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Jive for Office 2013 64bit

A client I’m consulting for is using Jive as their EDRMS of choice. It’s not bad; but after using Office 365 recently, Jive is not as integrated as you’d like with Office 2013.

Working in the cloud (Jive is a cloud EDRMS) requires that another client you may connect from have the appropriate client plugin. In the case of Office 2013, you need to install the Jive plugin from their community website. It’s not easy to find, but it can be found.

The first issue I hit after installing this is that the 64bit version of Office 2013 disabled the COM Add-In. This occurred using the Jive extension version 30.1.655.15760.

After digging around on the support community pages; there is a registry fix to make the plugin compatible with x64 office clients. The one provided was for Office 2011; so I’ve included here a modified registry file for Office 2013 64bit edition.

Steps to get the extension working are:

  • Uninstall the Jive for Office extension.
  • Import this registry file for windows:

  • Reinstall the JiveOfficeInstaller.msi

After that; success!

Jive extension now working in Office 2013 x64

Jive extension now working in Office 2013 x64

 

Microsoft Development

I’ve started down the path of Darkness 🙂

In December 2011, I went on BizTalk training with @BizTalkBill and I’m now four weeks into the next stage of my career which is being an Microsoft “Integration Specialist”. You won’t find any open source in this realm, no ruby, nothing involving indie developers cracking out code until late at night.

What this change means is getting to know Visual Studio, BizTalk, SQL Server and all things Microsoft. It means using TFS, even though you really want to use Git. It means C# coding when you are familiar with interpreted languages like Perl, PHP and Ruby (I won’t be doing an ASP work).

That means you can expect going forward less posts about Unix, Clearcase (finally!) and Open Source platforms, and more about Microsoft offerings; specifically integration products.

Welcome to 2012.

Excel – Determining worksheet cell references

Worksheet names in Excel Cells

If you are working in Excel, and you want to show the worksheet name in a Cell on that worksheet, you can use the CELL function to do so.
By default the CELL function will return the current document name, if used with the filename info_type:

=CELL("filename")

This provides a full path to the spreadsheet, with the worksheet of the current Cell at the end, e.g:
C:\folder\[myfile.xls]Sheet1

You can easily get just the worksheet name by using the FIND and MID functions to do the hard work. You need to find the location of the last square bracket, and find achieves this as shown:
=FIND("]",CELL("filename"))

This would return the position of the last bracket. In this case it is at position 22 of the text that CELL(“filename”) returns. The MID function can extract text starting at a location for n length, where n is an arbitrary number. So we would combine MID, FIND and CELL functions to return just the worksheet name like this:

=MID(CELL("filename"),FIND("]",CELL("filename"))+1,255)

The reason we add a +1 is because we want to start extracting the text one character AFTER the right square bracket, e.g. at the start of the Worksheet name. Our result is:
Sheet1

Worksheet names from another Worksheet

So far so good, and how is this any different than any other blog post or forum post on the net explaining this? So far it’s not, but here comes the fun part.

What if you have multiple Worksheets, and you do this:

  1. Have a cell with content, Sheet1!B2
  2. Sheet1!B2 displays the content of OtherSheet!H5, i.e.:
    =OtherSheet!H5
  3. You want Sheet1!B1 to display the worksheet name where the CONTENT of Sheet1!B2 comes from.

You could try using the MID/FIND/CELL function combination to try this. In Sheet1!B1 you would enter:

=MID(CELL("filename",B2),FIND("]",CELL("filename",B2))+1,255)

However this would yield the worksheet name of B2 itself, not the worksheet where you are taking your content from:
Sheet1

Not what we wanted. Somehow you need to get the Value of the formula used =OtherSheet!H5 and look up the worksheet name for OtherSheet!H5

The Solution

To do this you ware going to need to do two things:

  1. Make a new function to display the formula, sans the equal sign
  2. Make your CELL function use the result of your function to lookup the filename info_type

We can use the Excel VB Editor to create a new function, and call it GetLocation:


Function GetLocation(Cell As Range) As String
GetLocation = Mid(Cell.Formula, 2)
End Function

But we can’t just use GetLocation to directly feed the CELL function. We need to use another handy function INDIRECT. This allows us to return the result of the GetLocation function as a Reference. This then allows the CELL function to evaluate the filename/Worksheet details for the destination cell in the other worksheet:

=MID(CELL("filename",INDIRECT(GetLocation(B2))),FIND("]",CELL("filename",INDIRECT(GetLocation(B2))))+1,256)

This now provides the Worksheet name of the cell that Sheet1!B1 is using to get it’s content from which is OtherSheet!H5:
OtherSheet

This is very handy when you need to show on a master worksheet which other worksheet your data is actually coming from. Windows Excel only, not Mac I’m afraid – until they bring back VB. Enjoy!

Bootcamp 3.0 fixes WinXP BSOD for Multitouch Trackpad

Apple released Bootcamp 2.1 with OS 10.5, which allows you to dual boot to Windows XP/Vista on your Mac.
Subsequenet to that release, there was a driver update for the Multitouch trackpad which was suppose to improve souble tapping, etc. However it caused a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) the moment you double tapped, courtesy of applemtp.sys.

Many people sent suggestions to Apple to fix this, but it seemed to be falling on deaf ears.

Little did we know that Apple were releasing a new version of the touchpad driver included with Bootcamp 3.0 on the Snow Leopard install DVD.

I’ve updated my Bootcamp to 3.0, and indeed the applemtp.sys driver version has increased to 2.1.2.112. The FAQ for the Snow Leopard update states that Bootcamp 3.0 has:

“Improved tap-to-click support – The ability to tap the track pad to click the mouse button is now supported on all Mac portables that run Boot Camp.”

In my tests, so far, there has been no more crashes. I get to use double finger right click tap, and the track pad responsiveness that I got in the older buggy driver is back as well.

Thanks Apple. No more BSOD.

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