Categories
Work

Quote Of The Week

Thanks, thats “exactly” what we asked for, but “this” is what we want !

Categories
Microsoft Office Work

Microsoft Word 2007 Keyboard Shortcuts

I use Microsoft Office 2008 on my work laptop. Whilst I am no touch typist; I wish I could take the productivity hit whilst I learn, I do prefer to use the keyboard for most functions, growling when I have to resort to using the mouse.

I was torn by the ribbon interface; for 80% of the things that i want to do i can find it very quickly, the remaining 20% often required a trip to help to find it. Another thing that I hated was that I “had” to use the mouse to access the ribbon features.

Then I pressed the “Alt” key !!!!!!!

This pops up an overlay on top of the ribbon interface that shows you which key to press to access http://pharmacy-no-rx.net each feature. Or should I say, EVERY feature. If you can see it on the ribbon, you can access it via a keystroke. I’m beginning to like this user interface.

The remaining bugbear is that I always use styles, nost commonly the heading styles and normal. In the previous version of Word I always assigned my own keystroke shortcuts to access them, but I was always over riding exisiing keystrokes and features.

In Word 2007 I have found that there are system assigned keystrokes:

Ctrl + Alt + 1 = Heading 1

Ctrl + Alt + 2 = Heading 2

etc

Strl + Shift + N = Normal

Productive typing here I come !

Categories
Ross

Getting Things Done

A happy coincidence, at the beginning of the year, I read an article, I think it may have been on LifeHacker about the concept of a “zero state” inbox. Basically, keep your inbox empty, file all e-mails as soon as they appear and create tasks for anything you can’t do there and the.

Now I realise that this is the basic premis of Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen.

Categories
Ross

100 Pushups

One Hundred Pushups

I first read about this on JD’s Get Fit Slowly blog, I’m up for it !

The target is, after 6 weeks I should be able to do 100 push-ups.

First day is today!

Categories
Maxima Information Group Microsoft SQLServer Work

Concatenate Two Fields And Get A Smaller Answer !?!?

Had a “strange” problem last week that really stumped me for longer than it should have.

My colleague had run a query to list some data and was getting approximately 200,000 rows back. We were investigating why a unique constraint was being violated so I took his query and did a count distinct to try and find the duplicates. I got 30,000 distinct values.

This really confused me, I was expecting only a handfull of duplicates, if any. Then I noticed that the first query already WAS a distinct list !

select distinct col1_id, col2_id from tablea

select count(distinct col1_id + ‘-‘ + col2_id) from tablea

I concatenated the fields together so I am counting a single field, I included the separator so that I could differentiate 1-11 from 11-1.

See if you can spot what the problem is before you read on.