Concatenation of Thoughts

Excel Web Services format issue “Accounting” format vs “Currency”

2009-06-10T12:16:00.001-04:00

Strange, but when you publish an Excel sheet to Sharepoint and view it with Excel Web Services, cells formatted as “Accounting” show as follows:

but when you change the format in Excel to “Currency”, it shows correctly:

Could it be some kind of spacing issue with the rendering of the “$” within the web page?

Fix - Excel Web Services returning "External References" Error

2009-06-09T20:44:00.001-04:00

Today, we got a strange error when trying to open a published Excel 2007 Workbook in on Sharepoint with Excel Web Services. The Excel web part returned an error saying "External References (links to other workbooks)" we in the file and could not be opened. The 12 Hive log files had the same error and did not help any further with what the issue could be.

Looking at the file's external links properties in excel showed nothing.

I ended up renaming the xlsx file to a zip, and unzipping the Excel file… scanned the workbook.xml file and found a reference to an “external reference” that did not show up in the Excel interface:

Searching for the unique id in the rest of the zip file, i found it lead to a “Named Range’ that pointed to an external file.

Voila, went back into Excel, removed the Named Range….

Republished the Excel file and it worked.

MS should update the sharepoint error message saying a formula, or named range is referencing an external file. Would have helped.

Cheers

Woo Hoo…Windows 7 Media Center Extender to Xbox 360 plays all types of video types!!!

2009-05-01T23:11:00.001-04:00

Finally…Without having to install any extra codec products (like KLite or Shark007 Codec Pack) Windows 7 play all of my home video files taken with the variety of cameras and camcorders we have used over the last 10 years. What a joy to finally watch all our home movies right on Windows 7 as well as our XBOX 360 without any “conversion” like we had to back in the Vista/XP days.

I love Windows Media Center. Great job team. Gets better every release.

ps… the “play favorites” has become a family favorite feature.

Windows 7 RC and Dell XPS 1330 – smooth sailing

2009-05-01T10:58:00.001-04:00

I'm happy to report that the install of Windows 7 RC went very well on my Dell XPS 1330. I'll write more about it later, but I did not have to install anything specific from the dell website. I just did a clean Windows 7 RC install, ran windows updates after the install which added fingerprinting, video display, and memory card (SD, etc) support. Other components installed during the initial install (Bluetooth and the embedded Dell Webcam).

Its so much faster than the Beta.

Only issue, Norton 360 3.0 seems to have issues where there were no issues with the Beta.

More later…

MS has gotten really creative with their wall papers and account pictures

Office Service Pack 2 coming out!

2009-04-17T22:04:00.001-04:00

Some interesting new things for Sharepoint such as better support for Firefox and full support for IE8.

http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx

Codec and “Windows 7” Explorer Crashing

2009-04-15T21:46:00.001-04:00

I recently found out that due to corrupt or incompatible codec’s installed on my upgraded Windows 7 (from Vista), Windows Explorer will crash when it tries to produce “Thumbnails” for the icons it is trying to represent.

I had to turn enable “Always show icons, never thumbnails” to get Windows 7 to be stable. Love the thumbnails feature, but love a stable OS more. the OS is fun and solid for a beta…too bad something like faulty codec’s can break the explorer.

Codec Pack and Windows 7

2009-04-15T21:42:00.001-04:00

Before upgrading Windows 7, you should uninstall any Codec Packs that you might have installed. Microsoft did a lot of work to add great support for common Codecs and having Codec's packs can cause issues with playback or stable support for video. Research your codec pack before upgrading (k-lite, shark007 vista, etc).

Windows 7 – NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS Beta Driver

2009-04-15T21:41:00.001-04:00

Windows 7 Updated provides a beta driver for my XPS m1330 NVIDIA card:

I’ve had a lot of stability issues with this update. Good thing that “Rollback Driver” still works in Win7 :) Update at your own risk.

Linksys Powerline AV Adapter

2009-04-15T21:37:00.001-04:00

I tried this technology a few years ago and did not have much luck with it. It was a D-Link Powerline system that converted your standard power outlet into instant network cabling. It just didn’t work and was unreliable.

A little while ago, we added a Powerline-based security-IP camera to our network from Logitech. Its a really cool system and easy to setup. Web cam plugs in outside directly into an outlet. Then you plug another box right beside your PC/Server (one side into an outlet directly and the other into a USB port) and blamo, you got a direct network connection from the security camera right to your PC/Server.

I figure i’d try Linksys’ second generation Powerline systems to connect my Windows Home Server 2003 to our network. It was working over a Wireless N Network well, but was chewing up valuable Wireless bandwidth, plus, the Linksys Wireless N USB Adaptor would give up about once every two weeks under load requiring the server to be reboot (yuck).

I swapped out the Linksys Wireless N USB card on the server with a Powerline AV Adapter Kit HD (PLK300) and its been working great for a few months now.

This diagram shows how it uses your power plugs as a network.

Windows 7: Security Providers

2009-04-15T21:36:00.001-04:00

As per my last post, Norton Anti-virus that came with my ISP (Rogers) did not make the upgrade to Windows 7 Beta. When opening the application, it stated that it required to be reactivated. When running the activation, it complained that it was not a supported OS. Even worse, i was not able to uninstall it. However, i did find this link:

Windows 7: Security Providers

Thankfully, Norton provides a FREE trial till March 27, 2009 of their Norton Anti-virus software (Norton 360) for Windows 7 (along with AVG and Kaspersky Lab). Norton 360 found my broken previous Norton install and removed it for me before installing itself.

The new version is so much cleaner and simpler that what i had before. Nice work Norton.

Welcome to my new space

2009-04-15T21:34:00.001-04:00

I’ve decided to add my blogs to this service as well as my existing Windows Live Space (http://stevencwong.spaces.live.com/). I will be reposting some of my popular blogs to here.

I have been using Windows Live Writer and its a nice interface for writing blogs. It posts to multiple services and provides a great way to blog both on and off line.

Cheers!