I find the following shortcuts invaluable when marking practical assessment files (Word documents, Excel workbooks, etc.). I also teach my Learners these shortcuts as I believe it gives them a huge advantage. Microsoft Word SHIFT+F1This shortcut displays the “Reveal Formatting” panel. ALT + ←When you test a hyperlink that has its target in the same […]
Author: foxbeefly
PHP / MySQL Developer
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Prevent Pinterest pinning
If you have the Pinterest plug-in enabled in your browser as I do, the image below will display the bright red Pinterest “Save” button in the top-left hand corner. As a web developer / designer, you may not want this bright red button ruining your “aesthetic”. If you want to turn off Pinning on a […]
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ODBC MySQL Data connection in Excel
After swatting up on connecting QlikView to a MySQL database, I used the knowledge gained to create a similar set-up, this time with Microsoft Excel. This is how to dynamically connect to and query a MySQL database table directly from MS Excel on a local development machine. I did this using Microsoft Office Professional 2013. Download […]
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Hello World! Excel VBA
I find Visual Basic for Applications most useful in Excel. I have created many small enhancements to make my larger spreadsheets easier to use. Here follows a simple “Hello World!” introduction to VBA for Excel. In this exercise, we are simply going to have a pop-up message appear when we first open an Excel Workbook. […]
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Microsoft Excel CSV export options
I am busy with a data migration where I need to export Microsoft Excel workbook data to CSV so that I can import it into MySQL. I was extremely surprised that there are no options from within Excel to change delimiters and so forth. The solution is cumbersome and involves changing Windows operating system settings which […]
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Read a Word doc using COM
So I managed to write a script to read a Microsoft Word document using PHP CLI and the COM object pretty easily, but then battled to get it working in the browser. In your php.ini: ; allow Distributed-COM calls; http://php.net/com.allow-dcomcom.allow_dcom = true On your Windows PC: Run “dcomcnfg” (right-click Windows icon and select Run) to open […]
I have to have multiple Microsoft Word documents open when I am marking CAT practical assessment papers. As I have the Learner’s file, the original file, as well as the solution file open and they all, have the same name, it becomes difficult to know which one I am viewing. As constantly clicking on File […]
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Editing images for your website
The Learner Guide specifies that your images must be correctly sized for the web. Most Learners simply change the dimensions of the image using the width and height attributes, often causing the image to be displayed out of proportion in the process. This does also not change the file size. It is worth taking the […]
I decided to use the HTML5 <input><datalist> on a View in my CakePHP project, and was super surprised to see that there is no way of restricting the text in the <input> to the values in the <datalist>. I have a basic edit form in the database application I am working on. I wanted a […]
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PHP Dynamic year selector
Another post from the archives. After 2009 rolled in and all our sites failed to follow suite because “someone” hard-coded the years – but only up to 2008 – I quickly had to write something a bit more – well, smart. I needed an HTML drop-down box with a set of years starting from a […]