Month: November 2009

You Say CustomUI Editor, I Say TextPad

By xldynamic

  I have written before about hand-crafting XML so as to customise an Office 2007 ribbon at XML Is Such A Pain and Autogen’ed Ribbon Code   As I have mentioned before, the CustomUI editor is far from perfect. It does allow adding of  image files and to validate the XML, but the editing experience is absolutely awful.   My favourite editor is TextPad, and one of the useful features of TextPad is the facility to incorporate syntax files that are file type dependent, for instance a Visual Basic syntax file for .bas and .vbs file types. The syntax files … Continue reading You Say CustomUI Editor, I Say TextPad

Styles AIn’t What They Used To Be

By xldynamic

  Everybody knows that if you are going to create a meaningful document in Word, you use Styles. Excel has styles as well, but how many of us use these built-in styles, or add to them with our own custom styles? I have been building a styles utility recently, so I have delved deeply into this functionality. Clearly, one of the principal aims of such a utility would be the ability to edit styles. Being a rational coder, I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, so I decided to use the built-in styles editor. This is easily called using dialogs … Continue reading Styles AIn’t What They Used To Be

Keep It Simple

By xldynamic

We all know that coding is great fun, even code design is fun, but testing and debugging are most certainly not fun. As such, we have to do what we can to lighten that burden.  One of my underlying principles in coding is in keeping the code well structured, well laid out, and generally easy to follow, so as to make it easier to maintain, easier to debug, and just generally a better experience. Whilst spending some time on a forum today, I came across this code which had been found elsewhere. My question to you is, what is wrong … Continue reading Keep It Simple

Regression Can Be Sweet

By xldynamic

My laptop blew this last weekend. Unfortunately, my backups were yet to be done, so I have lost a fair amount of work. That is incredibly frustrating, but this post is on another topic. I was an Excel 2000 user for many years. I did dabble with 2002/XP for a while, but I didn’t see any real advantage to it,  didn’t really enjoy it, so I went back to Excel 2000. When I did finally take the plunge, I upgraded to Excel 2003, and after a few querulous moments adapting to this flashy beast, where I first took notice of … Continue reading Regression Can Be Sweet

OpenOffice Is Looking Good

By xldynamic

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:””; margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:6.0pt; margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan lines-together; font-size:11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} @page Section1 {size:595.3pt 841.9pt; margin:2.0cm 2.0cm 2.0cm 2.0cm; mso-header-margin:35.45pt; mso-footer-margin:35.45pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} I have blogged previously about what a rubbish job MS have done with Conditional Formatting in Excel 2007, but it seems … Continue reading OpenOffice Is Looking Good