29 January 2006 by Ross McLean
Mike Martin the aurthor of SpeedBasic recently contacted me about his product. It turns out that development has not in fact stopped. Mike took a look at B++ and noticed some areas he thought could be improved. He did the same with his own Speed basic. Taking all this on board and re wrote SpeedBasic to incorporate much more syntax checking prior to converting the code into C.
The latest incarnation of SpeedBasic can be found here: http://www.martinm.net/
New features include:
- Syntax similar to FreeBasic.
- Properties supported.
- Syntax checking almost complete.
- Creation of libraries.
Although, the IDE is not quite ready yet so you will have to make do with the basic editor.
If you’re interested in getting involved with this very worthwhile project I’m sure Mike would appreciate some help. He’s especially keen to hear from anyone with a decent understanding of API’s. He can be contacted thought his web site.
Tags: C, Dev Tools, Downloads
Categories: C/C++, Code •
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28 January 2006 by Ross McLean
While we’re on the subject of toolbars and the customise dialog, I would recommend to all Excel/Office users the following tip. Turn OFF the show menu after short delay option and turn ON the always show full menu option. Again this can be found in the customise dialog, under the options tab. Checking this option will force Excel to display the whole menus and lets you see all of the menu items
Ribbons about turn!
Tags: Tips
Categories: General •
2 Comments »
28 January 2006 by Ross McLean
Microsoft hold the average user has 4 or more toolbars displayed at any one time. This represents quite a lot of the screen “real-estate”. This is especially pertinent with the advent of “wide screen” type set ups popular on many laptops. A colleague of mine has about 25 rows on display, that’s on a 17″ screen! (well, “wide screen”).
I believe is that many uses pull up a menu bars and end up keeping the whole thing, for just a few of the buttons. But its easy to streamline your toolbars in excel.
Position your mouse somewhere on a toolbar (it’s best if you go for a place where there are no buttons). Right clicking will bring up a context menu, at the very bottom of which is a “Customise” option Click it!
Next click the “Commands” tab, from here you can pick all of you favourite buttons, and simply drag them all on to ONE tool bar. Better than that, you can even drag them on to the Menu bar (which it’s self is a toolbar).
If you can’t find the button you’re looking for, try clicking on the “Toolbars” tab, then checking the tool bar which holds the button you’re after. This displays the toolbar, and you can now drag and drop the button direct from the toolbars on the screen.
Now that’s better, I’ve got my screen back!!!!
Tags: MS, Tips, UI
Categories: General •
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25 January 2006 by Ross McLean
Sometimes we want to hide our data but still display the values in a chart. By defult Excel will remove the chart content when we hide rows or colunms.
The answer is to change a setting in the Excel Maze, sorry options box.
Select the chart you wish to change then goto: Tools > Options > ;Chart
then unselect the “Plot Visible Cells Only” option.
Another option to consider is putting the data in another worksheet then hiding that sheet.
Tags: Charts, Examples, Tips
Categories: Charting •
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22 January 2006 by Ross McLean
Big Dick Kusleika over at Daily Does of Excel made some suggestions for Excel 12. One of which was to have captionless worksheets.
The following example sort of does it, it’s a modification of Steven Bullen’s and Tim Clem’s Form fun class.
I didn’t spend very long on this as it’s not really of any use to me, I just wondered if it could be done. To use it in anger you’d have to tightly control the windows index and there protection settings I’d guess. And what about adding transparency?
DOWNLOAD .XLS
Tags: API's, Downloads, Examples, Forms, VBA
Categories: Code, General, UI Design •
3 Comments »
