Category: Work/Technical

  • Remove text from end of cell content in entire Column – MS Excel

    We’ve been working on a large project now for a good 3 or 4 months for one of our customers, and the final stage of the project is to add a load of free listings to their new directory style website.

    We have the bulk data in a spreadsheet and i have spent a good few days sorting the content out so that each column contains the right data (such as ensuring the street from each entry is in the “Street” column etc.

    I needed to duplicate the postcode column and remove the last part of it so that i had a “Postcode district” column so the import would place the listings in the right part of the directory (the last category level is “Postcode district”)

    However, there are 1776 entries!

    I spoke to an Excel specialist who solved my problems 🙂

    (more…)

  • Removing the VAT from a VAT Inclusive Price

    Ok, so we just spent the last 30 mins figuring out how to remove the VAT (20%) from a VAT inclusive price.

    The reason for this, is a customer of ours has an awesome online shop made by us – and all his prices are INCLUSIVE of VAT/Tax. He trades internationally, so we’ve been working on a cool EUVAT/Vat Exempt module so that (example) if someone buys from the EU and is EUVAT registered, they input their EUVAT number, the site instantly checks it for validity and if its OK removes the Tax/VAT from the order.

    It has a whole heap of other “conditions” with it, but thats not the reason for this blog post.

    We wanted to bulk remove the vat from his products, but our initial plan fell flat on its face, becasue;

    £100 + 20% VAT = £120

    £120 – 20% VAT = £96

    Ah.

    The reason for this is that 20% of 100 is not the same as 20% of 120….

    So we racked our brains for all those formulas and junk we learnt in school, and asked a few friends who mostly pointed us to cool websites that seemed to do the job – but we were still no closer to actualyl figuring out what the formula was..

    Then all of a sudden, bingo!

    One of the lads figured it out, and here it is;

    (total_price/(100+VAT))*100

    So, as we break it down…..

    (120/(100+20))*100

    (120/120)*100

    1*100

    £100

    Bingo! 🙂

  • Your UPS Invoice is Ready – SCAM – Phishing Email – WARNING – Explained

    My spam box receives hundreds and hundreds of emails every day – on all my email accounts. Every now and then one slips the net (not that often though, thanks Gmail!) and due to me bein’ around these parts for a while i’m able to spot the warning signs that indicate that it is in fact a scam;

    ups_scam_phishing_email-top

    The email address looks legit, there are no formatting errors within the body text like previous scam emails have contained – from first glances this is a pretty convincing fake!

    So can you tell if its a fake?

    Place your mouse cursor over links but DO NOT CLICK ON THEM!

    ups_scam_phishing_email-middle

    Note the preview of where that links takes you?

    Im pretty sure UPS dont use n-moto.ru for their own website. In fact, the domain could be ups.ru for all i care, the .ru bit in it makes it (imo) stand out like a sore thumb.

    It must be horrible for the russian domain name authority – but if i see a .RU domain name extension i run for the hills. I know my personal site has a .im domain name extension but these are very rarely used for spam/dodgy sites – in fact the spam sites seem to keep their domain extension choices to a minimum.

    They either use .RU (Russia) or .CN (China) – probably because the chinese and russian governments don’t give a shit about what people do online from their countries.

    Anyway, if you are not expecting an email from UPS or any other delivery company/service or if ANYTHING – and if something arouses your suspicions – then google it, ask me, ask someone who knows more about these things – and if all else fails delete it and they will call you if its important!

    Thanks to GemmaBeans for sending me the email – she thought it looked dodgy and she was right!

  • Syncing my Social World

    Hello 🙂

    So for ages i have argued with myself about how i should use the social networks that are available to me – i use about 6 quite regularly but i feel that i repeat myself or end up writing the same thing, on a few of them, and i only have the same friends/followers on most of them anyway.

    I’ve been pondering over an idea to simply use each social network for the things it does best (or what it started out doing) and then bringing them all together using one of the 6.

    Here is my plan, i think…

    Firstly, YouTube and Miso don’t really come into the plan (as such) as they are specific social networks and you cant really do what you do on these on the likes of Facebook or Twitter. I will however bring these into one of the more generic ones so that all my social activity is linked.

    I am going to use Twitter to chat, talk, and post quick messages (that’s what its made fo’) and i’m going to start posting all my images through Flickr (again, that’s what its made for) but of course each of these social networks will link to the other, so Flickr will notify Twitter that there is a new image, which will in turn post to Facebook)

    Foursquare will continue to be my location based social network – i used it before Facebook introduced the ability to check in.

    Im going to try and only use Facebook to show my updates from everything else – i’m going to (try to) sack off adding updates directly to it and only use the app for replying to any notifications.

    And i’m afraid coming in last place – is Google Plus. I do use it and i’m trying to use it more, but at the moment the only thing it really gets used for is the instant backup of all my photos. I do use the communities and find it more of a nerdy social network than anything else – i guess i need to expand my nerd crowd a bit more 🙂

    Its all going to take some planning as if i’m not careful ill have multiple updates on the same networks for the same information – ill draw myself a nice diagram later!

    Let me know how you use your social network accounts – do you link them up? Do you use any cool tools or apps to enable you to never miss a trick? 🙂