Best Wishes over the Holiday Season

I hope everyone had a great Christmas, Hanukkah or whatever holiday you celebrate. It is a great time to get together with your family and other people who are important to you and to remember the reason why we are all here.

I had a wonderful time getting together with my family in Boston for the holidays. The only minor disappointment was we spent a few days in Vermont and there was literally no snow - so no skiing unfortunately.

I am pretty excited. I got a MAC laptop for Christmas and feel like I am back in kindergarten learning how to scroll and select data. I also got the Mac version of Office so that should be interesting. I will let you know how this goes.
The Mac laptop has some great features that I am looking forward to playing with. Luckily I have my daughter as the resident Mac guru. It seems that with this I am reverting back to shortcut keys to do everything. The command key is constantly in use. When I tweeted about my laptop and commented about learning how to right-click, I had a couple of people tweet me back to see how to do it. 
To right-click on a Mac laptop, put two fingers - your index and forefinger -slightly apart on the track pad area and then press down with your forefinger.

Year End is almost upon us. Yikes! Enjoy the rest of the week.

Apps to Add to your Holiday Shopping List

IPAD/IPHONE APPS - Must haves! So, do you have all your Christmas and holiday shopping done?  Of course you do! So, now it is time to consider some stuff for yourself!

If you have an IPAD  or IPhone already or asked for one for Christmas - these are recommended apps for you.

iBooks is nice but the Kindle app is the best book app out there as far as I am concerned - simply because it has a huge selection to choose from which IBooks does not.  I have both the iBooks app and the Kindle app on my IPAD and find that I rarely use the ibook app. If you download the Kindle app - it will  automatically take you to Amazon.com where you can look and then  click to buy the Ebook. It will immediatlely download the Ebook to your ipad. If you purchase an Ebook on a desktop or laptop, the Ebook will automatically download next time you open your IPAD. Best of all both apps are free. The one thing that I love about the ibook app is that it will tell you if you have already purchased the Ebook  from ibook so it tracks your buying history -just as it does on ITunes - if the Kindle app did that then it would be perfect.

FlipBoard is a social magazine app.  This app is set up as a magazine and when you flip it open it displays the different feeds that you have selected. If you want to see that particular newsfeed - for example, ABC News, then you  touch it and the app will then show you a screen of articles from that periodical.If a headline catches your interest you can touch the headline and the rest of the story appears.  My Flipboard opens and displays my favorites: USA Today, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Huffington Post, Twitter, Facebook and a couple of others.

Apple offers Iwork which is an office suite including a wordprocessing, spreadsheet  and presentations however all 3 are disappointing and at $9.99 each the only one I would even recommend you consider is Pages, the word processing program. Pages is a very poor man's wordprocessing program and only does the very very basics. I think you are better off going over to Google docs.

Dropbox has an app. It offers a free service or you can pay for additional features and space. Dropbox allows you to store documents, photos etc on the cloud. This is great if you travel so if you lose that flashdrive you are not out of luck. It can also be a great way to share documents.

GoTo Meeting is a free app that allows you to attend online meetings on your IPAD or Iphone. Very easy to use if you are familiar with GoToMeeting.

GoToMYPC - you can try it for free . It allows you to access your pc remotely. Some of my friends have had great luck with this app. I unfortunately have not gotten it to work consistently - partly because we have a lot of quick power outages and when my pc reboots the program doesn't restart.  You can try it for free so take a look but always have a backup plan just in case it doesn't work when you need it.

Text+ and Textfree allow you to text if you are in a wireless environment. Useful if you don't have texting on your phone - particularly if your phone's battery is dead.  You are assigned a phone number that you text from. It can be useful but I added texting to my phone I tend not to use it anymore.

Evernote is one of the top apps . It is designed for note taking and archiving. You can save images to find later, you can view PDFs, you can click on New Note to jot down some thoughts and you can even clip and save a webpage using a Web Clipper. This is one I just downloaded for myself.

Now, for  you procrastinators, while you wait in line to make purchases and are looking for a mindless holiday game that becomes addictive - my daughter recommends Cut the Rope and I recommend LineUp.

If you want to exercise your mind check out these fun word games. Fling, iAssociate2, Moxie, 7 Words and WhirlyWord. They are all free although on some of these I have finished all the levels so I will have to buy the next levels - guess I need to add that to my Christmas list!

If you have any favorite apps that I have not mentioned, please let me know and I will be glad to include them.

Best wishes for the coming holidays.

Converting Text Dates to a Numeric Dates

Converting Text Dates to Numeric Dates

Sometimes when you import data, particularly dates,  Excel treats the data as text. You can use the DATEVALUE() function to convert text dates to real numeric dates.
 DATEVALUE() returns the serial number of the selected date. Once you have the serial date, you can format it to display as a date.

In this example, the data in Column A are dates that Excel treats as text. (A good way to tell if Excel is treating something as a number or text is to check the alignment. Text is left aligned whereas numbers are left aligned.)  In column B2, I used the formula =DATEVALUE(A2) to change the text in cell A2 into a serial number which displays as 39894.

39894 is the serial number of the date in cell A2.



To convert it to something meaningful, you just need to go the Number group  on the Home Tab

and click on the drop-down arrow beside General



In this particular example, I then selected the short date

The result is shown below:

DATEVALUE() only works on text dates. If you try it on a column of text and numeric dates, you will get a #VALUE error on the entries that are numeric.

LEN

I was getting my U.S. Christmas mailing list in order and noticed a problem on some of my zipcodes. Many of New England's zip codes begin with a zero so when I pulled my addresses into Excel to sort and filter them, Excel dropped the 0 from the beginning of the zipcode so for example, instead of 02186, Excel displayed 2186.
(It did this because it assumed the ZipCode was a number instead of text.)

The fix is easy.

In this case, I clicked in cell I2  and entered =IF(LEN(H2)=5,H2,"0"&H2)

LEN() counts the number of characters. So, I told Excel -if the number of characters in cell H2 total 5 then just display the contents of cell H2. However, if the number of characters in H2 do not total 5 then include a 0 at the beginning of the H2 cell contents. I used an ampersand (&) to tell Excel to join the 0 and the zipcode together  however you could also have used the Concatenate() function- I just think the & is faster.  Both LEN() and Concatenate() are Text functions.

Once I copied the formula down, I then selected all the zipcodes in Column I, copied them and then did Paste Values so that the formulas were overwritten with the actual numbers. I did that so that when I deleted Column H, my new zipcodes would display.

An alternative way would be to just hide Column H. 

 
This  IF assumed residential US zipcodes. If you had business zip codes which would have more than 5 characters or were including European postal codes then you would have to change the IF a bit.

Freezing Columns In an Access Table

You can FREEZE one or more of the columns in an Access table so that they become the leftmost columns and are visible at all times no matter where you scroll.

 

• Open a table in Datasheet view.
• Select the columns you want to freeze by clicking the field selector (top of the column) for that column
•  To select more than one column, click the column field selector and then, without releasing the mouse button, drag to extend the selection.
• Right-click and select Freeze Columns

Access handles this a bit differently from Excel - what it does is literally move that column so that it becomes the left most column in the table.

• To unfreeze a column, Right-click on the  frozen column heading and select Unfreeze Columns

And of course, Access does NOT move the column back to its original position - you have to move it manually.