Videos, Products and Changes
Wow - it's been over two months since our last post and it's already 2012! First, I'd like to apologize for the long delay between posts. Rest assured we've been hard at work trying to get things done and will be working harder at getting more posts out in the near future. To that end, we hope that you will bear with us as we are going to try to focus on more "general" issues rather than those specific to our products in an attempt to make this blog more enjoyable to a wider audience.
Of course, I'm breaking that rule right now as I wanted to give you a status update on what we've been working on. Hopefully I will redeem myself by the end of the blog! So - what have we been working on ... well, we have switched gears a bit from focusing solely on the GridMule and diverted our attention (at lest momentarily) to two projects:
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Online Training Videos. We have started to develop online training guides as we think that people may be interested in learning about some of the technology we use on a regular basis. Our first guide, Intro to VBA for Excel, was released this week and is available for $34. It covers the basics needed to get started with writing your own VBA code. It starts out by briefly covering macros and ends with you writing a simple mortgage calculator using buttons, If/Then statements in VBA and a For Loop. We have also released a free video (and associated materials) on Excel shortcuts. This is a short video showing you some of the most important Excel shortcuts (which are also provided via a free PDF) as well as an Excel add-in that helps you find shortcuts and identify which shortcut keys are used for what purposes.
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Excel History Manager Add-In. We have also started porting some of the code that we wrote for the GridMule to an Excel add-in. We know that managing different versions of the same Excel file is a major hassle, and thought that what we were developing for the GridMule would be a great add-in for Excel. The tool essentially allows you to:
- Take snapshots of your file (whenever you want) and let's you restore
those snapshots whenever you need to. So you could use this tool in
lieu of saving Excel files like
my-file-version-2012-01-17.xlsx. And since you can restore old versions with the click of a button, it's also more convenient than having separate files to track. - Compare the current file to different versions of the file. This means that you can send the file to a friend, let them make changes and send it back and then immediately know what they changed. No more hunting and pecking to figure out which cells were changed, added or deleted. Just use the add-in to see it instantly.
- Take snapshots of your file (whenever you want) and let's you restore
those snapshots whenever you need to. So you could use this tool in
lieu of saving Excel files like
We will be writing more about this tool in the near future as we are gearing up to release version 1.0.
Now, to hopefully redeem myself, in the second part of this post I wanted to introduce you to a book I read recently. It's called The Non-Designer's Design Book. The book goes over some very basic design considerations related to print design, web design, presentations, etc. I enjoyed the book because:
- It was a short, simple read. You could breeze through this book in a day if you wanted to.
- It seemed to boil a lot of design knowledge into some basic rules that are easy to remember and easy to visualize.
- I found the examples compelling.
I hope that we will be incorporating many of the suggestions offered in the book to our blog and website, so you can be the judge if we learned anything as you see changes!
PS - this book is probably good for a lot of different people. I found it useful in an attempt to help guide improvements on our website, but I suspect you would find value if you create reports, presentations, print materials (e.g., flyers), etc.