RobiNZ CAD Blog

Removing Excel cell formats in bulk

I wanted to re-use some AutoCAD Architecture schedule data in a spreadsheet but struck a problem with the output. It’s just a Right Click > Export to get a proper .xls file from an ACA Schedule (better than Revit can do) but the result was a little too smart for my intended use. The export faithfully reproduces the schedule cell format which included % symbols & values in cells formatted as text. Changing that for a cell is simple and Excel even helps, right, but that is a per cell fix and I had hundreds. The answer turns out to... Read more →

Microsoft Office Web Applications are Live, on SkyDrive

The Microsoft Office Web applications went live, on Live, today. I’ve only had a brief look but first impressions are pretty good. Live goes Office or Office goes Live? From Office.live.com (* see footnote if not in the US, UK, Canada, and Ireland) you get access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The files are hosted on Microsoft Skydrive which currently offers 25GB of free storage. They feel like basic Office 2010 applications with all you need to create, view, edit and share documents in the current Office xml based formats (old documents are migrated to .docx .xlsx ,pptx etc).... Read more →

Excel Ribbon’y Office goodness

What’s that, you know, the thing in Excel where you can stop stuff scrolling…? It was Office 2003 so I had to show the Window Menu>Freeze Panes command and explain, demo, how it freezes rows/columns to the left & above the selected cell. That led me to wonder why on “Window” when it’s the document view you are changing and what, if you don’t already know, would make you look for “Freeze Panes”? In Office 2007 it’s on the View tab, because it does alter how you view the document not it’s window, and although still named “Freeze Panes” has... Read more →

Sum time in Excel

If I ever resovled this in the past I'd forgotten how, so here it is for next time. Thanks to MrExcel for the cell format that makes sense of summed Hour/Minute time values in Excel. By default (at le... Read more →

MindManager 8 Integrated Microsoft Office Editing

MindManager maps are often used to reference information in other documents. Traditionally this has been achieved with a topic link to a file or use of "smart" map parts to incorporate information (Ou... Read more →