Another collection of mini-posts based on recent IT trials and tribulations…

Excel tips to display the worksheet name in a cell and to validate data

Last week, I was working on an Excel spreadsheet that acts as a plan for a series of tests. Each sheet has the same format, with some conditional formatting and associated logic to total up passes/fails and give a RAG score for the sheet. Those RAG scores are presented in an overview page – and data is copied between cells so that information is only populated once but appears on every sheet.  I’m quite pleased with the result but I did need to work a little on some of the tricks.

Firstly, data validation in lists (for the pass/fail). This is fairly straightforward but I usually forget how to do it so it’s worth reading the TechNet Productivity Hub post on restricting data entry in Excel with lists.

The second trick was to read the name of each worksheet and use that information in a cell (so I could name a worksheet after a set of tests, and see that name displayed as a header on the page too). Here, the SuperUser site came to the rescue and the code I needed in the cell was:

=RIGHT(CELL("filename",A1),LEN(CELL("filename",A1))-FIND("]",CELL("filename",A1),1))

Incidentally, I also needed to look something up that I’ve blogged about previously: if a cell shows the formula rather than the result, check the formatting is General and not Text.

Editing Microsoft Project files stored on SharePoint

Much as I try, it seems I can’t avoid working with Microsoft Project. Unfortunately, when working directly from SharePoint the files are opened read-only. The answer, it seems, is to work on a synchronised local copy – as described by Victor Butuza on his Microsoft Office SharePoint blog.

XPS to PDF conversion web service

Every now and again, I find myself wanting to create a PDF from an email, just to upload a receipt to Xero (the expenses system I use at work). Unfortunately Xero isn’t happy with XPS files – and Windows 8.1/Outlook don’t create PDFs, but a quick Internet search turned up XPS2PDF, a simple, fast and apparently secure way to convert my files.  There’s an API for those who want to make the conversion programmatically too.