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October 1, 2010New features added to the List SearcherOne of our customers needed to compare two lists (actually two large blocks of cells) and identify entries in each list that were not in the update. We thought this was a very useful need and added the feature to do such a search to our product the List Searcher. The user has full control on the color used for the test. We did about a thousand cells in one list and ten thousand in another in about 40 seconds! Price List Updater releasedOn Sept 30, 2010 we released a new product, Price List Updater. It is designed to help Excel users who have a price list and need to update it with new prices from another list. Before updating prices, you can use the Price List Updater to run an analysis of the new prices. Other options allow the Price List Updater to color code and mark prices that are not loaded in the new list and to do the same to prices that are updated in the destination list. The Price List Updater is extremely fast. We updated 10,000 new prices into an Excel worksheet with over 100,000 prices in just under a minute! August 19, 2010Microsoft Excel and memory problemsWe just got a clue as to why some users have memory problems with Excel and some do not. We have learned that there appears to be a critical edge of memory. Too many programs running can cause problem, too many graphs can cause problems, and running COM add-ins can cause problems. But, strangely, some users have problems and some don’t and they appear to be doing all the right things to manage memory. We suspect the users with memory problems are not using a video card, but are using the built in video instead of a video card. Most users with memory problems are lap top users. And almost all lap tops use built in video on the mother board. In PCs with built-in video, a large chunk of RAM is set aside as a graphics workspace. The higher the resolution, the more memory the video needs. If your PC does not have a video card, adding one may solve memory problems. If it is a portable without its own video card, try changing your resolution to a lower resolution. July 12, 2010Backing up to the cloudWe use the Carbonite service to backup all of our programs to an internet backup service. This was to give us daily backups and piece of mind that we could access files remotely while traveling. We have just found that the Carbonite service is un-reliable for large files. We know it doesn’t work for files that are 65 mb in size, which is obviously large. In converstations with them, they indicate it is good for only “small” files. We think that means under 1-5 mb. So, if you are relying on an internet backup service as your backup, we strongly urge a different approach. What we are going to do is first make our large files into files around 5 mb. And then we are going to build an add-in that takes all of our large files (> 1 mb) and split them into many small files for backup. This way, we have a backup of each file and backups of each worksheet in a file. It will take more hard disk space, but we will have far better piece of mind. In case you are wondering what we will use to identify large files, we will use the Directory Lister. It will scan our documents and list by and date modified. Has anyone used an internet backup service which successfully restores large files? June 10, 2010Excel 2007/2010 ease of use trickOne of the big problems with the Office ribbon in Excel 2007 and 2010 is that it makes it difficult to find features that were before just two clicks away on the Excel 97-2003 menus. It turns out that almost all features are still just two clicks away! To quickly access a feature like before, first right click and then select the feature you want from the context menu that appears! It is that simple! June 9, 2010COM Add-ins and memoryWe continue to run into customers who have COM add-ins “sneak” into Microsoft Excel. We have seen Adobe, Snag-it, Bluetooth, and a bunch of shareware COM add-ins on user machines. Most users do not know they are there. However, they complain that Excel has become unstable and they see perfectly good macros not working correctly. We have found that COM add-ins can cause memory problems. This is compounded on PCs with 1-2 gig of memory. The best thing to do is to check Excel every month or two for COM add-ins and remove. Unfortunately, checking is difficult. However, we have a free add-in, the Add-in Information Lister, that makes this easy to do, and easy to remove un-needed COM add-ins. Excel 2010 versus 2007We have had only limited exposure to Excel 2010, but thought we would share out initial thoughts. Excel 2010 seems a bit faster and responsive than Excel 2007. We have done some tests on 64 bit versus 32 bit Excel 2010, and find the 64 bit significantly faster. However this is only a benefit if you are doing very extensive macro or add-in work. For most users, the speed difference is not signficant. And, if you are skilled in 2003, stay in 2003. You will lose about 20% productivity by moving to 2007 or 2010. |
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