CHRISdotTODD

When you first apply an Auto-Filter in Excel, the Status Bar indicates the number of records in the filter (e.g. 517 of 8614). In many cases when you start performing other manipulations, the number disappears. Using a simple formula, you can calculate the filtered total. Assume you want to count all rows that are not empty -- the CountA function -- and assume you want to count the rows in column A. The formula would be SUBTOTAL(103,A:A)-1 . The syntax is as follows: subtotal(function_number, reference) , where function_number is 1 of many possible options as illustrated below. I included the "-1" to remove the count for the column heading row. function_num (includes hidden values) function_num (ignores hidden values) function 1 101 AVERAGE 2 102 COUNT 3 103 COUNTA 4 104 MAX 5 105 MIN 6 106 PRODUCT 7 107 STDEV 8 108 STDEVP 9 109 SUM 10 110 VAR 11 111 VARP Note: I used Excel 2003 for this example.

With increasingly more complex web pages, I found myself running into a limit in the number of IIS connections allowed for the constrained web server on Windows XP. By default Microsoft has limited the connections to 10. Even when I changed the time to release connections down to 5 minutes, I was still running into problems. With a little Google searching, I found a solution ( here , here , and here ). Apparently the hard-coded limitation Microsoft has set is 40 connections. The trick is determining how to raise the level from 10 to 40. There's a script, adsutil, that can do this for you. Go to the Command Prompt and navigate to C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts. Enter "adsutil set w3svc/MaxConnections 40". If you get an error message, "This script does not work with WScript," click OK and click Yes to make Cscript as the default script for VBscript. When this completes, go back to the Command Prompt and press F3 (repeats last command) and Enter. If you were successful, t

For the last five years iSiteDesign has been hosting Love @ First Website ( #LFW ). It's a half-day event where you get to listen to 3 or 4 speakers share about their business and their website and/or web presence. I've attended 3 of the 5 events and have always taken away a few nuggets. This years theme was "Dare to Delight." My notes follow. Carri Bugbee Owner of Big Deal PR; Instructor of Social Media Marketing at Portland State; and ghost tweeter as Mad Men's (AMC) Peggy Olson (@peggyolson) Twitter @peggyolson Lessons: 1. Get there first 2. Stay on message 3. Always listen first 4. Admit when you're wrong; Give credit due 5. Build community; everyone wants to be acknowledge. 6. It's a real job; it's a real tool (i.e. It takes time and effort to have a Twitter/social presence) Paul Zaengle Sr. Director of eCommerce, Columbia Sportswear Columbia Sportswear basics: 1. Make Brand the #1 Focus 2. Be Truly Multi-channel (Zipcar demonstrated this) 3. Th

I've been doing quite a bit of research lately on technical topics, where the results would frequently include results from a pay site, Expert Exchange. If you;re familiar with Expert Exchange, they've been very successful in getting their pages to return high in the list of Google results. I have found it very frustrating when I inadvertently click-through on one of their pages. With a little research, I found that Google has a custom search option, where you can include and exclude certain websites. I have created a custom search that includes all Google results with the exception of Expert Exchange. To make it really useful though, I needed it to be in my search bar in Firefox, which I use almost exclusively for new searches. I found a Firefox Add-on to do that too. Here's how you can make your own custom search. If you don't already have one, you must have a Google account. Go to the Google Custom Search page and click "Create a Custom Search" I had to

Sometimes when I get data from systems in CSV format, it includes a leading apostrophe ('). When viewing the data in a cell, the apostrophe does not appear, but when I look at it in the formula bar, it does. Without removing the leading apostrophe, any comparisons come up false. I tried removing the first character, but it removed the first displayed character. If you have a numeric field, you can divide the it by 1 (=c2/1), but that doesn't solve the problem for text fields. The solution is a built-in function Clean: =CLEAN(C2).

Congratulations to Microsoft for their delivery of Windows 7! You can search about anywhere and read stories from all the news outlets. Of course the industry experts have been talking about it for longer, and have reported good things. I think it's worth mentioning a couple good practices when considering new software, particularly when it's an OS. Unless you have a compelling need, don't be first. In the case of Win7, I think we can be fast followers, but give it a few weeks to be sure there are no significant, unforeseen problems. Wait and get the OS on a new machine. Why? You're likely running XP, which means there's no clear upgrade path -- you need to re-install. It's possible your machine is 3 or more years old -- you bought one just before Vista came out, because you knew it had problems, so it's likely underpowered for Win7. Benefits include: Drivers will (should) work on the new hardware. You wont have to go through the painful install yourself. (

I adopted some older code that I think had been working for some time. This code is part of an admin screen, and as I was testing some improvements I noticed an error with Internet Explorer. Since I predominately use Firefox, I'd never detected the error as a user of the admin screen. Internet Explorer reported the first character as having an Invalid Argument. The simple code was opening a new browser window. The problem was a hyphen in the window name (Help - Venues). window.open("venue_all.php","Help - Venues","height=800, width=720,scrollbars=yes")

I had tweeted shortly after Firefox 3.5 was released that it was too unstable for day-to-day work use, and I had to rollback to version 3. Finally after successfully using Firefox 3.5 for about 3 weeks at home I thought I'd give it a go again and upgraded late last week. Today (Monday, 12-Oct-09), I've had two crashes. I suspect it is related to memory usage, as I've had many tabs opened and closed as I do some data cleanup in our CRM system. Below is the last message upon restarting Firefox. While I'm disappointed and a bit frustrated, Firefox is embarrassed. We'll see whether this is a consistent problem, forcing me back again, or if other daily tasks workout.

Most of us have Contacts spread among many systems and it takes a lot of effort to keep them in sync or they're not in sync and you find yourself re-entering contacts in each system. With the help of Outlook (2003), LinkedIn , Gmail , My Digital Life , and Contact Scrubber for Outlook , I was able to sync a majority of my Contacts. Here are the steps I used: I downloaded and installed the LinkedIn Toolbar for Outlook . With the toolbar app, I was able to add Contacts from LinkedIn into my Outlook Contacts -- the master list. Then I used TeamScope's Contact Scrubber for Outlook to merge any duplicates that Outlook hadn't already picked up. Next with the help of My Digital Life blog, I exported my Gmail Contacts and imported them into Outlook. Again I used Contact Scrubber for Outlook to merge duplicates. Then with the help of My Digital Life again, I exported my Outlook Contacts and imported them into Gmail. Notes: Contact Scrubber for Outlook is a Trial that works wi

The NY Times has posted a recent survey on tailored advertising (“ Contrary to what marketers say, Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It ”) released by professors from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkley. It was not a surprised to learn that 2/3 (66%) of Americans do not want online tracking. It was a surprise to learn how many did not understand our privacy laws – most assumed they provided more protection. First I want to dig into the perceptions of our privacy laws as reported in the survey. If a website had a privacy policy, 62% of the respondents thought that meant that your collected data couldn’t be share with other companies. Another 16% didn’t know. Therefore, only 22% knew that a privacy policy was information the website provides on how they may or may not be using collected data about you. Other misconceptions in regards to privacy policies were as follows. If a website has a privacy policy… 54% assum