Einstein Discovers…

I’ve been amused by the cartoons in The New Yorker magazine since I was a kid. Here’s a joke about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Office Palooza

MSDN® is sponsoring a coding contest for Office 2007, named OfficePalooza! This sweepstakes will run two weeks beginning April 20, 2009, and features ten fun Visual Basic of Applications™ (VBA) coding challenges in the form of puzzles and games. Each entrant will earn a chance to win one of hundreds of available prizes, determined by a random drawing at the end of the contest.

Do my eyes deceive me? Microsoft is actually promoting that red-haired bastard stepchild, VBA? This is a welcome change in policy. The Office product groups have continued to support VBA, despite the snubbing by the development groups, who preach all things dot-net. I’m sure dot-net is good and all, but it’s overkill for 98% of the projects accomplished in Office using VBA.

Some of the challenges are a bit silly, but I think that’s the intent. As long as the light atmosphere of the Office Palooza doesn’t indicate consideration of VBA as a sideshow or clown act.

At least a couple of the Excel challenges look like conditional formatting or creative worksheet formulas would do the trick, but then, Exceldom is littered with VBA routines that reinvent existing Excel functionality.

Image Formats

Excel Guru Ken Puls asks what is the Best picture format for scaled charts? He evaluates a number of formats, both raster and vector, for use in dashboards. He didn’t use actual charts, nor explain why not.

Ken is coauthor of RibbonX: Customizing the Office 2007 Ribbon (right). This is a tremendous resource for dealing with the Office 2007 ribbon interface, and it’s the book I use most often nowadays.

Ken also has written the XLG Favourites Add-in, which is a useful extension of the Most Recently Used concept. It provides a flexible, customizable menu where you can keep your favorite files and directoriesa mere click or two away. It’s a great timesaver: I use it several times a day.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Why You Should Use PNG and not JPEG
• Pizza Pie
• Hide Series Data Label if Value is Zero
• I guess it’s supposed to be funny
• Legend Entry Tricks in Excel Charts
• Paper Pie Charts?
• Blue Ribbon Interface
• Contest Update
• Contest Deadline Approaching
• Export Chart as Image File