MS Excel - Sort pivottable column headings by date
This is a quick note to myself so that I never use parentheses in the column headings again. Basically I have a pivot table in Microsoft Excel 2010 with the projects down the left (in the first column) and the days of the week along the top.
Why?
The excel report would hit a bug where it couldn't work out that 10 (Wednesday) happened after 8 (Monday).
How?
See the following screenshot and note the dates for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday:
Administrator Program Shortcut without Prompt
- Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise
- User with Local Administrator Privileges (required for setup)
Why?
Our work has group policies and two of our programs, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (VS2010) and Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), require elevated or administator rights/privileges when run. This is so that these programs can write back and forth to our C drive. If we don't run them as local administrators on the workstation, they error incessantly and never manage to do what you want them to do.
What?
I want to create a desktop shortcut that I can double-click and it will run the above programs in administrator mode without confirmation by the Windows operating system. At home this may not be a problem but this is intended for those in an office environment and we get prompted to login (with the same account as we're currently logged-in with???) instead of being able to just click on "Yes".
How?
The gist is that we're going to create a scheduled task (that won't be scheduled) and a shortcut to that task:
Proposed Budget i3 PC under £200
So another year gone and our workstations running Windows 7 are somewhat lagging when opening too many apps. The recent release of Windows 8 has led to a review of our developer's equipment and the verdict is that our workstations need upgrading (it always is). So on a budget (ie. as cheap as possible), we'll skip Windows 8 and wait for Windows 9, but in the meantime we need something that flows as smooth as any other Microsoft product with Windows 7 as its Operating System:
Proposed for January 2013 (5 suppliers)
| Processor | Intel Core i3 3220 Dual Core CPU ( 3.30GHz, Socket 1155, 3MB Cache, Ivy Bridge, 55W, Intel HD Graphics 2500, Advanced Vector Extensions) - Intel | £88.50 |
| Motherboard | AsRock H61M-DGS Motherboard (Socket 1155, Intel H61, DDR3, 4 x S-ATA 300, Micro ATX, PCI Express 3.0, AsRock XFast USB, AsRock Instant Boot) - ASrock | £37.58 |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Blue 160 GB (7200 rpm) SATA 8 MB 3.5 inch Hard Drive (Internal) - Western Digital | £24.95 |
| Memory | Corsair CMX4GX3M1A1333C9 XMS3 Desktop Memory 4GB - Corsair | £20.05 |
| Optical Drive | Sony AD-5280S-0B DVD±RW 24x SATA Drive with Dust Protected Enclosure and Emergency Eject - Sony | £17.77 |
| Other | 2 X Serial ATA Sata Hard Drive Data Cable Lead - Unbranded | £0.90 |
| Total | £189.75 |
Confirmed for January 2013 (2 suppliers):
Set up Desktop SlideShow in Windows 7
Applies to Windows 7.
Requires a Vogonian environment of red tape and bureaucracy.
This is an article to describe an alternative method then "right-clicking on the desktop", "selecting Personalize", "clicking on Desktop Background", "browsing to the Picture Location". The problem happens when browsing to the picture location and it doesn't seem to remember which folder you selected. At home, this would be a breeze, but that's because I don't implement group policies at home.
Why?
We get problems with this because none of our staff are full administrators of their local workstation. As IT staff we have elevated privileges but not absolute rights to configuring our computer. And we still need to re-login for every change. About a zillion group policies control our every deviation from the standard staff image and so we spend more time on "how do you make it like it was in XP?" situations.
How?
Who doesn't want to change their desktop background wallpaper? Using Windows 7, who doesn't want it to be a slideshow as well?
Print Directory Contents to a File
A friend asked me if there was a quick way to simply right-click on a folder in Windows Explorer and it would generate a text file with the contents of the directory he right-clicked.
What?
We can do this by adding an entry to the context menu (when you right-click on an object). The following is a method of adding this as a single command similar to how we add the "Command prompt from here" option (now built-in to Windows 7). I added this option for him in Windows 7 Ultimate using the system registry (see "How: for Windows 7" below).
- -- yield
- a_subfolder_in_this_folder
- a_file_in_this_folder.txt
- another_file_in_this_folder.doc
How?