What’s Your Problem?

1: I have an interest in one Instruction, or single Instruction computers. I am curious about your interest, and saw your comments on your web page at http://www.chrisgreaves.com/SingleInstructionComputer , and the code at http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCodeAsText.asp?txtCodeId=2388 which references the article. The article, "Variations on a Single-Instruction Computer" by Ants Puust and K. C. Smith intrigues me but I have not found it online. Do you have an electronic copy? I checked the U. of Toronto, but no luck

2: We have a client that will need some macros created and I have provided Instructions below also with attachments. We would like to get a quote of how long creating these macros and templates will take and also a time line for their completion. If you have any further questions please let me know.

3: I'm building a database of insurance policies and want to create various summaries. Input screens that vary by product would be nice. So would a search mechanism. I'd also like to add variable graphics (e.g., gender-based) to make the printouts easier to sort.

4: Help! My keyboard has switched to the French character set; I don’t know how to change it back, and I have to get this eMail out now!

5: Can you teach Excel 2003 level 2 – here on, November 8 and Excel 2003 level 3 – here, on November 15?

6: Our web site is currently "under construction" as I look for a provider to create a great site at reasonable cost. Can you set up a couple of pages to get us started?

7: After selecting some of the customized styles when highlighting and bolding specific paragraphs it bolds the entire document instead of the paragraph.

8: When doing numbering the numbering will not continue; the numbers disappear when you click the style again.

9: Need to change the numbering for the first few pages so that page numbering starts on another page. Example: the numbering should start on the second or third page instead of on the first page which is normally the cover page.

10: Microsoft StickyNotes Question: Can I highlight something on my Sticky-Noted "to do" list and change the font to "strikeout" so it's crossed off and I know it's done?  Or do I just delete the item? Can I even change the font that MS uses for the notes?

11: Our business has seven sets of client details, held in Notepad text files, Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, each in a different format, different columns etc. Do you have an easy way of rationalizing all this data into a single list that we can use as a contact management system?

12: Please quote on a parsing system that can (a) Populate the spreadsheet I sent you (b) Do it no more than 3-5 hours after the ads are released on the perspective websites (c) allow this to be run on an MS Office computer locally

13: I have had an inquiry from a client if we provide VBA training. I said yes we do. This is for Excel, she said one of their department managers wants to have more sophisticated reporting. I guess they want to automate what they currently has set up in their Excel reports.

14: My sequence numbering in a set of twenty paragraphs isn’t working. I’m getting extra spaces and tabs that I just can’t get rid of.

15: Would you consider offering your Word VBA courses again. We’ll have to figure out an simple, easy way to make this work for both of us.

16: Do you have, for a reasonable license fee, a set of Word macros/VBA code, for managing (especially cleaning and applying) Word styles, perhaps in the manner of Silicon Prairie Software’s “ Paragraph Tools”, “ Character Tools” and “ Table Tools”?

17: We recently upgraded a client’s copy of Amicus and now the Microsoft Word templates work on only some machines; have you any ideas what might cause this?

18: I want to learn VBA and want to complete my project myself. Can you teach me VBA and help in my project.

19: We have a client that we are moving from Google apps back to exchange. This move requires a new signature set will need to be created. Would you be able to get a working signature in their Outlook 2010?

20: We need someone to sit with our client and suss out some details, map the work flow of what they’re doing now, so that we can suggest improvements and what application they can use going forward. Can you help us?

21: We have an Excel workbook with 2,300 companies extracted from our database and we would like to issue a one-page fax to each company. Have you a way of dealing with this?

22: What are the best steps to getting a firm organized with a macro in Microsoft Word that allows the secretaries the option to select from a list of 14 signatures that would put the signature at the bottom of the document or some where that they can easily manipulate and move around the document?

23: Further to our discussions, I have a question: Is there any way of reducing the size of this file? CG: Yes. I trimmed the original document down from 8.2 megabytes to 1.2 megabytes in about twenty minutes, but that included a great deal of cleaning-up. Zipped, of course, it reduces to under a megabyte. I have attached a course outline for "cleaning-up" Word documents. Let's talk ...

24: My blog was administrated by someone else who has now fled the coop. How can I go about recovering ownership of my blog?

25: We have a few issues we are tackling with the 407-ETR highway and one of them is their billing errors.  I have tried unsuccessfully for years to resolve my own issues, but got nowhere with them. There are many people attached to our Facebook page as well as our website that have bills that amount between $3,000-$32,000. I stumbled across your website that details how they reversed the charges .

26: Could you do a search for all companies on the TSX and TSXV with the name "gold" as part of the corporate name, and narrow it to those with a market capital of $20MM to $80 MM? Please call me for further details.

27: The company now has told all the agents they must be incorporated by July 1st. I have some understanding that you can do this yourself on line. My  sense of incorporating is it cost lots and then you have to do source deductions on paying yourself do a personal return have 3 officers of the company and have an audited statement. Since  you’re so good at web crawling thought you might point me in the right direction.

28: How do I set up a RAM Disk cache for my browser? (CG: try http://www.chrisgreaves.com/RAMDisk/index.htm )

29: What can you tell me about Security? (CG: try http://www.chrisgreaves.com/Security/index.htm )

30: I have a question for you - Our grandfather, Jean-Paul, took many, many 16 mm films during the years.  Where might I ask about getting the contents onto DVD's?

31: I need a bit of help, about two hours training. We are a luxury travel company, with six worksheets used as templates to build quotations. I would like to make the workbooks “Work Better”.

32: What did you do back in the day when you had to work with 200,000+ records and  Excel could only handle 65,000 rows. Is splitting the total into 3 sheets the best solution?

33: I spend up to an hour per resume copy-pasting into a standard format. Have you an idea for a tool that would cut my time down to about 5 minutes? I have two assistants who work with me, and as well we have an office in Montreal and in Quebec City. (CG: yes I have such a tool, it is called “Snare”).

34: Excel issue... Two columns... 

Name; URL

name1; url1

name2; url2

How do I make the name column hyperlinked by using the URL column?

(Later) "Your two-minute solution would have taken me thirty+ minutes to figure out."

35: Appreciate your offer of help. My wife feels that reading [the Excel spreadsheet] would be made easier if we ran the months on the vertical and the categories on the horizontal. Thank you for your assistance. (Try using the last video on this page on the little sample attached. http://www.chrisgreaves.com/Videos )

36: We need the amount of capital raised for resource companies (with $5MM market cap or less) in Canada over the last 2 years (since June 2008) so it can be compared to our company. The data should be amenable to be put into a bar cHart, e.g. GLD raised 16 million; The average resource co with less than $ 5 million market cap raised XXX$, the top 10% decile raised YYY$.

37: I'm trying to do an all word index, every word except the, and, etc. I'm hoping that Indexer will do all words for me. I need how often the word occurs in document, the line it occurs on, and the page. I know it probably won't do all that but just to do all the words would be great.

38: There is a spreadsheet that several people use to input data. The president wants to receive an eMail when the value in a cell is equal to a certain criteria.

39: I'd like the database to send automatic eMail remainders to clients that confirm their course reservations - 10 business days prior to the 1st booking date of each registration.

40: I'm looking for accesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss VBA coding that will automatically populate business days of the week based on a start date and entry of # of days

41: I want to put this full view picture of David (below) on our radio website but I don’t know how to make a .jpg from this. Is there a way?

42: If you could remove "DRAFT" from the title on page 1, I will be in your debt. (Within reason)

43: I have a client that is looking for someone to teach one-to-one VBA for Excel macros for a finance person. The trainer must have a very professional demeanor as this is for a large formal corporate client.

44: I'm looking for a trainer that has delivered/has courseware for 1 or 2 day courses on the following: Proposal Writing and Presentation; Benchmarking. These courses are for senior management.

45: I have “developed” a number of accesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss and Excel based applications that are taking up a lot of my time and I know have not been built properly. I am looking for some outside help to review everything I have done and to develop some new applications from my existing data. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.

46: We have a set of seven workbooks which calculate ROI on our products, but the worksheets are getting out of hand. Can you come up with a coherent design so that we can maintain and expand our offerings to our sales force?

47: I was searching for PowerPoint files that had the words "change agent" in their text somewhere and was pulling my hair out (I'm am now almost completely bald - the boss WILL be paying for a new wig!). (later) Weeeellll... Will it run on Windows 7 and find the d*mn files I'm looking for on the network? I will GLADLY pay for that!!!

48: What we need is a working session on Thursday with an expert consultant - hopefully you. It may be possible that there is programming to do off-site but on Thursday we definitely need a report for that day.

49: What do you charge for one-on-one custom training? That is what we need. We do not have any wish to contract the work out. We are already doing the work in-house and wish to continue to do that in-house, but more efficiently. The problem is we are not skilled in Excel sufficiently to do it efficiently.

50: There is another project that I need help with. We want to create a set of payback calculators for our sales force.

51: Can you make a list of companies involved in mineral and metals exploration, who are raising flow through funds, trade more than $25k per day, share price under $1?

52: Can you make a list of companies with a working capital per share > share price, trade more than $25k per day, share price under $1, seeking acquisitions; management changes being considered?

53: I need some advice on what to do with my old laptop which is running pretty slow. Should I try to clean it up so I can use it or just buy a new one? I still have the software discs that came with it 5 yrs ago.

54: I did some thinking over the holidays and concluded that I have to do something about my lack of skills. Would you be willing to teach me Microsoft Excel and Adobe Acrobat (converting various documents into PDF files) - for a fee? I know you're very occupied with much more challenging stuff but I haven't got a clue how these programs might be applied to my work here and we have a submission to the Newfoundland government that is due in a few weeks. I know that if I tried looking for alternate employment these would probably be required and I just can't learn on my own!!!! What do you think?

55: re: Excel & VBA solutions. I am working on a project now and have some minor issue that I would need to be resolved with VBA.

56: We are working in a straight XP environment. I want a fairly comprehensive login script which locks down Windows and customizes the user's desktop based on their security group. I have gathered most (if not all) of the VB code from various sources, but need it to all work together, and if it's not too much work, make it fairly modular as in breaking out each task into a subroutine that is called using parameters.

57: The items we need for the “portable” document style template would contain the following:

- Headers & footers in the format shown,

- Table of contents

- Page numbering system as shown

- Section, paragraph and sentence numbering as shown

In addition is there a means of providing macro(s) for inserting sections or paragraphs c/w TOC? (Additional task.) Also, could you provide a rate for training the secretary?

58: I was hoping you could help me with the attached template. If you look at the box, I would like to have a macro that popped up a message that they have too many words in the field, but allow them to go to the next field.

59: I would like to find out why my workaround macro does not allow me to close the new document.

60: My goal for training is to understand as much as possible about creating and editing Word Templates and be able to apply those skills to creating client templates that are stable and easy to use.

61: What would you charge to give us a list of all TSX and TSX-V companies that have a working capital > $20 million and a market cap of not more than 30% greater than WC? They can operate in any sector.

62: I need a tool that will analyze web networks, determine if a site is "down" or has broken links, and report back to me. Can you help?

63: I obtain text files after OCR'ing scanned invoices. Is it possible to extract the data in a defined record format that can be fed into an accounting package?

64: I have lost my worksheets – I can't see them on the tabs any more.

65: How can I make better use of my named ranges. I'm annoyed that I have these ranges name, but have to keep on typing in cell references.

66: I have clients with paper-based invoices, accounts and other fiscal data. I'd like to scan these, OCR them and encode relevant data so I can load it into accounting packages. But I don't want to pay $40,000 for a solution.

67: (Cathy's Coffee Cup Collection) Where can I get 365 empty used paper coffee cups? (They were wanted for a visual aid, and if you take a few seconds to think about it, how WOULD you go about it? The stores wouldn't be happy in case you are going to bad-light them; no one wants to spend two days cycling up and down Dundas Street with a garbage bag, and although you say you would, you wouldn't really dive into a dumpster. I came up with an elegant solution with a high-profile add on!)

68: When I do a shutdown on my Toshiba Satellite – it does a re-boot – as if I had selected Restart. The only way I can power down is to unplug and remove the battery!!! Vista operating system. Annoying, weird behavior – that just adds to all of my other frustrations!!!!!! Arghh!!!!

69: Some of my Outlook E-Mails are going to my junk box – on a seemingly random basis. For example – your E-Mail from last Thursday “Business communications ...” went to junk mail and I missed it until I just happened to review my junk mail.

70: WEB Site - The TEST menu selection shows an attempt to display DIVs with absolute positioning – nothing is displayed???

71: WEB Site - There is a problem in creating content within this generated code. The TABLE menu selection shows one problem – the first row in the table has a color specification that seems to get ignored ??

72: Hello, I was wondering if you could take a look at a PowerPoint file that I am having a problem with. I have activated the simplest of macro's (on second slide, see hexagon button). It does not seem to activate the macro? Any ideas on why it doesn't work? I was thinking it had something to do with security, but I have the setting on medium and enable the macro upon opening the file.

73: I need an MS Office 2007 Trainer to train 500 people (Most via Video conference for a Real Estate Organization Corporate.

74: I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the attached Word document into a searchable/filterable/sort able list by postal code. Any thoughts on how to automate this process? i.e. I want to find all locations close to me that have wireless. The online website is not very user friendly: http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/hou_loc_index.jsp

75: How can I automate the process of updating links amongst Excel workbooks from my APL program code?

76: When I import this file the descriptions for (some thing), (something else), and (yet another thing) are truncated. Others are OK. The length of the description has no effect as many of the descriptions are much longer than any of these. The 255 character answer drives me nuts. Not saying it isn't the case, but why are 9 out of 10 entries OK and then one goes wrong. Descriptions that work fine run from 50 characters to 1000+. I can believe Microsoft can just let this slide.

77: Are you available this coming Tuesday to teach an Advanced Excel course? The course is from 9 am until 4 pm. I've included the details of what they want to cover and a sample of their documentation.

78: What I'm wondering is if there is a way that I can trap every action in Word and then replay it later, without them knowing. Scenario: A class has 40 students in an exam room. They all are doing work in Word to do writing. I suspect student 7, 28 and 39 of cheating. I then want to 'see' what they did during the exam. They have handed me a word doc that has been Chris-ified. Can I then run what they did at double or triple or whatever time?

79: My goal is to produce reports from data in a seamless automated manner, reducing time spent in preparation, improving consistency of output, reducing user errors and thereby reducing the need for costly re-runs.

80: We need to learn how to create macros and templates that can be used to manipulate the reports that come off of a third-party report generator and customize them to our needs.

81: I have to create an exam for a course I'm teaching. Novice level word users. I want to prevent them from using cut/copy/paste so that they can't put web content into a word doc. The main goal is to prevent them from finding info online and simply putting it into Word. Is there either an easy way for me to disable this feature set, or is there an easy way (that is, you can do it in 10 minutes) way that you can do this and send me a file to use? Basically I need to ensure that they do not simply duplicate and plagiarize. I really only need to disable "Paste" and "Paste Special", don't I... I've figured out how to remove "paste" from the keyboard and the menu and the toolbar. However, it's still in the right mouse click. Tried Google, tried MSDN, but I can't figure out how to code the system to restrict the right mouse click.

82: We have two dozen Word templates that need to be cleaned up and standardized; we need a set of user procedures that will guide contracting staff in the proper use of these templates.

83: Question "How do you run a windows shell command in VBA?" The answer can be found here .

84: Our office is filling up with archived copies of documents running back twenty years. Some of us feel that this could be stored off-site, while others argue that it should be kept handy. Please supply us with some clear thinking on the pros and cons of hard-copy storage, and help us by providing tools to determine the best solution for us.

85: My office is on the ground floor with three networked computers. I am worried about break-ins. The loss of my data would be stunning. Loss of client confidence might destroy my business. What can you tell me about encryption and off-site backup storage ?

86: I run a field hockey club and am looking for a way that I can keep my web pages up to date with schedules, cancellations etc without having to eMail corrections to a web master.

87: We need an Excel macro. We export data from Simply Accounting to a spreadsheet and manually drag data to columns “H” and “I” of the spreadsheet, according to the type of data. It seems to me that a Macro could do this regular work for us.

88: I have about ten to twenty Word documents each of about 100 to 150 pages each that need to have their styles cleaned up. Can you do that for me?

89: Do you offer excel training for creating templates/forms? I am interested in on site, one on one training. How much would it cost? Do you have a ballpark idea of how much it would take to create a table-based style generator? That greatly affects how much time it'll take me to do my stuff.

90: I am just wondering after receiving your flyer in the mail if you have done any work in MS-accessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss?

91: We need a Word template that would match this. New content is to be created in Word with this template, using paragraph and character styles of the same name as in Frame Maker. The attached RTF came out of the Frame Maker conversion, and as you can see it does a reasonable job but is not tied to any template and has no associated trickery. The writers should be limited in what they can/can't do so it's harder for them to screw up. We need to minimize the number of opportunities they have to use any kind of direct formatting or bad style (e.g. the Enter-Enter-Enter method of page layout). Toolbars, etc. would make it less appealing for users to do the wrong thing. We need a way to set up inserting tables and figures, and limiting the options for hyperlink appearances. As well, we need to configure the header/footer and page layout, build the TOC, index, and set up a cover.

92: I am trying to find out if you have CD’s or Online courses on Business Communications. This is for a corporation. We have close to 3,000 employees worldwide. This is why the CD’s or online would have been perfect. Many of our employees are remote. We have a Learn Maintenance Server here that we have developed. Classroom or workshops would not work. Our colleagues can connect into our LMS from anywhere in the world. If you have any thoughts on this let me know. All I am looking for now are quotes. For now it would be for 100 people.

93: I have a column of correctly spelled words and I want to generate a second column containing these same words misspelled. In the column of misspellings I would want to generate (from the correctly spelled list) half into transposition errors (abcd --> abdc)  and half into omission errors (abcd --> abd). I can think of long ways to build the lists by hand but I'm sure there's a better way.

94: The accessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss form should list work orders in descending order.  This form's data source is an inline query based on tblWork.

95: The accessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss form should list the most recent action date (if there is one) from tblActions so they can tell at a glance whether any work has been done.

96: Problem with two identical work order numbers being generated.  It's a multi-user database and I didn't add any code to check to see if a number has been generated before assigning it to the current work order.

97: Could you tell me what I need to put into a template in order to get it to automatically number.  I want the number to increase by one each time I make a new invoice.

98: Your colleague needs a specialized training course developed for the new in-house application. The application is ready to roll, but who will train the trainers? And who can produce coherent training manuals quickly? Who can drill down to the essential basics for this new application?

99: Your client has 5,000 Word Perfect documents to be converted. You feel certain that your client doesn’t know their source files, and that they want a magic wand to “make them clean”. They have provided you with less than four documents, none of them accompanied by a printout (hard-copy). They have recently received training, but don’t understand styles. They have no template and, of course, they want a template. You have developed a Sales Lead Management database for your sales team to use.  It is a very straightforward template in accesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss adjusted a bit for your needs, but now, of course, people are asking you to make it better and you don’t know how!!! They want to be able to eMail the contact directly from the contact screen, rather than leaving this system and going into Outlook.  There is currently a “dial customer” option that was part of the template – we want this to be changed to eMail customer and automatically open Outlook to create the message?

100: Your company distributes equipment and supplies.  As these usually government funded, most sales processes involve our issuing multiple price quotations.  These can be very simple for one item only to quite complex ones for an entire laboratory setup.  In an effort to automate this process as much as possible, I have developed an application based on WordPerfect.  It works reasonably well for us but I am the only person in the company that knows anything about WordPerfect and therefore am the only support they have.  This is not a good business situation, so we are looking to change over to a more contemporary software.  Because we need the flexibility to edit the documents a word processor like Word seems to be the preferred choice but my limited knowledge of VBA means I am not the right person to do this migration.

101: You run a Microsoft Word mail merge, but the data that arrives from the AS400 is in a non-standard delimited form. Further, each document produced by the mail merge must be tailored as a result of codes in the input data. Specifically the codes should cause inclusion of two levels of text, each level identified by look up codes. The entire system must be maintained by someone with an intermediate knowledge of Microsoft Word.

102: Your consultant has had six months to develop the budget data accumulation workbook, but with two weeks to go, announces that they cannot complete the task on time. Further investigation reveals that they really do not have the skills to address the problem.

103: You would like to implement a low-cost Document Management System that intercepts the save and close events in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and uses a lookup table to implement a coded folder and file name structure. The system must support batch operations and reports on held documents.

104: Your in-house staff need training so that everyone is at the same level.

105: You have been handed an existing Excel workbook which contains macros. You are required to support some 2,000 lines of VBA code, but you don’t know where to start.

106: You want an add-in or macro that starts with the application itself (MS-Word / Excel / PowerPoint). For each window it will keep track of the time worked. So when the window is not active, the timer will stop. If the window is on top, the timer will stop after (say) 5 minutes of inactivity and this parameter can be set by the user. The time information will be written to a log (which can be the billT056 program) for reporting. As a result of the above, this app will capture the time "actually worked" on the document. The log will also capture the size of the document in terms of the number of lines, word count and user name (You expect to exchange the document with others for review / updates and their input time / work can also be captured). The report will give me the time spent on working the document and the amount / size of work produced. Finally when you close a document you will be able to get the cumulative total of the total time spent on completion of the document etc.(this can be user-wise too).

107: You just don’t know how to phrase your request; you don’t know how to describe your problem.

108: Your computer hardware is sporting severe problems, and you are reluctant to start playing around with cables and switches.

109: You find that you are losing too much time from simple errors; there must be a way to avoid them.

110: You don’t understand Windows; things seem to take longer to do than when you do them by hand.

111: You would like to merge three Act! Contact databases, but Act! Doesn’t properly merge the Notes/History data.

112: You need to clean up your data; phone numbers are formatted every which way, some records have postcodes but no provinces, or postcodes don’t match provinces.

113: You have 20,000 Word Perfect documents that must be migrated to Microsoft Word and cleaned up and standardized along the way.

114: You would like your Word Perfect macros rewritten in Microsoft Word.

115: You are unhappy with your business letters, proposals and business cards.

116: You would like to see a draft of your new brochure or flyer, but you do not have a color printer.

117: You would like to obtain a FREE savvy Shortcuts card, laminated in plastic.

118: You would like to receive a Christmas card each year, in June or July.

119: You need to grab data from a dynamic web page, but the data to be grabbed is time-dependant on another web page.

120: You need a speaker to address your networking or social group.

121: You need an in-house VBA workshop.

122: You need one-on-one training.

123: You need help in organizing your web site.

124: You would like a really cheap way of developing a mock-up of your web site, that you can take to a Real Web designer.

125: You need to make your computer run faster.

126: You’ve heard about backups, and would like to implement encryption and off-site backup storage

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