It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read my blog for a while that I use Excel on a relatively regular basis. Wherever possible, I like using parameters, rather than addressing something directly. There are a few reasons for this. It makes a formula shorter, more user friendly, and quicker to write. I have a small spreadsheet, which shows some currencies and their relative exchange rates. I want to define an addressing parameter, rather than using the cell address. Here’s how:
(more…)Category: Tips & Tricks
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Specific search sites for better* results
I’ve been a user of computers and the internet for long enough to remember the first browser war. It used to be that I’d regularly use multiple search engines in order to ensure that I got the best* results. My defaults would be Yahoo, AltaVista, and Kvasir, but others were certainly in the mix, too. Over time, however, most of these were replaced by Google. As a student, my exprience was that Google usually provided “more or less close enough”, rather than “exactly what I need”, and as your search gets more specialized, Googles results tend to get less useful.
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Mac: Lock your computer
There are a number of security best practices out there. The most basic include password-protecting your devices and limiting administrative privileges. Password protection is only effective when your device is locked. While I’ve mostly been a Windows user at work, at home I tend to prefer a Mac.
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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
(more…)pingcommand with the-aoption, I have also been working towards higher proficiency in PowerShell. Frankly, for a single IP address, I prefer sticking with CLI. When working with a number of addresses, however, it gets a lot more interesting. -
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 for more than five hundred groups. The sheer amount of data makes that a very different proposition.
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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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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 my presentation notes. I use the presentation notes feature in Powerpoint to write, edit, and keep track of the script I am presenting.
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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;
(more…)Test-NetConnection. In its simplest form, the command simply checks your network connectivity: