Latest posts on Excel-Ticker.com (03)
In the following, links to the articles I have published to the Excel-Ticker blog since the last post on this blog. And, I'm also happy to announce the next version of our Excel Soccer World Cup Planner for the Woman's World Cup next year in Germany. PS: oups, I have just seen that I forgot to link to the (older) articles for the calculations of large numbers in Excel, sorry.
- Announcement for the Excel Soccer Woman’s World Cup 2011 Planner
After the great success of our free Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner for the Soccer World Cup in South Africa this year with over 380,000 downloads and the great feedback, referrals and links from companies, bloggers and individuals, we feel happy to announce the Excel Soccer Woman’s World Cup 2011 Planner. The Woman’s World Cup takes place in Germany and will start on 06/26/2011 at 18:00 in Berlin with the match between Germany and Canada. (...) - Group Policy for Microsoft Office 2010 eBook for free
Microsoft has recently released the “Group Policy for Microsoft Office 2010” E-Book. The book is available for download as a Word, PDF or XPS document. The target groups are primarily IT professionals, consultants and administrators. The book is explaining on 259 pages the meaning and use of group policies and gives tips on planning and configurating Office 2010 deployements. Links to additional information are also provided. (...) - Excel 2007 and 2010 Calendar for 2011 (FR-FR)
We have released the French version of our multiple year calendar template for Excel 2007 and Excel 2010. The calendar includes the official holidays for France. However, due to some regional differences for the holidays, you may activate or deactivate some entries. (...) - Overview of the Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 Calendar Templates for 2011
Due to the numerous downloads of the calendar templates and as the download links are a little bit distributed through the blog posts, I thought, it may be a good idea to post an overview for all published versions of the calendar template. This post is also marked “sticky” in this category. So, this post will always be displayed on top when calling this category. I will update this post each time after a release of new versions or updates for the calendar. (...) - Installation of Drupal 7 on a dedicated managed server from 1&1
I am currently testing Drupal, a very mature and flexible content management system. Drupal is currently available in the stable version 6.19, which should be used for production systems. Drupal 7, which is currently in beta 3, brings a lot of new features and is definitely worth a test. (...) - Calculation of very large numbers in Excel – Part 5 – Add-In
This article presents my first version of my free Excel Add-In (Version 0.75 Build 151110) for calculating large numbers in Excel. The Add-In (you can download the file at the end of this article) currently implements functions for the addition, subtraction, multiplication and exponentiation of large numbers. The code in the Add-In is password protected; however you can unprotect the VBA project by using the password “excel-ticker” (without the quotes). Please also read the copyright notice and license terms in the last section of this article. (...) - Calculation of very large numbers in Excel – Part 4 – Exponentiation
This fourth part of my article series about the calculation of very large numbers in Excel talks about the exponentiation of two large numbers. If we consider the original problem (see my first article) which was the calculation of 80 ^200 in Excel, we will need at least from 80 ^ 160 an own algorithm. (...) - Calculation of very large numbers in Excel – Part 3 – Multiplication
In the last two articles, we have implemented two VBA functions for adding and subtracting two large numbers represented as strings. Now, it’s time to implement a function able to multiply two large numbers in a very fast way. The used algorithm for this purpose is the “Karatsuba algorithm”. I had already written an article about this algorithm on my blog on my software website, but I had not transferred the article to this blog. So, firstly some few words about the algorithm. (...) - Calculation of very large numbers in Excel – Part 2 – Subtraction
In the first article of this series, I presented a VBA function for adding two large numbers represented by strings. This article presents a function for performing a subtraction for two large numbers. This function will, like the adding function, split the numbers into blocks, do the subtraction and then reassemble the blocks. (...) - Calculation of very large numbers in Excel – Part 1 – Addition
Some time ago, there was a very interesting discussion in my favorite German “Office-Lösung” Office forum. A user asked, if it is possible to calculate the value of 80 ^ 200 in Excel. As the precision is limited in Excel to 15 digits, using an Excel formula will lead to result which will be cut from the 16th digit. And, because the default data types in VBA are also limited by their range of values, a simple function in VBA will not work. (...)
Latest posts on Excel-Ticker.com (02)
I am currently working on the relaunch of all my websites and blogs. A new, more intuitive and modern design is one of the targetted objectives. And, I will also change the technology behind my sites. The new system will be based on Drupal, which offers multidomain and mulitlanguage sites, social network components, blogs, forums and much more things. However, this means that I have to recreate and/or rewrite all content from my sites. Therefore, this is a project which cannot be realized in a few weeks but needs some more time. But we are on a good way.
In the future, until the relauch is finished, I will just publish an excerpt of my articles from my Excel-Ticker Blog. Following articles have been recently published.
- Excel 2007 and 2010 Calendar for 2011 (EN-US) – Update Version 1.10
We have modified and improved the calendar by adding a new option for selecting the date format from a list. Common German, English and French date formats are include in the calendar. You can also add up to two user specific date formats to the resource sheet. (...) - Excel 2007 and 2010 Calendar for 2011 (EN-US)
Please note that I have modified the content of this article by adding the detailed description for the calendar and that I have shortened the article “Our contribution to the Microsoft 2011 Calendar Contest – US-Version” which previously included the description. The reason for this is that I would like to avoid confusions between the versions of the country specific calendars and want to keep in sync with the German and English articles.
On the occasion, when developing the German version of the calendar, I have added some new features to the calendar and updated the US-Version. And I have also fixed some minor bugs and extended the holiday calculation algorithms. These algorithms automatically calculate the dates of the holidays for the selected year, both fixed to a date and relative to each other. So, in general, there is no need to reenter the holidays each year. (...)
My contribution to the Microsoft 2011 Calendar Contest
I'm pleased to inform you that I am participating to the Microsoft 2011 Calendar Contest by providing an Excel multiple year calendar. As the contest is primarily focused on the US market, I have only included the official holidays for the United States in our template at this time. But I am planning to release localized versions for European countries as soon as possible. The calendar template includes a week, a month, a quarter and a year view. Sheets for entering notes and holidays have also been included as well as a sheet for individual settings for the calendar.
I have published a detailled description of the template on my Excel Ticker Blog.
If you like the calendar, it would be great, if you vote for it on the Office Website. Please note that the community filter may be set to “Unfiltered” and the category "Multiple-year Calendars" selected in order to display all available templates. The template presented here is named “Calendar including holidays and notes management”. Thanks :-)
Latest posts on Excel-Ticker.com (01)
Following new articles have been posted on the English version of my Excel Ticker blog.
- Create VBA Application Objects by using the Windows API
Someone asked in the German Microsoft Answers Forum, if it is possible to get access to an Excel instance and then execute code from this instance. This gave me the idea to enumerate all open Excel instances by using the windows API and then try to access them with VBA. The article describes how to create VBA Application Objects using the Windows API. (...) - Get the path and file name for a file location using formulas or VBA in Excel
I am currently studying some Windows Registry accesses from Excel & Co. A formula in an Excel sheet helps me to split these entries into its components; meaning the path elements and the value. The location where a file is stored can be addressed in a similar manner like a registry key. So, I had the idea to write this article and use my formula for splitting a file location in its path and file name. (...) - Automatically update an image from a web server in Excel
A user asked in my favorite German forum “Office Lösung” about MS Office, if it is possible to automatically update an image from a web server in Excel. The user also posted some sample links and wished that the update should occur every minute. The images from the web server are sent to the browser as raw data and therefore no HTML code is used. (...) - Create and use dynamic references to external files in Excel
Someone asked in my favorite German forum about Microsoft Office if it is possible to dynamically build a reference to an Excel range located in another file. The following solution addresses a range in an external file by using the Excel functions OFFSET(), INDIRECT() and ADDRESS(). Let’s suppose, we have some files which all have an identical structure for the data. (...) - Read and write Excel and other Office documents with PHP
Sometimes, I also use PHP for implementing features for my websites. A very interesting and professional managed open source class library for reading and writing Excel documents in PHP is the “PHPExcel” project which can be found on CodePlex. (...) - Disable the blog post publishing feature in Word 2010
A user recently asked on the German Microsoft Office 2010 Forum the question whether and how the button “Publish as a blog post” can be turned off in Word 2010. This cannot be done in the Word 2010 options dialogue, but there is an option in the administrative templates for Word 2010. (...) - Use own filename for the Normal.dot template in Word
Most of my readers certainly know that, when creating a new document in Microsoft Word, the application generally uses the file “Nomal.dot” or “Normal.dotm” as template. But did you know that the filename can also be customized? (...) - Using wildcards for searching text in Excel and PowerPivot
While I was writing my part (PowerPivot) of an article about Microsoft Office 2010 for the German computer magazine “c’t” (issue 16/2010), I noticed that the DAX function “Search” apparently supports wildcards. However I did not find any explanations for the use of wildcards in this function on the online help website for PowerPivot. (...)
Freezed rows and incorrect display of active cells in Excel 2010
Like in my previous post, I found this strange behaviour when testing some sample files for my next article about PowerPivot in a computer magazine. In some cases, Excel 2010 does not correctly display the selected cell, especially if you are freezing rows. This behaviour does not appear in Excel 2007.
To reproduce the error, you may first create a new workbook in Excel 2010 and store the file. It does not matter whether you choose the old file format XLS or the new modern XLSX format. I created the two sheets „Fixed“ and „Standard“ in my workbook and formatted some cells as you can see in the screenshots below. Please note, that only Excel 2010 in German is currently available for me, but I think, this will be suffisent for the demonstration.
The areas I to IV are containing merged cells. And the pane was freezed between row 7 and 8. If you select cell D2 by clicking with the mouse on this cell, then select the worksheet „Standard“ and go back to the sheet „Fixed“, the selected cell is correctly displayed.
An interesting effect occurs if you click on other cells. The follwing series of screenshots shows this behaviour of Excel 2010. First, I selected area I, as you can see below:Continue…
German translation error for the zoom selection in Excel 2010
When testing the sample files for an article for the well known german computer magazine c't, I noticed a small but confusing translation error in Excel 2010.
The function „Zoom to Selection“ is incorrectly translated to „Fenster einfrieren“ in German instead of „Zoommodus: Auswahl“ (like in Excel 2007). Unfortunately „Fenster einfrieren“ means „Freeze panes“ and this feature is located next to the incorrect button on the ribbon tab. However, when clicking on the incorrect translated button, the right function „Zoom to Selection“ is executed, as you can see on the two screenshots below for Excel 2007 and 2010 in German.
The head line for the help window is also incorrect in german, the help text is however correct.
Since I could not remember whether the error was already present in the beta of Excel 2010, I tested this in a virtual machine with the Beta installed. Interestingly, there, the designation of the functon is correct.
Positioning of controls using VBA, Bug in Excel 2010?
When testing an own developped VBA application in Excel 2010, I noticed a curiosity, which I personally would classify as a bug in Excel 2010.
My application is using some form controls, especially checkboxes which are hidden or unhidden per code. And the cells containing the controls are also hidden or unhidden per code. The error in Excel 2010 appears when following steps are done:
- Hide the form controls per code (Visible = False).
- Hide the rows containing the controls.
- Save and close the workbook.
- Open the workbook again.
- The form controls are now all on top and lost their original positions.
This problem does not appear in Excel 2007. Now, for getting sure that this is actually a problem of Excel 2010, I wrote a small sample application, which positioned 9 checkboxes as shown in the screenshots below. Please note, that I haved used the german version of Excel for the screenshots as the english version of Excel 2010 is not available yet for me. The properties for each control are set to "Move but don't size with cells" (in German "Nur von Zellposition abhängig"). The two screenshots below show the worksheet in Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 in the initial state without any influence from VBA code.
Continue…
Version 2.00 of the Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner
We have the pleasure to inform you that we have released the Version 2.00 Build 150510 of the Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner. The new version contains some new features, which can be found in the version history on the download page of the website for the planner www.en.excel-soccer-2010.de.
As we added much more features to the planner and the add-on tool then planned, we have increased the announced version 1.75 to version 2.00.
However, we must unfortunately move the release date of the Add-On tool for the planner by one week to the 05/22/2010. This is mainly due to the following reasons. We would like to add a help file to the Add-On tool which also covers the Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner. Writing the topics for the help file, creating the screenshots and translating the help file to English and French is much more work as planned. Also, we encountered in our tests for the tool some performance problem, which we would like to fix before publishing the tool. Finally, we have not completed all tests for the tool on other systems with the different languages. Thank you for your patience.UserForm design for the Excel Soccer Planner Addon
Today, the second article of my series on the development of the additional tool for Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner. Those who deal with Excel VBA, are certainly aware that own forms or UserForms can be created and be filled with controls. The design of the controls and the UserForm lies on older Windows versions and is - in my opinion - by its appearance a little bit boring. Below is a screenshot of the same UserForm, on the left side you can see the default design and on the right side an alternative variant.
Continue…
VBA Add-In for highlighting rows and columns in an Excel sheet
For some time now, I'm evaluating my web server log files with Excel 2010. Yes, there are many other good tools for analyzing logfiles on the market and I'm also using some of them. However, Excel 2010 provides the function to easily import and filter the raw data of my logfiles. Unfortunately, with such amount of data, I'm often „loosing“ the line while reading on the screen. Ok, I can surely increase the zoom factor of the sheet or setup borders for the cells; my wish was, however, to have a tool which highlights the current line or column. As Excel does not provide such a feature, I decided to implement my own tool in VBA. The following screenshot shows the tool in action:
Continue…
Custom VBA Tooltips for an Addon for the Excel Soccer Planner
Some of you have probably heard of our Excel Soccer World Cup 2010 Planner for the soccer world cup this year in South Africa; a conjoint project of my friends and me. I had recently announced an additional Excel VBA tool for the planner, which will, for example, be able to import and export predictions from the prediction game or send queries to a web server.
Now I had the idea to involve all interested people in the development of this tool by writing articles, how choosen features are implemented in this tool. I will also present parts of the code and at the the end of this series of articles I will write a post resuming the other posts.
This article starts with presenting a solution how to write custom tooltips using VBA. The following screenshot shows a sample of these tooltips from the options dialog in Word 2010. When you move the mouse cursor over the icons containing a small "i", a text explaining the function of the setting appears.
Continue…
Creating UTF-8 XML files in VBA for use in Adobe Flash
My partner - www.designimsinn.de (German) - and me have recently redesigned and implemented an Adobe Flash based CD for one of our customers. This multilanguage CD (German, English and Russian) contains many external documents to the CD interface and stored in several subfolders on the CD. However, the user should be able to access and open these documents directly from the CD interface application by clicking on specific buttons or by clicking on listbox items.
During the project I had the idea to develop a small Excel tool that simplifies the management and generation of document keys, INI files and XML files which may be used for accessing the documents from Flash. This article describes the framework conditions and the tool. Ok, this application is specially designed for our project. However this Excel Tool can be downloaded at the end of the article and the VBA project is not protected. Maybe someone can use the tool with a few modifications for his own projects, or perhaps the code may be useful for study purposes.
Continue…
The administrative Templates for Office 2010 and Office 2007
Microsoft offers for several Office versions the administrative tempates, which especially allows system administrators to maintain and configure various settings and options for Microsoft Office in a very convenient way. The templates are can be downloaded for free at the Microsoft Download Center.
So, everyone can use them, for example at home or in the small office. However, if you use them, please do this very carefully. Most settings are explained in the templates and also accessible using the Office interface. However, some of them are only accessible (excepted some uncomfortable registry hacks) via the administrative templates and you should know what you are doing before changing these values.
In this article, I will explain how to use the administrative templates on a local computer and show some sample settings for Office 2007 and Office 2010. If I got some spare time, I will report about more settings for the Office applications in further posts. First, we have to download the adminstrative templates for each Office version and install them. This can be done by just executing the downloaded file, which unpacks the templates to a folder you can choose. The following image shows a screenshot for the folder structure after unpacking the files:
Continue…
Comparison of GAMMALN() in Excel 2010, 2007 and 2003
Some time ago, I read the interesting blog post „Function Improvements in Excel 2010” on the Microsoft Excel Team Blog. The reports about the changed formulas in Excel 2010 and about the improvements made to the calculation algorithms for these formulas. I’m not a statistician and I can’t really use all those statistical formulas, but I’m curious and I would like to examine how the results returnes by the affected formulas distinguish in the different Excel Versions. For doing this, I have choosen the GAMMALN() function because this formula just only needs one argument. You can download a sample workbook at the end of this article.
Continue…
Creating a rotating image gallery in Excel VBA
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Maren, Arabic on a keyboard with latin layout
Please note that some of the following screenshots were made on my German system,
I hope it would be clear what is meaned.
Continue…
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