The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Funktor posted:

Well, I know all that (except for the drop-down lists). Here's the issue:

They don't have the same workers day-to-day. If they enter in the daily information that they get on the invoices, is there a way to combine that information nicely? In other words, if Jerry works Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday at three different companies, the enter in his daily information, and then when they go to concatenate the info for the whole week, they alphabetize by name, and now Jerry's got three lines. If they want to make it so that he's only got one line, is there some way to do that automatically, or do they have to manually copy & paste the info from those three lines onto one?

This is why I was wondering if some other software would do the job better.

And yeah, it seems simple to me too, but somehow explaining =SUM(A1:A4) to my mother took 20 minutes. She knows it now, but still...

This sounds like it might be a job for pivot tables. It's amazing how easily you can get Excel to summarize information with them.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2011 15:07

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 16:08

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

MachinTrucChose posted:

Anyone know of a basic indexing tool?

I don't want something that watches a directory and runs as a service, I want something simple where I tell it to index the contents of C:\folder at the push of a button, then I can search the plaintext contents of that folder and see results (and only that folder). Basically on-demand indexing. I don't care if it doesn't integrate with Explorer, in fact I don't want it to.

Everything I'm finding through Google has its tentacles all over the place, and wants to manage indexing itself.

Try Inforapid Search & Replace. It hasn't been updated in quite a while, but it works.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2011 18:39

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Comradephate posted:

Are there any good telnet/ssh apps for Windows 7? Tabbed sessions would be nice, as would free. Right now I use putty, it's... okay.

E: would also like to be able to copy and paste into it, if that's a thing SSH clients can do.

What do you need that PuTTy doesn't have? Your mention of copy/paste makes me wonder whether you know that Putty copies text automatically when you highlight it, and pastes when you right-click inside the window.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2011 19:41

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Comradephate posted:

Tabs and saving my passwords are two things that have proven extremely useful for the day or two that I've been using Xshell.

Unless your environment can't use SSH key authentication, I would recommend SSH keys + Pageant or other key agent instead of saved passwords.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2011 18:43

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Mak0rz posted:

Way ahead of you

It doesn't seem to do that by default. What I mean is that I'm using the Filter function to sort columns in numerical order.

Why are you using Filter and not Sort? In my experience, which granted has been on smaller spreadsheets, it orders the rows in the entire selection, so J120 moves around with K120 and things aren't disturbed.

If disturbing things is your goal, then I'm at a loss. You might need to rewrite with crazy vlook functions or something to tell Excel how to find the rows you want as things slide around.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2012 22:49

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

A few years ago, when most other imaging solutions were either expensive or iffy, DriveImage XML was a pretty useful piece of freeware. I'm sure it's way behind the state of the art now but I'd concur that it's legit. I used it for backup and restore on my kid's Vista machine for years and while I never needed an image restore, the few file restores I tried worked fine.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2013 20:19

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Hummer Driving human being posted:

I'd like to start using Access to do what everyone in my organization uses Excel and Word to do.

An easy example is a language test. I'm going to create one table with the information of every person who would ever take the test. I would like another table that contains the test information such as the name of the person who took it, the date they took it, their score, as well as previous tests and scores they received.

Is there a way to automatically bump all of the old test dates and scores to the right as new scores are entered? I would like to avoid having to create new fields every time a test id given.

Also, if you're an Access pro, pm me because I know I'm going to have plenty of questions as I go about making this database.

I'm no pro but you generally want to use multiple rows instead of additional columns inside the schema. When someone takes a test multiple times, add a row for each session. Generate the report you want by querying for all the times a given person took the test, then use logic in the presentation layer to transpose the rows to columns, or just show the rows and let the users figure it out.

Question of my own: I have no experience with Visual Basic, but I have programming experience. I have a desire to learn how to automate Visio - I've been asked to work on making diagrams showing servers, dataflows among them, etc, and I don't want to type information into Visio if I can dynamically query our inventory database for it instead. Does anyone know of a good place to start for learning how to do that?

# ¿ Feb 18, 2013 03:42

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Hummer Driving human being posted:

Thanks. I think I'm still in the mindset of trying to make Access look like what I'm used to seeing in Excel which is a no-no. If I'm using the students as the primary key on the test results table and the primary key is entered more than once because the student takes the test more than once, can I create a report that will only list the student once but to the right of the student column have the results of their most recent test followed by any previous tests the farther to the right you go on the page?

Don't make the student the primary key. Use an automatic primary key and just index on the student ID.

Access doesn't do that sort of report automatically. You can do a pivot but it still has each test in its own row. I found someone asking much the same question in Google and the answer might be helpful to you, although it's not point and click: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11561422/transpose-a-set-of-values-in-rows-to-columns-in-access-2010. I also found http://msgroups.net/microsoft.public.access/how-to-transpose-multiple-columns-int/89766 interesting.

Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Feb 18, 2013

# ¿ Feb 18, 2013 15:31

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Brady posted:

Excel question. This is probably an easy one for most of you, but I'm terrible with Excel.

I have 3 columns. The first Column has dates in a Month/Day/Year format that starts in cell A2 with 7/12/2013 and goes to... forever (5/29/4884).

The next 3 columns have simple values in them, from 1-10, not all are whole numbers.

Anyway, I was wondering if there was a way to populate a weekly total for each of those columns. I'd like a new one to auto populate for every week, next to that week's set of data. I don't know if this is even possible? A weekly average would also be nice, and is probably easier to do as well.

Of course, I can do these things manually, but I'd rather find a way to not have to.

I Googled around a bit and found a "WEEKNUM" function to try and get the ball rolling, but that returns "28" (=WEEKNUM(A2,2) and I have no idea where that number is even coming from, so I decided I needed to ask for help.

Any and all advice is appreciated.

Literal autopopulation is outside my skill set. If I get this right, you want a new set of columns that's only populated every seven rows, showing totals and means for those rows. I think you could just go down seven rows, put in the formulas you want, then select an entire week's worth of cells (six rows of empty space and the weekly stuff), copy it, and paste that block from the next week to the end of the spreadsheet.

Then you look at that and wince at all the zeroes and errors, so you change it to wrap the totals in IF(COUNTA(range)!=0,(formula),"") functions to suppress that stuff, and you're off to the races.

You could be wilier and use date functions to detect the start of a new week (if weeknum for the current row's date isn't weeknum for the row above's date) or do subtotals every Tuesday or something like that, but I'm not sure how much you get out of it.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2013 17:25

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

stubblyhead posted:

PuTTY is just fine in my opinion. It does lack the ability to save usernames and/or passwords, but that's ok in my book.

The auto-login user name is one of the session options. All my sessions have user names in them. Look in Connection->Data. I know of no way to save a password but then that's not really a great idea anyway, since IIRC session data gets stored in the registry. Pageant and SSH keys or a Keepass auto-type entry have been my go-to solutions for that problem.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2014 21:23

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Seventh Arrow posted:

I'm only casually familiar with Excel, so forgive me if there's actually an easy way to do this. I've scanned a bunch of user home drives on our domain and the results have generated a spreadsheet with the user's account names and the size of their home drives. So it looks something like this:

Amber | 10GB
Andrew | 5GB
Jeff | 15GB
Karen | 5GB
Linda | 5GB
Mark | 20GB
Peter | 5GB
Rob | 50GB
Sharon | 10GB
Tanya | 5GB

And so on. I run this file through a script and (with a bit of editing) end up with a text file that leaves out the inactive users:

Amber
Jeff
Mark
Rob
Tanya

So now I need a file that combines only the active users and their quotas and leaves out the inactive users. If it were only fifty or so, I'd just copy/paste them side by side and do it manually. But this is actually hundreds of users. Any ideas?

My first thought is to paste the active user list into a new tab of the spreadsheet and then use index/match to get their quotas from the first tab.

What language is the script in?

# ¿ Feb 4, 2015 21:08

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Anyone know of a good MTP file sync program? I want to get my AAC files moved to my cell phone's memory card, and I don't need a music or media manager to deal with them. I just want to sync a couple of directory trees from my Windows 8.1 machine to my phone. I tried PowerSync but it ran very slowly, slower than using an Android app to sync over Wifi.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 02:32

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

I expect that would work but I was thinking using MTP would be quicker and avoid any need to run a server on the Windows box.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 02:49

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

DrBouvenstein posted:

Not sure if this is the best thread for an Excel question, but I'll start here:

If Mr Peck's solution isn't it, you might try the Excel question thread. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3132163

# ¿ Feb 29, 2016 18:52

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

That's a false dichotomy for anyone who cares enough to post in this thread, but not for the general population. I tried to show my father how to use Keepass several times and I cannot make it stick. I think we can take it as given that if he can't figure out the app, I'm not going to have any luck explaining about storing your password database in a cloud, but using a key file that isn't in the cloud, and so on, and so on. My mom has also made it clear that I cannot tell him he isn't smart enough to use a computer in the internet and must stop. If LastPass and the browser extension for it are easier and that brings it within his sphere of comprehension, I'll take it.

Or maybe someday I'll take advantage of the fact that I know the one password he uses for everything and buy myself something nice.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 03:43

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

I use Primo Ramdisk at home and it's been done exactly what it advertises with no issues. I'm a little worried that the last version came out in 2016, but then, why would they need to keep issuing new releases if the current one works?

# ¿ Feb 16, 2018 17:14

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

This notion would require some trial and error, but you could create another column showing the right sort order for the answers, then do it as two mail merges, with the second document printed on the back of the first, rather than using the automatic duplexing.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2019 20:43

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Statutory Ape posted:

this woke my computer today, is there a thing thatll give me a timestamp on it? also i was checking update settings and didnt see an option to "not turn on computer ive loving manually put to sleep"

Is it something you could find in Task Schedule and edit? I don't have that exact task on my Win10 system, but going in as admin and unchecking "Wake the computer to run this task" doesn't seem like it should be too destructive.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2019 18:01

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Is there a way to tell Win 10 not to bring displays out of power save just because there are notifications? I keep coming in the morning and finding out that my monitor has been on for hours because two of my friends had a 4am chat on some Discord channel where I have notifications enabled, or someone Signalled me after I went AFK.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2020 05:13

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Zorak of Michigan posted:

Is there a way to tell Win 10 not to bring displays out of power save just because there are notifications? I keep coming in the morning and finding out that my monitor has been on for hours because two of my friends had a 4am chat on some Discord channel where I have notifications enabled, or someone Signalled me after I went AFK.

In case anyone was curious, this turned out to have nothing to do with Discord, Signal, wake timers, or any other sane thing. Somehow my aging Thrustmaster HOTAS setup was keeping the display alive. I happened to unplug and re-plug it one day just to tidy up some cords, and the problem vanished. It is a mystery.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2020 21:43

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Thanks Ants posted:

Something like a headphone mixer would be the perfect way to do this

https://artproaudio.com/product/powermix-iii-three-channel-personal-stereo-mixer/

I did something similar so I could be sure to hear notification sounds from my work computer when listening to music on my personal computer. It works quite well. If I was going to be using my phone as a source, I'd probably also want to get a stereo BT receiver to use as an input.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 21:33

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

I've never heard about certutil's ability to do encoding and decoding until a few months back, and I thought "oh neat" and checked to see what would happen if I manually encoded a binary payload with it, sent myself the payload, and then decoded it. What happened was an error message and a call from the SOC to ask what I was doing.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2021 19:34

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

I've been trying for decades, but my Dad still cannot grasp what a browser is. Can he use Chrome without changing his AOL email address? If a web site tells him to use Edge, is he allowed to use Firefox? If a page looks different when he changes browsers, does he have a virus?

My parents raised me and I have to respect that, but when he starts asking computer questions, I really appreciate being an adopted child.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2022 20:21

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

You can't start the cell value with a ' to force Excel to treat them as strings?

# ¿ Apr 25, 2022 20:59

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

David Weber wrote entire novels with Dragon after his carpal tunnel issues got bad.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2022 16:17

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

I use Avidemux.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2023 00:41

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Does Win 11 support monitor persistence with a Display Port KVM?

# ¿ Apr 12, 2023 04:10

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Completely agree. It's another step in the crapification of everything.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2023 21:02

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

There are many aspects of VS Code that make me shake my head in bafflement and wonder, but if you told me that the new Outlook was going to be like VS Code, I'd have expected better than we've got.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2023 04:11

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

god please help me posted:

Thank you for the responses. Unfortunately I was not able find any dump files on my computer, despite it literally crashing a couple of minutes ago. I'm not able to find a %SystemRoot% folder either. I think I may have the same error this person did where it wouldn't write a dump too. I still have no idea what I'm doing.

I did try the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, and it proceeded fine, but it didn't give me any result once my PC restarted normally. I'm not sure if that's normal or not.

Typing in get-physicaldisk into Powershell says that my SSDs are healthy. Crystaldiskinfo says that they're both healthy again.

I've been looking things up in the Event Viewer, and I just can't find anything in particular that's the cause of the shut down. Of particular note is that there's a log stating that the previous shut down at [twenty minutes before it actually physically rebooted itself] was unexpected, and after the unclean reboot there's a log about how audit events have been dropped by the transport, which I assume is the computer saying that it wasn't able to create a dump file.

I'm tempted to blame this on an update to windows version 23H2, or if I got dust in my PC or not, but god knows. If it's a power supply issue, I've also turned off my second monitor to see if that may stop the crashes.

If you're not getting dumps because of an error, there should be something about that in the event log, as there was in that example. He was getting

quote:

Error 4/11/2022 10:59:54 AM volmgr 161 None Dump file creation failed due to error during dump creation.

and if you aren't seeing something about dump file creation failing, I'd first check under Advanced Systems Settings -> Startup and Recovery (well, that's where it is on my Win10 system) to make sure that "Write Debugging Information" has a memory dump option selected.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2023 06:56

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

lllllllllllllllllll posted:

In Thunderbird (email) there is a menu above your email addresses on the left where you can further specify if you'd like to see the total number of mails or how much space they use. You can also make that menu disappear. How the heck do you get it back once it is gone? Thank you!!!!

View -> Layout -> Message List Header?

# ¿ Jan 24, 2024 23:49

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 16:08

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Tapedump posted:

Really old iDRAC and a server with a busted VGA port.

I'm just trying to avoid having to drive across town to get my Win7 laptop from the shop until morning if I can.

I've had good enough luck with Edge in IE mode on old R*10-series iDRACs that I don't need to go find our ancient jump server with IE and some ancient Java version anymore.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2024 04:42

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