As part of my job, my role as head of my union local, and as a board member in my shooting sports club, I give presentations on a relatively regular basis. Whenever I do so, I usually share my slides so that people can refer back to them later on. I do not, however, share my presentation notes. I use the presentation notes feature in Powerpoint to write, edit, and keep track of the script I am presenting.
(more…)Category: How To
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PowerShell: Troubleshoot network connectivity
A while back, a customer contacted us because they were having problems connecting to Amazon WorkSpaces. This led me to dig into a PowerShell command which was new to me;
(more…)Test-NetConnection. In its simplest form, the command simply checks your network connectivity: -
Finding your YouTube comments
From time to time, I’ve found that I need to find a comment I made on a YouTube video some time ago. As luck would have it, that a feat which is relatively easily achievable. Here’s how:
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Endpoint: Finding the serial number of a computer
One of the nice things with managing computers in Endpoint is that you can get a lot of information about the specifications of a given computer out of it, such as the serial number, which is useful for warranty check purposes. Here’s how:
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Find WLAN password from the command line
If I’ve been there once, I’ve been there a thousand times; I’ve connected to a wireless network with my computer, but want to connect with my phone, too. The only problem is that I don’t know what the WLAN password is. Luckily, you can find the password to networks you’ve connected to using the command line. Here’s how:
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Excel: Allow dividing formulas to fail gracefully
I’m sure I’m not alone in having had this happen: I was using Excel to make some quick calculations, and got
(more…)#DIV/0!-errors for some rows because one of the fields I’d been dividing by was empty. Sometimes you don’t have all the information you need for every single row, but you still want to have a standardised calculation to run where you do have the information you need. -
Paste text without formatting
I recently had a long term collaboration with a number of colleagues, where part of what we did was produce, edit, and agree upon finalized versions of text. We applied various formatting such as color, cursive, and bold to track the status of specific text blocks. At the end of it all, we needed to collate the disparate pieces of text into a single document.
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Excel: Format cells based on content
As a union steward, one of the many things I do on a regular basis is evaluate key indicators of the company financials. I do this by plotting a few numbers from the accounting reports into Excel, and then run them through some standardised analysis to identify the performance of key indicators. These indicators are evaluated on a five-point scale ranging from “unsatisfactory” to “very good”, and I have set up a total of seven rules using Conditional Formatting to allow me to read the indicators at a glance. Here’s how it’s set up:
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Excel: Automatically set width and height
If I’ve been there once, I’ve been there a thousand times; I’ve got a spreadsheet in excel with varying widths and heights that don’t fit the data. Now, sure, you could go in and correct it manually – but that’s not only boring, it’s a pain it the behind. Luckily, there are keyboard shortcuts to accomplish it. Here’s how:
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Move OneNote notebook to OneDrive
Back in 2019, I wrote about how I was moving to OneNote for all of my notetaking needs, a decision I have yet to regret. I have a few notebooks, set up for different purposes; one which is my rants, ramblings, recipes, and diverse writings of many kinds, one for my job (which makes it easy both to find the information I’m looking for, and to delete it when I change employers), and I recently created one to keep and maintain the documentation I’ve assembled over the years for my Union local.
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Excel: Merge cells without losing data
If you’ve ever attempted to merge cells that hold data in Excel, you will almost certainly have encountered this warning:
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