Category: How To

  • Excel: Finding averages based on a specified criterion

    One of the many things I do in my capacity as a union representative is to assemble my own statistics based on raw numbers I get from my employer. One of the stats I calculate is the average pay in each section. As you might remember, last week I assembled a list of forty seven […]

  • Excel: Finding unique values

    In complex datasets, finding the unique values can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. While you can often simply remove duplicates, if you intend to create a lookup-table, that isn’t an option, and you need to do it differently. Enter the UNIQUE-function.

  • Excel: Adding multiple axes in a chart

    One of the many things I do as a union representative, is negotiate wages with management. I argue my point using a number of tools, not least of which is the change in pay over time. I have one set of data which is what we use when negotiating, which represents the estimated change. I […]

  • Excel: Visualising pay differences

    As I’ve mentioned more than once previously, I’m a union representative. Among my many duties in this role is wage negotiations. While we negotiate collectively, I also make sure to dive into the numbers to look for the unexplained outliers, and to have them addressed.

  • PowerShell: Find User based on partial name

    Some time ago, I needed to look up the account names of a handful of users in Active Directory. The information I had beforehand was their names. I did not have ADUC available to me, but I did have PowerShell. This is an excellent use case for the Get-ADUser cmdlet when combined with the -Filter […]

  • PowerShell: Finding host name from IP address

    In tech support, resolving IP addresses to host names can be something you do on a relatively frequent basis. While I’ve always used the CLI ping command with the -a option, I have also been working towards higher proficiency in PowerShell. Frankly, for a single IP address, I prefer sticking with CLI. When working with […]

  • PowerShell: Return multiple specific properties

    The script I described a few weeks ago for finding all members of several groups is serving me very well indeed. I was recently asked to provide both the display name and the login name for each member in the group. This was readily achieved by modifying the script slightly. The rest of the script […]

  • Notepad++: the Macro recorder

    In my last post, I detailed how I solved the challenge of finding all the group members of a set of groups containing more than five hundred groups. While the Powershell script was very effective, I needed one more tool in order to really make quick work of it all; Notepad++.

  • Facebook: Exporting your data

    Last week, I wrote about Twitter, that I’ve stopped posting there, and how I went about exporting my posting history. I actually made a similar decision with regards to Facebook back in the end of June. Like I did with Twitter, I also grabbed a copy of my data on Facebook – here’s how:

  • Twitter: Exporting your data

    I’ve been a Twitter user for the better part of fifteen years, now, and it’s a platform I’ve enjoyed using. With Elon Musks takeover of the site, and the sackings that immediately followed it, I have found continuing to use it much less of an attractive proposition, and I have made the decision not to […]

  • Powershell: A script to find all members of several groups refined

    One of the scripts that I use most often is the one I wrote about back in September of 2019. Usually, I only run it for up to ten or so groups, so it’s not a big problem to simply swap out the group name, rince and repeat. Recently, however, I needed to run it […]