Category Archives: MS-Office

Visio and database creation

For quite a while I used Visio 2000 Enterprise Edition to design database schemas, and then have it create and update the tables. Admittedly the Visio 2000 interface is a little cumbersome for such things: it’s overzealous on its checking before you can update the database, and just try and delete a relationship without the sky falling on your head — it somehow thinks some kind of underlying link is still there, and if there’s anything wrong with it, it refuses to play ball. But when it behaves, it’s an excellent timesaver.

The other week I upgraded to Visio 2003 Professional Edition. Somewhere between 2000 and 2003 they’ve scrapped the Enterprise Edition, and although Microsoft don’t specify it in their literature comparing editions and versions, gone too is the database creation stuff. Apparently they’ve moved that functionality into Visual Studio Enterprise Architect — which Joel On Software describes as the super expensive “Enterprise Architect” edition at the top of the line that hardly anyone ever buys; it’s only there to make the other prices look reasonable by comparison. Great.

In Visio 2003 you can still draw database designs, or even generate them from existing databases, but there’s no way to create the DDL (SQL) for them, or update/create the databases themselves. I spent a couple of hours searching vainly through the Visio menus (the “Database” one is particularly deceptive) looking for such options, but couldn’t find them. I did find stuff pertaining to outputting a bunch of data describing my database diagram, but nothing would let me create the database I’d meticulously designed, or even print out a list of the fields and their types and sizes.

I have Visual Studio 2003, but for various reasons it’s the Professional Edition. So I couldn’t get my lovely design into the waiting and ready Oracle database. On the Visio 2003 Save As, it lets you choose “Visio 2002”. I wondered if by some fluke Visio 2000 would read a 2002 format. So I saved it, removed Visio 2003, installed Visio 2000 and tried to load it up.

Eureka, it worked. There was some further messing with it to get around a relationship on the database that was causing an error, and which I eventually decided I wanted to delete (an impossibility in Visio 2000 — see above) but eventually I got my DDL and indeed managed to create my glorious Oracle database.

But really, it shouldn’t be this hard.

Word options

Word 2003: Tools menuDumb things in Word 2003 that they should have fixed 3 versions ago, number 473: Not being able to get into the Options when you don’t have an open document.

Do you really really want to open the file?

I know the spread of macro viruses via consumer products is a dangerous thing, and obviously Microsoft in particular have had to take action to help slow them down. But I’m not convinced the plethora of dialog boxes that now adorns every application is really the way to go.

For instance, if you open an MDB in Access 2003 that was created in Access 2000, you are likely to get no less than three separate security dialogs asking if you’re sure, if you’re really sure you want to open the file.

I’ve been using Access for some years, but I don’t know what an “unsafe expression” is. I created the MDB I’m opening, and it’s just got tables in it. No macros, no VBA modules, not even a report or query. There’s nothing unsafe in it. So I said No, don’t block the unsafe stuff you imagine is in this file. Give it all to me.

Having said no, I don’t want them blocked, it then complains that it can’t block them. Obviously it doesn’t trust me to answer sensibly, it really wants to block those imaginery unsafe items. But it can’t without sending me off to Windows Update to install Jet 4 SP 8 or later.

I had to really concentrate to work out what the Yes/No options at the bottom of the dialog are for. They’re nothing to do with blocking the alleged unsafe expressions, or installing the service pack. Nope. What it’s asking is if I still want to open the file.

Having ascertained that I don’t care about the unsafe expressions that don’t exist, and I still want to open the file… it asks me just one more time, by suggesting the bleeding obvious: “This file may not be safe if it contains code that was intended to harm your computer.” Well duh, no kidding.

The cunningly placed Cancel button on the left could easily lead one to click that by default. But finding and clicking the Open button finally really opens the file.

Now, why did I want to look at this file again?

Excel to HTML

I can’t believe how stupid Excel (2002/XP) was with the table of browsers the other day.

The plan was to get the numbers into Excel, copy/paste into a Frontpage table to strip back the formatting, then paste into WordPress.

Nup, bloody monstrous Excel tags right the way through it, which Frontpage couldn’t override, and evidently no easy way to strip. No combination of Paste Special would work. So for example, instead of <td></td> we got:

<td align="right" x:num="1.15E-2" style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Arial; text-align: general; vertical-align: bottom; white-space: nowrap; border: medium none; padding-left: 1px; padding-right: 1px; padding-top: 1px"></td>

I kid you not. Now, I know about round-trip HTML, though I have my doubts that anybody uses it — firstly because it looks like crap in a web browser, and secondly because if you’ll want to edit it later, you’ll just keep an XLS copy. Besides, it’s badly implemented. The cell above was using the “Normal” style. It shouldn’t have had all the formatting crap embedded in it.

Word XP actually has a Save As Filtered HTML option to strip out all this crap. Excel XP doesn’t. (I haven’t checked Excel 2003 yet).

Plan 2 was to save it as HTML, load it into FrontPage and crop the HTML to paste into WordPress. Nup, trying to re-open it in FrontPage just threw it back to Excel. WTF?! Opening in UltraEdit (my preferred text editor) just revealed the same tags as above.

How can two Microsoft products that are part of the same suite, same version, operate so disastrously badly with one another, for something as simple as copying a table?

Plan 3? Oh bugger it, it’s only a few lines, just write it by hand.

If it were more I’d go install and run that clear The Useless Crap Out Of The HTML filter thing (oh look, they could do with clearing the crap out of their URLs too), but it refuses to install unless you have Office 2000. Wonderful.

Next time (after swearing a bit) I’ll probably save to CSV and then do a global replace from commas to table tags.

Surely there must be an easier way?

Office Clipboard

I’m used to the Windows Clipboard, which has one spot to put things in. Copy/paste. It’s simple, it’s easy to use, it’s quick.

Office ClipboardDamn this expanded Office Clipboard that comes with Office 2000, with its extraneous toolbar turning itself on and plonking itself right at the top, screwing up all your menus. Damn its 12 spots which fill up and then interrupt you to tell you they’re full. I don’t care if they’re full. Yes of course I want to copy this and bump some old long-forgotten thing from an hour ago off the list.

I don’t want it. I didn’t ask for it. Is there some way of turning this bloody thing off?

Yes, thankfully there is.

(Thankfully in Office XP, it can be done from the Options screen.)

Lookout is so frelling useful

I can’t believe it hasn’t been part of Outlook since the beginning.

I’ve had it for like a month. I stopped noticing how hard it was to search through Outlook’s folders a few years back because I stopped *trying* to search through Outlook’s folders. It was too pointless an exercise. I just found other ways to do things. I treated Outlook’s search feature as damage and routed around it.

Now, I want to know the IP address of the XYZ Server, I search my mail for “XYZ Server.” I want to know when we’re supposed to be at the restaurant, I search on the name of the restaurant.

In hindsight, I can’t believe how much Outlook sucks at some things.

—Jekke

(oh, yeah. Lookout is available for free at http://sandbox.msn.com)

Missing the bloat

A colleague was pasting a picture into his Powerpoint presentation. Some kind of diagram, and unfortunately he didn’t have the original document it came from, so no matter which Paste Special option he tried, it came through as a bitmap. Saved it to disk, e-mailed it to someone else, and wondered why it took so long.

Then he saw the size. It had blown out from a couple of hundred K to over 4Mb.

So he tried zipping it. WinZip took it down to, believe it or not, 80Kb.

No wonder people complain about Microsoft bloatware… sometimes it’s not just the apps, it’s the way they store stuff as well.

Pointless dialog

Digging out an old Word97 document at work, I loaded it up into Word 2K. It displayed fine, but I noticed an embedded Draw98 diagram in it that needed updating. Double-clicked, it produced an error to the effect that it wasn’t going to happen ‘cos Draw98 wasn’t on the machine. Okay. Right-click… ah… it can convert it to something else… choose that, and what do I see but this:

Convert Draw98 to Draw98?

Very handy, eh? And if you’re wondering, clicking OK got the error again. Pretty sloppy from a coding point of view.

I did a bit of digging and found an MSKB article which said no problem, just install Draw98 again… and even a handily placed link to it.

Click, download, run. Nup. It wants an Office 97 application on the machine to install! Triffic. And all this recommended in a KB article purporting to apply to Word 2K.

The article also suggests digging into your archive for Word 2, for a copy of Draw (that’d be 16 bit, surely? Eugh!)

If you don’t have 10 year old floppies hanging about, you can also get at the picture and edit it in Word’s Picture Editor. Not as good for this particular drawing, but it might have to do if I can’t do it any other way.

Or else re-do it from scratch in Visio…