Handy Excel Tip: Open workbook in new instance

I’ve written before about using Excel for some remote data collection and analysis tasks. One thing that often annoyed me in such situations was the inability to utilize multiple monitors. Whenever I wanted to break out a sheet, or especially when opening a new workbook, I found there is no way in default Excel to open the item in a new instance. It would always open in the same window, severely limiting potentially useful layout arrangements.

As is unfortunately common with Windows improvements… there’s a registry modification to solve it. All credit goes to OnlineTechTips: this article got me fixed up quickly.

Basically you just download a zip file, extract the contents, and rename the file whose title indicates the behavior you’d like in place. After this you just double click to run the file. This is a very convenient way to provide a fix, much easier than following descriptions of where in the registry tree to find what entries and what values to set them as. One of them even adds the option to open in a new Excel window to the right click context menu.

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Charlie Sheen is a long way from philosophy– but the journey is winning

After reading about an interesting phenomenon witnessed in a cartoon by Randall xkcd I decided to see how true it was that you could get to Philosophy from most any Wikipedia term via a reasonable number of clicks (here the devil waits, no doubt). The principle:

If you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.

Being a good citizen of the Internet I started my search with the article on Charlie Sheen, hopeful that I was a mere two or three hops from my beloved Ivory Tower description. The truth, it turns out, is far more amusing. Follow the clicktrain:

  • Step 1: Charlie sheen -> Martin sheen -> Stage name -> Pseudonym -> Name ->
  • Step 6: Noun -> Linguistics -> Human -> Taxonomically -> Science ->
  • Step 11: Knowledge -> Facts -> Information -> Finite -> Mathematics ->
  • Step 16: Quantity -> Property -> Modern philosophy ->
  • Step 19. Philosophy

Now of course I have to write a script to facilitate exploring distances between terms in Wikipedia. After more important projects…

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Show all available documents to new Google Apps – Docs users

At my job we use Google Docs (via Google Apps) for internal collaborative documents and archives. One big issue with this platform is that when new folks are hired/given accounts and they go to view “All documents”– lo, and behold! it is empty. That’s right, if you go to “All items” and select Visibility -> YOURCOMPANY under More options as the filter, you will still only get “No items matched your selections”. This despite there potentially being thousands of documents that should fit your criterion.
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Bag of useful Bash aliases and functions

Here are a number of assorted aliases and functions for Bash that I’ve made in the last few months and found to be useful. Enjoy!
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Great iPad Apps

I purchased an iPad 2 recently and have really been impressed with the versatility of the platform. I keep finding new uses for it, including some that are new roles instead of replacements for more limited options. I don’t have the bandwidth for a full review of the iPad 2 and all its great features. But I did end up going on a bit of an app spree, so I’d like to share some of the more interesting ones I’ve found so far.
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