Category: Tips & Tricks
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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.
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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 […]
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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++.
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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 […]
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Powershell: Add user to multiple groups
A while back, I had a user that had to be added to a large number (150+) of active directory groups. Rather than doing so manually, I spent a little time looking up how to automate it, and created a script to help me do it. Here’s how I constructed it:
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Top 15 Excel shortcuts
As I’ve described elsewhere, I use Excel a fair amount. To this end, keyboard shortcuts are very useful. Here are some I find to be very useful:
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Powerpoint: Remove presentation notes
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 […]
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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; Test-NetConnection. In its simplest form, the command simply checks your network connectivity:
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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 […]
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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 #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 […]
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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 […]