If you’re frustrated or pleased with a company or product, you can join the discussions at Get Satisfaction. The site is similar to the Microsoft newsgroups, with a wide range of questions and comments.
Company employees are encouraged to participate, and customers help one another.
You can ask questions, describe problems, voice an opinion, or help someone else. Microsoft is participating, and there are a few Excel questions listed.
There are hundreds of other companies too, so if you’re looking for help, or want to evaluate a company or product, this might be a good place to start.
Do you use the mouse wheel to save time while scrolling through a web page, Word document or Excel sheet? If so, you can thank the Excel users from the early 1990s.
The scroll wheel is one of many features created by Eric Michelman, who was an Excel Program Manager at Microsoft, where he worked from 1991 to 2002.
Eric also designed other time-savers, including Pivot Tables (thanks!), database features, multi-user worksheets, and Page Break Preview.
“Back in 1993, as I was watching many Excel users do their work, I noticed the difficulty they had moving around large spreadsheets. Finding and jumping to different sections was often difficult. I had the idea that perhaps a richer input device would help.”
You can read Eric’s full account of the development of the scroll wheel, to learn how it evolved from a joystick designed for zooming in Excel (shown at the end of this article), to a scrolling wheel.
Scroll Wheel Development
There’s also a brief reference to the scroll wheel development on the Microsoft site, that confirms Eric’s description of the events.
“Eric Michelman wired a joystick to the zoom setting in Excel to make it easier to navigate large spreadsheets. He called it the ZoomLever. He demoed it at one of our team meetings and asked if anyone had any ideas for what we could use instead of the joystick. I had just bought a new VCR that had a remote with a wheel on it, and I brought it in the next day to show him. Eric asked if he could borrow it, showed it to the hardware guys, and soon we were playing with IntelliMouse prototypes with wheels on them.”
The researchers found at least three types of participants: Answer People, Reply Magnets and Discussion People.
Hey, I know a few of those “Answer People.” No mention of trolls though — maybe they’re in the Discussion People group.
Analyzing newsgroup networks in Excel
Website Connections
Somewhat related, but more fun, I won’t admit how much time I’ve spent on the Walk2Web site this week, exploring the connections between web sites. I’m marking it in my time log as “Research” so it’s time invested, rather than time wasted. 😉
It’s a great way to discover new sites in your area of interest, and who knows what other gems (or garbage) you’ll find? It’s fascinating to see a picture of how sites are linked, and it does look like a web after you’ve walked to a few sites. A very messy web, granted.
In the screen shot below I’ve followed a couple of the links from my Excel Tips Index page.
In the overview you can click on a linked site, to see its connections, or point to a link and see a snapshot of the page.
Point to the top, bottom, left or right of the page, to scroll in that direction.
Green links are incoming and blue links are outgoing. A maximum of three of each are shown, and you can click the orange More links to expand the view.
You can mark sites as favorites, Digg them or StumbleUpon them.
So, if you’re looking for inspiration, or new ideas, or a way to kill an hour, visit Walk2Web. Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.
When working on my laptop, especially with a second monitor plugged in, it’s sometimes hard to find the mouse pointer. Too often, this happens in the middle of a meeting, while I’m trying to demonstrate something to a client.
To make the pointer easier to find, you can use one of the built in features:
Click the Start button on the Windows taskbar, and click on Control Panel
Double-click on the Mousecontrol, to open the Mouse Properties dialog box
Click on the Pointer Options tab
Add a check mark to Show Location of Pointer When I Press the CTRL Key
Click OK
Close the Control Panel window.
The next time you lose the pointer, press the Ctrl key, and circles will flash on the screen, showing its location.
