Bobby

Excel does not allow more than 15 digits

by

I noticed today that Excel does not allow more than 15 digits in a cell. If you a type a number with more than 15 digits into an excel cell, the digits after the first 15 get replaced by zeroes. I had a hard time trying to figure out how to fix this. You can make the cell accept more than 15 digits by:
[1] pre-formatting the cells as text fields BEFORE pasting the values
or
[2] by start the number with an apostrophe i.e. ‘
From Microsoft Knowledge Base 269370:

“CAUSE
Excel follows the IEEE 754 specification on how to store and calculate floating-point numbers. Excel therefore stores only 15 significant digits in a number, and changes digits after the fifteenth place to zeroes.
WORKAROUND
To work around this behavior, format the cell as text. The cell can then display up to 1,024 characters.”

Related Links:
– http://support.microsoft.com/kb/269370

– http://www.mrexcel.com/archive/Formatting/20648.html

Blair joins Chase

by

“LONDON, England (CNN) — Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who left office last June, has taken up a part-time job with a Wall Street bank on an estimated $1 million salary.
Blair will work with JP Morgan Chase, a firm with assets of $1.5 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries. He will advise the bank on global political and strategic issues, a company statement said.”
Read the full article at CNN.com

12/12: Label “important” not allowed in Gmail

by

I figured out today that the label “important” is not allowed in Gmail. I thought it was a problem only with my account. But then I tried in some other gmail accounts that I have and I found that you cannot name a label “important”. I get the error message: The label name “important” is invalid. I did have a label named “important” a couple of weeks back and one fine day it stopped working and I had to rename it to “important2” :).
Label important not allowed in Gmail
I wonder if it is a Gmail bug or if it is on purpose. If it is on purpose/by design, the only reason I can think of is privacy issues. If you flag emails with the “important” label, most probably it is important and might contain banking or other sensitive information, maybe that’s why Gmail does not allow its labels to be named “important” to avoid potential privacy issues.
Let me know if anybody else has the same issue.
Related links:
– Gmail Help – Using labels
p.s. Today is Dec 12, hence the 12/12 in the blog post title 🙂

Black Friday Deals websites

by

The Black Friday Deals for major stores are available at the following links:

  1. http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/
  2. http://www.theblackfriday.com/
  3. http://www.blackfridayads.com/

This year, I don’t plan to wait from 4 am outside a store to get a good Black Friday deal. I will pay a couple of dollars more and instead buy it online.
And if you do not know what Black Friday is, it is the day after Thanksgiving (Nov 22 this year) when all major stores have major sales and discounts. This is when the shopping season actually starts and the shopping season continues till Christmas upto the New Year. The “black” part comes from the fact that companies went into the black (i.e. profitable) after being red (i.e. not profitable) due to the large Black Friday sales. More info about Black Friday is available on this Wikipedia page.

Convert pps to ppt (PowerPoint SlideShow to regular PowerPoint)

by

To convert a PowerPoint SlideShow file (.pps) to a regular PowerPoint file, just rename the file extension from .pps to .ppt. That’s it! This works the other way round too i.e. from .ppt to .pps.
I checked with multiple .pps and .ppt files and they were exactly the same after conversion, even the file size. I did not realize that it was this simple. I thought PowerPoint does some kind of conversion when saving a .ppt file as .pps. But apparently, it just renames/changes the file extension.
More info: http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00185.htm

Fax It Nice – Review

by

Update 2/14/2017: The www.faxitnice.com website is no longer working. I use www.ringplus.com now for occasional faxes (they can give you a $9.99 pay per use plan if you call them)

Original post (9/5/2007) below:

I had to send an urgent fax today and did not have access to a fax machine. I signed up first for eFax. Then I realized that I could not send faxes without paying a monthly subscription. I then went to this Wikipedia page and looked at the list of online fax providers. I finally decided on FaxItNice.
Fax It Nice - Visit Website
The nice part about FaxItNice is that you have the option of not paying a monthly fee. And the credits do not expire. This served me well because I do not send faxes regularly. And I do not want to pay a monthly fee for something I will not use regularly. I uploaded 2 word files and 1 excel file and there were no issues sending them. I went for their Sending Only Plan which costs 18 cents per page to send faxes to the US.
Bottomline: Definitely recommended for people who want to have the ability to send faxes online.
Link: www.FaxItNice.com

Installed Movable Type 4

by

Upgraded to Movable Type 4 today. The upgrade process was pretty straightforward for the first part. However, I really got stuck in one area – in the archives templates section. My archive pages were not getting generated at all. I struggled with it and I realized later that I have to map the archives.
MT 4 logo - click to enlarge ( kb).
I will write a detailed review later but here are my tips if you want to install MT 4.
1. Don’t forget to back up your old blog and the database.
2. Read the “Archive Mapping” and the “Archive File Path Specifiers” help pages.
3. The MT 4 default templates are here.
4. If you want to start from the new templates totally, use the “Refresh Templates” feature which is explained well on this page.
5. If you are having a lot of issues, try the Dynamic Publishing option discussed on this page.
6. Check out the MT news blog.
The new version is totally different and much much better. There are a lot of new features but these are the ones which really impressed me.
1. It is very easy to switch between templates now, similar to the template switching in WordPress
2. The dynamic publishing is awesome. Maybe it is not suitable for very large sites but I was blown away by it.
3. Better editor and totally new interface.
Little more rambling about the coolness of dynamically generated pages and archive mapping :). I have always statically generated my pages till now. And maybe dynamic generation existed in previous versions of MT but I did not realize it. For example, my post about Bourne Ultimatum can be accessed at both http://blog.maisnam.com/archives/000218.php and http://blog.maisnam.com/archives/2007/08/bourne-ultimatu.php. However, here is the cool part. None of those pages exist. In fact, none of the pages in my /archives folder exist. Even though the user feels that they are actual pages, they are actually dynamically generated in real time. If you knew all about this and feel that it was something very simple everyone should know, so be it. But I am enjoying my new enlightenment :).
Have fun, everybody.

Bourne Ultimatum

by

Bourne Ultimatum was released in the US today. Just came back after watching the movie. Loved it. I had been waiting for this movie for about 2 or 3 months now. If you have seen Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy and enjoyed those movies, and you love action movies, this movie will not disappoint you. Action – oh yeah, you will get a lot of it :). However, be prepared for some shaky camera movement. Overall, a must-see movie. Absolutely recommended.
Bourne Ultimatum Movie Poster - click to enlarge (20 kb).
Reviews and Links:
– Entertainment Weekly
– Official Website
– Yahoo Movies
– NY Times
– IMDB
– Rotten Tomatoes