choose your blog provider from the list shown below. Fortunately, WordPress was in the list, so I didn’t need to create my own:

   

    

2. Next, you tell Word where your blog is located, and provide your login credentials in the box below:

   

    

   NOTE: I think the Word team did a good job with this by putting the <Enter your blog URL here> part, as it makes it really obvious where it goes. For me, this was pretty simple to complete, (http://www.excelguru.ca/blog). Hopefully you’ll know your login credentials for your own site.

    

3. Just to be thorough, I also decided to check the Picture Options. I actually ended up going with the default of My Blog Provider, so we’ll see if it works.

   

    

4. Click OK a couple of times, and the blog registration is done.

Creating a Blog Post – Part II

Okay, so now that we’re done with the setup intermission, I’m dumped into a blank Word document with the following:

Again, it was pretty obvious what to do!

• As you can imagine, I selected the text above, changed it to Blogging to WordPress from Microsoft Word.
• Finally I dropped below the line and started composing my post.

Adding a Category

Of course, we also have Categories in our blogs. In the UI, there is a place to select those, so I figured I might as well try that too. I clicked the Insert Category button.

I had to clear a login box to the blog, and after that nothing seemed to happen. I clicked it again… still nothing. Again… (like anything was going to change, but I like to do stupid things like that sometimes…)

Finally, I scrolled back up to the top of the document… aha! It had inserted some fields for me to play with under the title!

So I picked General, Software Reviews, and Office 2007. J

The End Result

All right, I’m not going to tell you what I typed, as you can already see that. (Remember that I’m still writing, so I don’t even know if this will make it to the blog, although I have some faith it will!)

What I am going to do is quickly summarize the stuff that I believe is important in this post, to see how it comes through. This is partly notes to me, so I know what the original Word document looked like before I posted it, as well as notes to anyone else who is interested…

 

And there you go! I’m going to hit Publish now, and see what happens!

It’s very apparent that it’s quite powerful, but it feels quite clunky to try and talk to your computer to begin with.  I also found myself correcting an awful lot of mistakes where the computer misunderstood me, and that in itself was quite painful.

Probably the most frustrating part, however, was I had to do this speech recognition in Microsoft word as it could not be done in Firefox.  (I was trying to post to the WordPress blog.)

Despite the pain, I persevered and this blog post was completely dictated.  I will also be attempting, using voice commands alone, to actually copy and paste this in the blog.  If it shows up you’ll know I was successful.

Something tells me that I need to get Word to post directly to my blog which I understand can be done.

Before I get into the software, here’s the issue I’ve been facing:

In addition to being the Controller at Fairwinds, I’m also the only on-site IT guy.  It’s therefore up to me to make sure that I’ve got all the information, when needed, where needed, in order to restore the systems should they go down for any reason.  And while I may call in outsourced techs to do the dirty work in restoring things, it remains up to me to be able to provide them with the information that they need.

I have a few really important documents that I basically need to be able to get to.  While I have remote access to my system, the issue is that it’s when the systems are down that I need the docs most, and I can’t get to them.  So basically, this meant that I need to create my Critical Info Document, save it (password protected) on my laptop, and save it to the server.  When I go on vacation, my boss needs a copy, and it then becomes important to make sure his is up to date, just in case he’s ever contacted because I’m unavailable.  I also want to share a copy with my outside support consultants so that they can deal with issues without me, should they need to.  (They are trustworthy and professional.)
So now I have several copies of the document that I need to maintain.  Maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal if the document wasn’t as fluid as it is.  But that’s neither here nor there as the reality is that it gets updated at least once a week, and sometimes once a day.  Saving and emailng copies of this document is not desirable from either a managment or security point of view.
So, enter the file sharing technologies.  Here’s the ones I looked at:

Groove

Groove has a bunch of uses including sharing calendars, sketchpads, and documents.   You can also set up full File Sharing folders to sync up between PC’s.  I looked at this very quickly, as it costs to install Groove on each PC.  In addition, because Groove is a big program, it feels a bit “heavy” if that’s all you want to do.  Of course, to access your files, you need to log on to a computer with your Groove account installed.  I’m also not convinced that you’ll get updates unless at least one user is online that you can sync to.  I’ve been told otherwise, but haven’t tested that for myself to date.

Don’t get me wrong, Groove is a great program, but I wouldn’t buy it if all you want to do is share files.

Windows Live FolderShare

FolderShare is a Windows Live Beta technology.  Pretty neat stuff, as you can create libraries to share between PC’s, libraries to share with other users, and even use the internet to access the files on your PC from a remote site (if it is on.)  What is cool here is that, when sharing a folder, you can invite others to it, and give them a variety of rights from read only to full editing.  It seems pretty light-weight and works fairly well from what I’ve seen.

The drawback here is that, if you are at a remote site without your PC, and it doesn’t happen to be on at home or in your office, you can’t access your files.  Maybe not a big deal to you, but if I need access to my Critical Info Document and all I have access to is an internet cafe…

Windows Live Mesh

This one is actually pretty cool, classified as a “Tech Preview”, which I believe is before even Beta.  It’s got all the benefits of FolderShare, and adds a couple more components.

Mesh has 5GB of storage “in the cloud”.  (Read as on Microsoft’s servers.)  So basically, when you connect to the internet, your selected folders sync up to the storage in the cloud, then down to your other PC’s.  This means that you can access your files over the internet, even if none of your PC’s are on.

And if one of your PC’s does happen to be on, throught the net you can remote control it, just like you would using a program like LogMeIn.

Mesh also displays a nice little message that synching with a mobile phone is “coming soon”.  That will be a pretty cool feature to add.

Some of the drawbacks with Mesh, at this point:

• When inviting others to share a folder, you have to give them “Owner” rights.  That kind of sucks, as it would be nice to be able to decide who should have Read Only rights.
• It’s a little bit awkward to set up synching folders, IMO.  Could be a bit cleaner.  Once you get used to it, it’s okay, but it’s not really intuitive.
• “Non-US” customers are not eligible to sign up for an account, and they validate your email address to make sure it ends in .com

A Security Perspective…

One of the things that I found ironic about these technologies is that you can’t share network drives.  I’m guessing that this is probably designed around security concerns, as we wouldn’t want all of our users sharing critical work files, would we?

Instead, we now push our users to save into non-network folders, which usually aren’t backed up, and push the storage to personal computers outside the company control.

Things I’d Like To See

Now, thinking about my critical information document that I share with consultants, it would be awesome if these technologies could be set up to do the following:

• Prevent users (depending on permissions) from copying out of a folder that they have been given access to.  (I wouldn’t want them sharing with all their friends.)
• Allow for a way for the owner to revoke files from an invited user.  (If I were ever to discontinue using these consultants, how can I assure that they lose access to my info?)

]]> http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/09/03/file-sharing-technologies/feed/ 5 http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/08/07/go-tomtom-go/ http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/08/07/go-tomtom-go/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:52:56 +0000 Ken Puls http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/08/07/go-tomtom-go/ A couple of weeks ago, I took the most relaxing vacation of my life.

My family and I went to the Okanagan Valley and spent some time in Osoyoos BC at Walnut Beach Resort.  It was purely awesome, and I think we’re just going to have to go back there next year.

So what made it so relaxing?  From the time I left work on the Friday afternoon until I returned to work on the Monday a couple of weeks later, my laptop was turned on twice… both times it was so my wife could read her blog posts.  For the very first time in my life, I shut off for my vacation.  It was something I badly needed to do, but honestly never thought I could.  I didn’t even check my email on my smartphone or anything.  Pure bliss, seriously.  (The place was awesome too, as was the weather.)

One of the things that I did do on my vacation was to really use my TomTom Go 920 on a regular basis.  I’d used it to drive to/from work (like I don’t know the way), and it seemed to work pretty well.  On vacation, though, now this was a serious test!  So here’s my feedback on GPS (this is the first one I’ve ever owned), and some specifc TomTom features.

“Go Confidently”

This is actually TomTom’s tagline, and couldn’t be more appropriate, as far as I’m concerned.  When driving around, I never had to worry about getting lost, as TomTom could always get me back on route to my ultimate destination.  It allowed me to drive to Victoria last weekend with no concerns about having to read a map, and allowed us to find our hotel with ease in a city I’d never spent time in.  One day, when we showed up an hour early for a B&B, we decided to go exploring.  Not a concern in the world as we headed off the beaten track.  We saw some REALLY out of the way countryside, TomTom constantly re-routing to let us know how to get back to the B&B when we were ready.  I’d NEVER have done that, or seen those roads, without TomTom on board.  Very cool.

Accuracy

This isn’t a knock on TomTom so much as it is on general GPS technology.  The device will get you close, but you need to do the final looking for your destination.  The route is easy, but the last 50-100 metres can be a little confusing.  I think it’s because a lot of places are plotted on the map by their street address, but as we all know, that sometimes doesn’t actually match exactly to their physical address.  (Driveway on the side road, mall stores are particularly difficult, and addresses where houses are tight together don’t have to the foot accuracy.)  I hope that over the next few years that this can be improved overall, and would further suggest that it will be user communities that make this happen.  And fortunately TomTom has done some work in this area.

Corrections

Correcting the actual location address of a “Point of Interest”(POI) is pretty easy in TomTom.  I managed to “move” the Fairwinds Centre (where I work) to it’s actual address fairly easily.  (It was off by about 100metres when I first got it.

Unfortunately, while moving POI’s is easy, I had bigger hopes for updating the map.  TomTom has “mapshare”, which leads you to believe that this should be easy, but I’m not convinced.  My subdivision is not accurate, with a new road being put in that isn’t on the map, and another road being moved.  Neither road is straight, which adds complications.  I was really hoping I could delete two roads and re-create them in the right place.  It looked like I did, but those changes don’t seem to take effect, despite the fact that I made them, and have asked to have all map corrections.

Adding roads at all is painful.  (Why can’t I just turn something on to say “start here and track me as a drive” then “end here”?)  The worst is that without the immediate feedback on my map, I have no reason to give this feedback.  I’ll correct all of Nanaimo if you let me… just let me!

Distant POI’s

Not all POI’s are in TomTom’s database, so you need an easy way to find remote POI’s.  I struggled in this area as well, as I seemed to need to know which city things were close to.  So I’m trying to locate Fintry Provincial Park, which is across the water from Kelowna.  I tried looking up FIN with Kelowna as the closest point… no luck.  Then I tried near Westbank… no luck.  Now, I know about where it is, but I couldn’t find a way to pull up a BC map to try and drill down.  The software needs to have a way to do this.

Itinerary Planning

This is kind of a neat feature, but again needs some work, I think.  I laid out our entire vacation in the planner, then saved it.  And since it has the abilty to set waypoints along the route, I did exactly that.  Great, but…

I treated my waypoints as somewhere I wanted to stop.  TomTom seems to treat them as somewhere to pass by.  I suppose this makes sense, but it doesn’t totally work due to the accuracy issue I mentioned above.  At one point, we stopped at Manning Park and, in fact, drove all through it.  I’m not sure where the address TomTom picks up for Manning actually is, but it never marked as visited.  So as we’re driving away, it tells me I need to pull a U-Turn.  It took me a bit to figure out that Manning was never marked as visited.

By contrast, in Naramata, where the wineries are next door to each other, it was marking them as visited before we even found them!

Problem solved by marking them all as destinations, as I actually had to manually select each destination I wanted to visit.  I guess if you just want to use the waypoint to route yourself a specifc way, then it would work well.

A really good thing with the planner, though, is that you can save and recall multiple itineraries.  So we ended up setting one up for each day we did wine tours.  I can look back in TomTom and see which wineries we went too, and where they were.  Yes, we hit that many! 

Funny Things

While TomTom had a TON of wineries in it’s list, the Okanagan Valley has many new ones.  Because of this, we had to set some destinations without the aid of a POI.  I don’t know who you’d point at for this, but I found that the local maps seemed to have roads by local names, where TomTom had different names.  (i.e 325th Street was shown on a local map as #11 Road.)

Extras

Love the fact that you can customize the voices, and the “Quick Start” screen, but I wish you could add specific items to the Quick Start.  There are a few things you can add, but they are pretty specific.  I’d like to be able to choose what I want there, such as a “Next Itinerary Destination” button.

QuickGPSFix is awesome.  Where the GPS Unit would normally take a minute to locate satellites, if you sync to the QuickGPSFix, it downloads the satellite positions for you from your PC.  Then when you get in your car it takes about 5 seconds.  Pretty cool there.

The hands-free functionality works pretty well when linked to my Bluetooth phone, although my wife tells me that I sometimes sound like I’m underwater.  Moving the GPS closer did fix that a bit, but you can only move it so close before you start getting it into your driving view.

The only other comment I’d make on the phone is that it’s not ideal if you are making a call to somewhere that has an extension.  If you can quickly call up a screen on TomTom to dial the extension after the call has been answered, I haven’t found it.  (Not that I’ve generally put a lot of attention to it, as I’ve been driving.)

Overall

Any qualms I’ve raised above are minor compared to the awesome benefits of having this puppy in the car.  I love it, and would recommend it to anyone. 

]]> http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/08/07/go-tomtom-go/feed/ 2 http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/07/02/windows-mobile-smartphone-thoughts/ http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/07/02/windows-mobile-smartphone-thoughts/#comments Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:15:12 +0000 Ken Puls http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/07/02/windows-mobile-smartphone-thoughts/ I still love my phone, but there are a couple of things I’d like to see…

We’re activating the feature which requires our users to put in a password to unlock the phone.  In addition, we’ll be activating automatic wipe of the phone if the pin is botched five times.  This should be interesting, as I haven’t yet tested just what “rest to factory defaults” means.  (I don’t know if I have to call the provider to reactivate it or not.)  I do know that it will clear all email, tasks, contacts, files, IM’s, pictures, etc… off the phone.

The issues I have with this are that, when the phone is locked, the screen is so dim that you can barely read it.  If you are in sunlight, the contrast is so poor that you really have to get close to the screen to see it.  If anyone knows a way to change this, I’m game to hear it, as I’m trying to type my password into a virtually invisible field to access the phone.  (Not to answer a call mind, but more on that later.)  My concern is that, because I can’t see what screen I’m typing in, I *could* end up wiping my phone be accident.

Another thing that I’m not huge on is that I constantly have to shut down applications to get memory back.  If I open the web browser, it stays open.  If I open email, it stays open.  If I play a game, you got it… it stays open.  So I constantly need to go to the task manager to shut down my apps.  This might be good for your IM client, but I wish there was a way to set a timeout on features so that they automatically closed at some point.

I also find that my phone just stops responding in a variety of ways on occasion.  Disconnecting from a bluetooth headset randomly triggered issues for me where the phone locked up so solidly that I had to remove the battery to restart it.  (That particular one hasn’t happened since I removed the Plantronics Voyager 510, and am only using my TomTom Go 920, so there may be something there.)  The other night, despite having closed all running applications, I still didn’t have enough memory to take a picture.  A reboot cured that.  Our sales rep recommended that do a “soft reset” at least once per week on these devices.  He then showed us how to do that… take the battery out.  (Didn’t seem so soft to me, but whatever.)  Personally, I don’t think this should be necessary more than once every few months, but I end up popping the battery out at least once a week.

Having my contacts all in my phone is awesome, especially since it is synched up with our Exchange server.  I do wish, though, that the corporate contact list was just merged into my own contacts list.  (This is probably more of an Outlook issue, actually.)  The effect, though, is that I have to tell the phone I want to search the company directory, then type in the name, then select it.  This after I have already gone to my own contacts list.  I’d WAY prefer to just type part of the name and have it pop up the person, a la regular contacts without all the extra keystrokes.

The “holster” that comes with the phone either isn’t padded enough, or the buttons on the phone depress too easily.  It is constantly activating the “unlock” screen in the holster when I bump the phone.  (I’ve pulled it off my belt and can see the keys lit up.)  Not a phone design issue, per se, but the manufacturer does outfit it with a standard case, so I’m tarring it with the same brush.

I have “Any Key Answer” set to Off, and yet, whenever it rings, the call often picks up and is answered in the action of pulling it from the holster.  Except for the confusion of trying to figure out if it was answered this time or not, this can be good.  I do get calls I’d like to ignore, though, and invariably those get answered too.  I was under the impression that “Any key answer”=No would mean you’d have to press the “Talk” button, but apparently this is not the case.

And, of course, I’ve already covered the lack of the “create Excel file” option.

Despite these minor annoyances, I still love the phone though.  I can totally see how people can get addicted to them quickly though… it’s way too easy to sneak in and check your email when you should be doing something else…

]]> http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/07/02/windows-mobile-smartphone-thoughts/feed/ 4 http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/03/02/things-i-want-to-see-in-the-next-outlook-version/ http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/03/02/things-i-want-to-see-in-the-next-outlook-version/#comments Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:16:21 +0000 Ken Puls http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/03/02/things-i-want-to-see-in-the-next-outlook-version/ Now that we’ve completed our systems migration, I’m actually using Outlook 2007 on a daily basis. Previously, we used Novell Groupwise at work, and I’m also a huge consumer of gmail for my personal stuff.

I don’t mind Outlook 2007 overall, although I’ve heard some complaints that there are too many steps to get to each thing. Most of it is that people are trying to get used to the new UI, but I’d agree that it could be more efficient in certain areas.

Things I do like about Outlook 2007:

• It has a softer feel than Groupwise 6.5
• I can code against the object model (Okay, I’m a geek, but we knew that)
• The calendar has a neat feature that, when shared, overlays others appointments against your own, so you can see everything that is going on.

Things that I think are sorely lacking

• In Groupwise you could set up rules to file email once it had been marked read. In Outlook, even in 2007, you cannot do this. We can set up rules to file it when it comes in the door, but not after the email is read. Come on Microsoft! I don’t want my email filed until I’ve had a chance to see it, or I’ll miss it. This is WAY overdue!
• Filing in folder vs labels. Microsoft needs to take a page from gmail and get this into the next version. Filing in folders is soooo 1997! I want to be able to label each email with MULTIPLE labels. None of this filing an email in one folder. I want to be able to tag it with each person’s name, and maybe even a project description. As it is, I file based on the original sender, which means I’m pretty much restricted to using the search feature and waiting for it. Gmail is incredibly powerful in this regard, as I don’t need to remember the original sender, just one of the participants in the thread, and I can find the entire email conversation. Ultimately, I’d like to combine this with rules, automatically applying rules to label the email when it arrives, (based on sender and/or subject) and having it clear out of my inbox once it’s read.

The thing I’m still trying to figure out, that I’m sure is possible…

• I’m still trying to figure out how to get all my contacts to file, and flow into email, by LAST name. By default, I have to enter the person’s first name to get the email prompting to work. This simply isn’t the way I work. I know it can be done, but haven’t had time to fight it through yet.

I’m sure I’ll have more as I go along. As it is, I’ve started publishing short articles to our staff on how to work with Outlook 2007, which I’m reproducing in the Outlook General Tips section of my website.

]]> http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/03/02/things-i-want-to-see-in-the-next-outlook-version/feed/ 7 http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/01/03/office-pdfxps-addin/ http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/01/03/office-pdfxps-addin/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:15:02 +0000 Ken Puls http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/01/03/office-pdfxps-addin/ One of the big things that Office 2007 was supposed to bring was the ability to save to a PDF file, without getting extra software. Somewhere along the line, they decided to make this feature an Add-in, which can be downloaded from Microsoft. Funny enough, they have three different ways you can download it:
• The Save As PDF and XPS add-in
• The Save As PDF add-in
• The Save As XPS add-in

For my sake, I downloaded the PDF and XPS add-in to try the PDF features in Office 2007. (It won't work in 2003.) As an aside, I have never seen an XPS file in the wild, so may revisit that format when I need to.

A few of you may wonder why I bothered with this at all, since I have a few pages dedicated to PDFCreator on my main site. The answer, sadly, is Vista. PDFCreator works great on Windows XP, (I have some revised articles to post about it, actually,) but it doesn't work on Vista. They are actively fighting the issue, but so far it's eluded the development team. I really hope they nail it, as I was less than impressed by the half baked PDF add-in that Microsoft has supplied.  (Update... the Vista issue has been fixed.)

Okay, maybe I'm being a bit unfair by calling it half baked. Here's the benefits of the Microsoft Add-in:

• It's free
• I will allow a user to save to a PDF file easily
• It is found under "Save As", rather than being treated as a printer, which could be less confusing to new PDF users
• You can code a routine to use the PDF add-in

Honestly, the biggest thing that made me dig into PDFCreator in the first place was that it was the only PDF writer which exposed it's object model for free. I'm rather cheap, so I didn't want to pay for the license to do so with CutePDF, Adobe, or any other engine. Had I come upon the Microsoft version at that time, I probably would have been quite satisfied.

So what's missing?

For starters, security. I find this pretty ironic, considering the huge push that Microsoft has been on to create secure environments everywhere. The PDF/XPS add-in does not allow you any method of setting security on your PDF documents. Maybe it's not important to most users, but it should be an available option, IMO.

The logic behind using this add-in is also different. The logic for printing multiple sheets to a single PDF would be as follows:

PDFCreator:

• Loop through each sheet checking if we want to print it
• "Print" the job to temporary queue
• Combine all the jobs in the temporary queue into a single job
• Print the job to the PDF file

Using the MS PDF Add-in:

• Loop through each sheet checking if we want to print it
• Select all the sheets we want to print
• Export all the active sheets to the PDF file

Some sample code of printing multiple specific sheets to a PDF using the MS PDF Add-in:

PLAIN TEXT
Visual Basic:
1. Sheets(Array("Sheet1", "Sheet3")).Select
2. With ActiveSheet
3. .ExportAsFixedFormat _
4. Type:=xlTypePDF, _
5. Filename:="C:\Test\Test.pdf", _
6. Quality:=xlQualityStandard, _
7. IncludeDocProperties:=True, _
8. IgnorePrintAreas:=False, _
9. OpenAfterPublish:=True
10. End With

So here's the question... why do we have to select the array of sheets first? I hate selecting anything, as it's slow and, IMO, unreliable. I also despise dealing with ActiveSheet, as I never trust my users to take their hands off the keyboard when the macro is running.

Now, you can print a single sheet by referring to it directly, but not multiple sheets unless you print the entire workbook. This is where PDFCreator is superior. With PDFCreator, I can loop through the sheets, referring to them directly, printing the ones I want, and combine them into one job.

Another really big thing... while I have not done it yet, I can see no reason why you wouldn't be able to print reports from multiple applications to a single PDF using PDFCreator. That could absolutely not be done with the MS version, as you're stuck with the current application by nature of the "Activesheet" issue. Come to think of it, maybe I should write a routine to demonstrate the process using PDFCreator. Being able to print Word, Excel & Powerpoint documents to a single PDF could make for some really nice reports...

The final thing that I can say in PDFCreator's favour over the MS add-in is that PDFCreator can be used manually from any program, as it's just a printer. Not so with the MS add-in which is specific to the Office suite.

In Microsoft's defense, I will have to admit that there is much less code involved using their Add-in. A large part of this is due to the fact that you don't need to bind to the PDFCreator class to get going, clean up, etc...

At any rate, I'd be remiss in not showing a couple of other MS PDF examples as well before I end the post, so here goes:Here's an example of printing the active sheet to PDF, which does not automatically open the completed PDF.

PLAIN TEXT
Visual Basic:
1. With ActiveSheet
2. .ExportAsFixedFormat _
3. Type:=xlTypePDF, _
4. Filename:="C:\Test\Test.pdf", _
5. OpenAfterPublish:=False
6. End With

And here's an example of printing the entire workbook to a PDF file. This one DOES open the completed PDF in Acrobat once it is complete.

PLAIN TEXT
Visual Basic:
1. ActiveWorkbook.ExportAsFixedFormat _
2. Type:=xlTypePDF, _
3. Filename:="C:\Test\Test.pdf", _
4. OpenAfterPublish:=True

Naturally, you can also have it print to a variable sheet location such as:

PLAIN TEXT
Visual Basic:
1. ActiveWorkbook.ExportAsFixedFormat _
2. Type:=xlTypePDF, _
3. Filename:=Worksheets("FilePath").Range("A1").Value, _
4. OpenAfterPublish:=True

I'll admit that despite the fact that the code for PDFCreator appears more complicated, I've got a lot of time invested in it, and know it fairly well. That may make me a little biased, but I really enjoy the robustness of what PDFCreator has to offer. I feel that it gives me more control over things, which is very important to me. I just wish that the team could get their Vista issue sorted.

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