Juice Analytics – Great Resource for Excel and Data Analysis

Juice Analytics is a consulting firm based in Virginia USA specialising in business information analytics.  They are big fans of Excel, and their site has lots of useful Excel articles and downloads.

One which I’ve mentioned to several other Excel users already is a quick and effective way to generate in-cell bar charts using the Excel REPT function.  This can be very effective, and in my opinion looks at least as good as the Data Bars in Excel 2007.

Other articles on their site that are worth a look:

Fixing Excel Charts – a clean charts addin for Excel

Excel Training Worksheet – Tips, tricks and training exercises to sharpen your Excel skills

 

Technorati tags: Excel, Juice Analytics

Access 2007 and Office Live – Cool as Ice

I just spotted an interesting post on Clint Covington’s blog, an overview of an Access 2007/OfficeLive application developed by Alan Cossey.  This is worth a read, and is the first real Access 2007-specific application I’ve seen.  I’ve tried out some things with Access 2007 and SharePoint (which is how the OfficeLive stuff works), and I think it’s an area worth exploring. 

A while ago I posted a comment on the Office User Group web site asking if anyone else had looked at Office Live in the UK.  If anyone reading this has, could they post a comment?

Vista 30-Day VHD Evaluation

I see you can now download a 30-day evaluation VHD of WIndows Vista.  A good way to try it out without having to go through any installation pain yourself.

Refactor! for ASP.Net

Over the past couple of months I’ve had to do a fair bit of ASP.Net work.  One of the time-consuming areas when using ASP.Net controls is moving display properties to a CSS class rather than spreading them liberally inside the control itself.  Developer Express provide a free download of Refactor! for ASP.Net to help with this, and a whole load of other refactorings – well worth downloading if you use Visual Studio 2005 for ASP.Net development. 

It works with Visual Studio 2005 and the new Orcas beta 1.  You can download here.  If you want to read a little more about it there is a good post on Mark Miller’s blog.

Technorati tags: refactor, Developer Express, asp.net

Mike Gunderloy – Stepping back from Microsoft

Mike Gunderloy’s Daily Grind post on his Larkware News site has for me always been a really useful resource.  I’ve found many developer tools, whitepapers, links etc here which otherwise I just wouldn’t have come across.  Mike has been around in the developer world for a fair amount of time, writing and consulting on topics such as Access, Visual Basic, database development etc.  He also wrote a book called Coder to Developer which is worth reading.  When he’s not involved with software, he also runs a farm !

Recently, I’ve noticed a lot less stuff going up on the Daily Grind.  It turns out that the reason for this is that Mike is trying a one year experiment where he weans himself off Microsoft developer tools and tries out some of the other stuff out there – particularly Ruby and the Rails framework.  He explains what he’s doing here, and now puts a daily posting up on A Fresh Cup.  Mike is not alone in his experiment – I’m beginning to see a lot of interest in Ruby on Rails and other opensource platforms – Scott Hanselman’s post called Is Microsoft losing the Alpha Geeks is also worth a read.

Last November I did a presentation to the UK Access User Group on developer trends, and covered some of the areas that I thought application developers (particularly those who were making a living from Access) should look at.  One of those was Ruby on Rails.  When I went to the May user group seminar, I was quite surprised by the number of attendees who told me that they had been looking at Ruby on Rails, and even been on training courses. 

And at the MIX 07 conference, Microsoft announced Iron Ruby, a Dynamic Language Ruby implementation for the .Net Framework…

Technorati tags: ruby, asp.net, microsoft