Author Archives: Stephen

I don’t like to talk about myself, however I enjoy talking about others. Favourite pastime: trying new things like Ubuntu, free software, and learning about scripts and programming languages just for fun. Bad habits: ranting about poor old Micros*ft (shame). Pet hate: poor service (a norm in South Africa).

Customize the Visio toolbar and keep macros handy(ish)… Part II

Hey, I return to the topic of Visio customisation to implement actual buttons for my macros instead of using the time wasting menu drill down through Tools/Macros/Document1/Module1/My_Macro. I didn’t do this before because there is no functionality to add macro’s as buttons in the  Customise Toolbar dialog. However I have now learned that it is [...]

Proper Titlecase for MS Word

[Code sample updated to fix bugs on 21/06/2009] I use Titlecase a lot in business documents so I was never quite satisfied with the “dumb” version available by default in MS Word which just capitalises the first letter of every word. After researching some of the conventional rules for Titlecase I started building a Visual [...]

iTunes a Misnomer

Let me get this straight – the iTunes Store for South Africa doesn’t sell tunes? Duh! Wasn’t that the whole point of iTunes? What a rotten apple this is! A visit to this “so-called” music store revceals that all we miserable bastards in South Africa can download is useless utilities and other crap that won’t [...]

WELL DONE SHARKS!!!!!!

Blood, sweat and VICTORY!

Windows Explorer “Send To” in HTML with Signature and Multiple Attachments

Have just recently finished putting together a bulk mailing application inside Excel to email preformatted html newsletters with embedded images. I learned a lot in the process and was able to solve a problem that has irritated me for years. Previous research led me to the Micro$oft’s support website to this solution but it only [...]

Customize the Visio toolbar and keep macros handy(ish)…

The consultants I work for are always needing process flow diagrams and so I use Visio a lot. However my efforts to boost productivity by customizing the interface have always been frustrated because, try as I might, I couldn’t get Visio to retain any of my changes to the toolbar from one drawing to the [...]

Bad First Impression of Vista!

I’ve only caught rare glimpses of Vista in action but thanks to my employer dropping his laptop and getting a new one with Vista Ultimute pre-installed I’ve had the dubious pleasure of making it’s acquaintance. Wow! It really is breathtakingly beautiful, an absolute visual feast of ultra-cool flavours. I was secretly glad to spend some [...]

Virus Killer Killer Killer

There once was a Virus Killer named AVG who lived quietly in his little corner of the screen. In another place there lived Billy*, a spotty faced teenager with a personality disorder. Billy* wrote a virus to kill virus killers called killav. This was Billy’s* great gift to the world. AVG wrote all about Billy* [...]

Visual Styling problem creates filing mayhem

A funny thing happened today, but wait let me start at the beginning. Yesterday I was playing around with visual styles for Micro$oft Windoze XP and was toying with changing font sizes, trying to get bigger taskbar icons etc, i.e. generally trying to squeeze water out of a bloody stone. Lo and behold, without installing [...]

Resize embedded Excel sheet to show more columns

I had difficulty resizing an embedded Excel sheet in MS Word. I’d edited the embedded object by opening it in Excel, but could not get the extra columns I added to show in Word. I tried to use Word’s crop feature but wasn’t satisfied with the level of control there because it wasn’t precise enough [...]

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