On the plus side it gave me the opportunity to have a good look at Excel 2007, get used to the ribbon, play with Pivot Tables and fill in the gaps between causal use and VBA programming. I found that most people were interested in IF and VLOOKUP functions, Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts, naming Ranges and using them in formulas and what Macros were good for.
Pivot tables are very good for consolidation of information to produce reports for your supervisor(s). Pivot Charts are just like normal charts but you generate them from your pivot table, after that it is all the same kinds of things you would do with a normal Excel chart. Pivot tables are a subset of the OLAP cubes you can have in SQLServer and are generated of a table in Excel or pulled in from an external data source. They are very good for playing around with summarizing data and it doesn’t take all that long to get used to them. There are plenty of tutorials available online. I could not figure out how to get percentages for three levels of row values but I’m sure it is possible somehow.
Working my way through Excel to prepare for the teaching I also found that there was a huge amount of functionality I would never use and I suspect that most others will only be using a small fraction of what is now available within Excel. For Excel 2010 users the best thing Microsoft did was allow you to create custom tabs and groups and rename or change the order of the built-in tabs and groups. Other nice features include the ability to recover versions of files that you closed without saving ( helpful when you forget to manually save), pivot table percentages against parent rows and columns (annoyingly missing from 2007), better filtering and a few other visual features.
Do you remember that movie Trading Places? Apple has been trading places with Microsoft and Sony in recent times and now it is Google’s turn. It wasn’t that long ago that Microsoft was always the one wearing the black cowboy hat. They were the one facing the anti-trust suits, they always had the not so standard standards and they were the ones with the proprietary software. Google(and Apple) had the white hat, and talked about the glory of being open to all.
More recently Google talks open but seems to be continually closing off their own code, “to protect their own interests.” It is getting very confusing. Android is supposed to be an open platform but Honeycomb is closed until later in the year. The reason is to keep phone users from trying to put it on their devices so it kind of makes sense, but still. Microsoft has a pragmatic reason for keeping its stuff closed, billions of dollars in revenue. Google is also sticking with the proprietary Flash for video, for the time being. I think this is partially just to continue to annoy Apple who refuses to support it at all.
This does not mean however that Microsoft has suddenly become all open, sweetness and light. It still takes open source companies to court or threatens then that they will. It is also true that some of the anti-Google lobby is being funded by the big Redmond company. They tried to get everyone to adopt Silverlight but found themselves looking at a market that moved to HTML5 and JavaScript. Silverlight is probably dead and Microsoft has responded by enthusiastically supporting HTML5, after some initial baulking of course.
Microsoft has had a kind of epiphany realizing that if it wants to work with the Mac and the increasing world of mobile devices then .Net and Silverlight will not cut it for the simple reason that people are using other platforms besides Windows. So now that Microsoft can benefit from going open to some extent it will and has. MS bought Skype but rather than license everything has seen that keeping it as it is and leveraging the advertising I a better way to go. If they don’t a Skype challenger will simply spring up on the space that would be opened. Where this ends up is anyone’s guess but it will keep changing.
Industry News
Firefox 5 is out in public Beta with the release date due at the end of June. The biggest change is support for CSS animations. The Do Not Track header has been moved to make it easier to find. Also included is support for switching Firefox development channels, an improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance, better standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas, better spell checking for some locales and better desktop environment integration for Linux users.
If you happen to have a Toshiba's Folio 100, the one that came with Android 2.2, you can no unofficially upgrade to Honeycomb. This is because that unnamed group of enterprising coders have succeeded in porting over Android 3.0 to the device. There are some issues that may dissuade you like the rotation sensors are disabled and it may sleep a lot longer than you want it to but it does demonstrate how keen some people are to port Honeycomb to other platforms. There are more ports in the works e.g. to the Dixons' Advent Vega tablet.
According to an executive at HP their new touch pad will dominate over the Apple iPad and take them to the “number one plus” market position. I’m not sure what he was smoking but that is a rather bold and optimistic claim, but one worthy of the Marketing Department. HP is currently number one in the PC market and the expectation is they will be able to leverage on that and out-innovate all other competitors. Seriously, I want some of whatever he is on. This innovation will apparently come from the TouchPad webOS operating system HP gained when they bought Palm. HP also has a solid presences in the business and personal arenas. It is worth noting the RIM also holds a similar position but their PlayBook is not doing that well.
I’m going to predict that HP will not make the splash they are counting on mostly because Android is sweeping the tables at the moment and within six months I expect them to have a very strong position in the market. Third position for HP perhaps?
I love scientists. No, not the ones who sit on climate panels and reverse the real world data graphs to make their case, real scientists. A few over at Nottingham University in the UK have come up with a plan to use depleted uranium molecules as components for a memory storage device. You take two of them, put a toluene molecule in the middle and this forms a single molecule magnet. If it can be implemented it will provide about 1000 times the storage for the same size of material that current hard drives do today. It sounds exciting but like so many other discoveries it breaks down at this point. You see at the moment such devices only work at temperatures a couple of degrees above absolute zero. This is why I love scientists they have a discovery and a dream and they work on making it work, in this case room temperature would be nice. There are some other problems with the discovery like how to change the magnetic field state. Don’t expect to see this in a PC near you anytime soon.
Google is putting WebP image compression into Gmail, Picasa and Chrome. WebP is an open source image compression format introduced as an alternative to JPEG. It is a "lossy" compression algorithm like JPEG and works by dropping small pieces of an image. Initially WebP was claimed to drop Web images by 40% but Google says they have improved on this. WebP allows for partial image decoding as the image is downloaded. WebP is also supported by the Opera browser. There are a number of other WebP tools including a plug-in for Photoshop. Mac OSX, Apache and other platforms are supported. To date Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft have yet to adopt the format in their browsers but Firefox 5 will support it.
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