Off-Topic: Getting Excel to Open Files Again

excel1For a while now, I have had the issue that I could not open Excel sheets (files) by double-clicking them in the Windows Explorer, nor could I directly open Excel sheets sent to me in email from within Outlook. I got an error like this: “Cannot find the file path (or one of its components). Make sure the path and file name are correct and that all required libraries are available.”

Turned out this is a fairly common problem, with a documented solution.

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Off-Topic: Office 2007 Weird Windows Explained

excel1This is a short note about an “aha” moment: ArsTechnica just explained why Excel 2007 windows that look like being documents are not quite that, and how I sometimes manage to start multiple Excel processes by mistake. It seems that Excel is not truly a multi-window app like Word is… but still an MDI app that fakes windows in a way that makes the Windows task bar and Vista task switcher fairly confused. Thanks for the explanation.

Off-topic: Excel to Wiki Table Converter

I work quite a lot with Wikipedia systems (mostly mediawiki-based) to structure data and make it accessible to other people at my job. Since I happen to love tables as a way to provide overviews and summaries of complex information, I keep creating wiki tables. Editing tables in a wiki is pretty painful, especially when it is time to do things like add columns. Excel is a much superior tool for this purpose, and I have been looking for a tool to let me create tables in Excel and then get a wiki rendering of them for insertion into a wiki. Finally, I have found it! Here, you can find a pretty good Excel VBA macro that lets you select a range of cells and then get a wiki table code corresponding to it on your clipboard, ready to paste into the wiki site. Thanks a million times to the creators of that tool, it is really useful. Note that in Office 2007, you must save documents in .xlsm, macro-enabled, format to be able to save the macro with your file.