Archive for April, 2018

UK Excel event 2018

Wednesday, 25th April, 2018

Just a quick update as I realise I have not followed up on my request for interest for an Excel event from a month or two ago.

I personally have decided to step back from organising an Excel event this year, I am happy to help anyone else who wants to take it on. And happy to speak if needed.

No giant single alarm bells reason, just a few things that would make it overly hard.

  • I am not that involved in Excel much any more (I had expected to be more so)
  • I am a good few years out of date (stuck on Office 2010 (and Classique) for the (very) odd time I fire up a windows machine)
  • I am mega busy working on Android apps-  – which brings a lot of things that an Excel career could have delivered but didn’t (like working from home/anywhere, decent toolset, the Play store)
  • I have finally found a language that is better than VBA for getting stuff done – Kotlin.
  • The VBA IDE is sadder than a wet weekend in Brid (out of season) compared to IntelliJ.
  • The London venue that cost a few hundred quid last time now want a few thousand!

So, sorry to get everyones hopes up, I think there was just about enough interest on here to make an event viable if a suitable venue could be found. And plenty of people happy to speak, but just not something I can realistically take on at the moment.

cheers

simon

Eventbrite warning

Sunday, 22nd April, 2018

Someone recently mentioned using Eventbrite or similar for organising the next Excel Conf (I have not heard more, so no idea if anything is in the offing or not).

Their latest agreement that you sign up to (after reading carefully I’m sure) grants them (amongst other stuff) the right to enter your event , and pre and post setup/teardowns, take as much video and photos as they like of anything they like, for them to use whenever, where ever they like for ever!!!

That also means you grant them right to publish photos of any and all attendees any time any where.

Dunno if it applies in the UK/EU

Fuller details here

What an outrageous rights grab

Office 2016 Migration issues

Monday, 16th April, 2018

I have been doing some Office migration stuff recently and came across a couple of issues I wondered if anyone else has seen. and perhaps has a solution?

Word 2016

From time to time gets very upset at docs with form fields in and scatters the text all over the screen, like toys from a pram. Seems to be related to printing, possibly quick print, but printed docs come out fine. So it looks like the printer driver is upsetting the screen driver somehow. Swapping printers ‘fixes’ the issue. Anyone seen this?

Excel 2016

Application.getfilename manages to get a filename Excel can’t use? I have had to go and add a file type to the file saveas stuff, fair enough. But the (non null) file name is not acceptable??

I thinks this might be related to server paths or something?

(this is a remote project so troubleshooting is a bit of a challenge – any ideas?)

cheers