As a fan of the ideas and tools of Microsoft FUSE Labs, I registered for an e-mail invitation to participate in the beta test for the new social network so.cl some time ago. Although I had not recieved an invitation, I was fortunately able to take a closer look to the platform two days ago, as I got an invitation from a friend via Facebook.
In order to use the social network, you have to log in by using a Facebook account. Then you will be taken to the welcome page, where the main functions and features are well explained.
The workbook includes five worksheets: “Info” just includes some info’s about me, “Formulas” lists the formulas in the different languages, “Compare” can be used for comparing the formulas in two languages, “Languages” includes the list of available languages and “Resources” allows to select between the three languages German, English and French for the interface of the workbook. My goal was now to allow to the user to select the two languages for comparing the formulas and to switch from one interface language to another.
Unfortunately, my provider 1&1 experienced some network configuration problems on 09/26/2011 that have led to a server failure from approximately 14:45 to 16:45 and from 19:45 to 21:30 o’clock (Central Europe time).
Not only this domain was affected, but also several other domain hosted on this server like the German Excel Ticker, the Website about my services, the Excel Formula Translator or the German Office365-Forum.
According to the 1&1 blog, the failure was caused by a faulty network configuration, which in turn was caused by a software.
I recently released version 1.50 of my free online Excel Formula Translator. The translator can be used to translate both single Excel Formulas and combined complex formulas. For example the formula =PROPER(MID(A1;FIND(“.”;A1)+1;FIND(“@”;A1)-FIND(“.”;A1)-1)) to extract the first and last name from an e-Mail address is translated to =NOMPROPRE(STXT(A1;TROUVE(“.”;A1)+1;TROUVE(“@”;A1)-TROUVE(“.”;A1)-1)) in French.
MSDN actually provides 43 language packs for Microsoft Office 2010, which I downloaded and installed in a virtual machine. I then compared the Excel functions, the Excel error codes and the arguments of some specific functions to the English version. And I have found 32 languages which have differences and included these languages in the translator.
However, in some languages the differences are minimal. For example, the only difference I found in the Japanese language pack is the DOLLAR() function which was replaced by YEN(). Another example is Thai, where the only difference is the argument “System” for the INFO() function. So, for these languages, the translator will in most cases return the same result as for English.
Occasionally I am also active in the French Microsoft Office TechNet forum, on one hand to practice my French and on the other hand just out of curiosity. Some time ago, someone asked there whether it is possible to retrieve a list of all trusted documents of Word 2010.
Unfortunately the Trust Center of Office 2010 does not offer a possibility to see which documents have been added to the trusted list of documents.
So I had the idea to implement a free Excel Add-In and list all trusted documents in an Excel sheet. And, when I am at it, I thought it should be a good idea to implement a function for listing all trusted folders too. And I should include the trusted documents and folders for PowerPoint, Word and Excel from Office 2007 and Office 2010.