Categories
Application Tips

Alternation Row Colors in Excel

Follow the steps below to set up alternating row colors in Excel:

  • Highlight the rows that you wish to apply the formatting to. You can also select the entire sheet.
  • Under the Format menu, select Conditional Formatting.
  • When the Conditional Formatting window appears, select “Formula Is” in the drop down list.
  • Enter the following formula: =mod(row(),2)=1
  • To select the color you want to see in the alternating rows, click on the Format button.
  • In the Format Cells window, select the Patterns tab. Then select the color you want to use and click OK.
  • Click OK again to close the Conditional Formatting window.
Categories
Application Tips

Pasting content from Microsoft Word to WordPress

Pasting content directly from Microsoft Word can create serious formatting problems, but there is a trick to avoid it.

When pasting from MS Word, click the  button at the end of the editor toolbar in WordPress to open out the second row of the toolbar.

Then click the "Paste from Word" button  on the second row which gives you a pop-up to paste the content into.

This pastes it in without all the MS Word codes.

Most alternate text editors in WordPress, as well as those in Joomla, seem to have an equivalent "Paste from Word" button.

Categories
Joomla!

Tips for Setting up Joomla! websites

1. Create a demo site with a standard set of components and plugins (delete config file, add installation folder for a clean Joomla install).

2. Create a sample database import after installing a new site, containing only relevant articles, etc.  This will save time deleting all the detrius from the sample data.

Categories
Uncategorized

Easy Password Generator in PHP

This function will return a password of the length passed as a parameter. It's handy for automated processes to reset a password and mail a temporary password to a user who has forgotten their password, or for any other purpose which requires a random string.

The $p variable provides a list of characters eligible to be used in the password. You can see that I've omitted characters that can be mistaken, like a lower case "L" or an upper case "i" or a zero and upper case letter "O".

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function GeneratePassword($len) {
	$p="2346789abcdefghjkmnprtuvwxyz";
	for( $i=0; $i < $len; $i++) { $s.= $p{rand(0,strlen($p))}; }
	return $s;
}
Categories
Uncategorized

Using PHP/MySQL with Google Maps

Courtesy of Google:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/articles/phpsqlajax_v3.html