News!

Charles Williams on ‘Making Excel go Faster’

Wow my first post in 6 months, the second of the year, and its a link to someone elses blog!

Well its a good one, anyway Charles Williams, speed demon!  So get this added to you RSS!

http://fastexcel.wordpress.com

Why no posts? I’ve got a few things on the plate here at MIE towers, and more over I’ve just not been using Excel that much for the last year or so. Having said that I’m toying with the idea of making a ribbon for an addin(so far I’ve been happy to stick them in the Addins Tab), so I might be back in the game soon!

Thanks

Ross

From Office to Xbox, Andrew Whitechapel

Just seen this Andrew Whitechapel is moving from the Office team to the Xbox team, an interesting move for sure. Andrew has done a lot of work in the Office world, and a lot of stuff with Office and dot Net. He will be missed, and I’m sure the Xbox team will be very glad to get there hands on him!

I’m thinking of a similar juxtapose with a move into cricket bat manufacturing.

Excel DNA for dot Net 4 relased…

News just in, the lasted version of Excel DNA (0.27) has been released by Govert, and can be had here.

From the site:

Release Notes

This release adds support for the .NET Framework version 4: add a RuntimeVersion=”v4.0″ attribute to the DnaLibrary tag to load the .NET 4 runtime.
Additional changes:
  • XML-based hierarchical CommandBars updated (thanks to Bertrand).
  • Shadow copy support: add ShadowCopyFiles=”true” to the DnaLibrary tag.

This might inspire a change to C#!

Excel UK Dev Con, July 2010

I was there!

What a great day, it was brilliant to meet so many famous faces of the Excel world, I really enjoyed myself.

My talk on Excel DNA went Ok, apart from one small technical issue, which we managed to gloss over I think! (pack:= “True”, say no more!).

All the talks were good, and I learnt a lot of new stuff, Charles’ series of discussions on developing a commercial addin were a real eye opener, it’s great that we can share this insight. Simon on RTD functions was made all the better for the presences of two chaps from Bloomingdales Bloomberg (they really knew their stuff!). And Rogers talk on slicers and filters was insightful.

The venue was cool, not too big, not too small, tea and coffee on tap, I’d like to thank (Dr) Mike (Staunton), for provision of biscuits, well done Mike, and the irrepressible Bob Phillips for his words of wisdom!

We are aiming to do something similar next year, so start working on your boss now! And next year, I’ll organise the T-shirts!!!

An Excel eBay Sold Prices Search Tool

I wanted to buy a Blackberry for work, my company don’t provide me with one, preferring smoke signals instead ;-). Obviously I didn’t want to pay top dollar for it so it was off to eBay in search of a bargain. I noticed there was a large spread of prices for the same phone, which lead me to wonder if I could research the sold prices for various items.

It turns out that you can’t via eBay, but some other company does provide an API (with a free option) which can be used to search the sold prices.   Long story short here is a file that you can use to get the prices. You’ll need to get a developers key first though, at:

https://developer.ebay.com/join/Default.aspx

Mine took a day to come through….

“User Guide…”

Get your AppID key and paste it in the “eBay developers App ID” box, then type something in the keyword box, then pick a currency then and parent category, then a child one. Click search!. If you can’t find anything in this category, try a slightly different set of keywords, of check the “search all” box, to search the all the listings.

The “update category data” link under the child category drop down updates the data in the category dropdowns as eBay change them form time to time.

Note on quality….

Over all I’m a bit disappointed by the whole thing. As I’ve thought about it, while writing the app, it’s dawned on me that it’s quite a tricky thing to do. You see the problem is, eBay gets hammered by people selling links to things, or multiply items, or broken things, or replicas, or mis-listings (something listed as “Oakley sunglass, but when you read the detail it says there not actually Oakley’s but they look like them etc), so getting a true average price is actually quite hard… I’m not sure I trust the results. As the API does not return a list of all the items that go into the average price you can’t eye ball the data. But it’s better than nothing I guess.

Download the workbook here: