Excel, iPads and Hidden Tabs

Oh. My. Excel.
Apparently, when you "Hide" a workbook tab in Excel, even if you "Protect" the workbook & its structure, it's PERFECTLY visible on an iPad or a Mac using Numbers. [Gulp.]
The workaround is so super simple, I can barely wrap my mind around why it's not the default instead of this "Hide" command.
I found it here:

http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/usertips/tip036.htm

Can someone please explain why this isn't common, widely discussed knowledge?

Moving a Sharepoint List WITH Attachments to another Site if you're not an Administrator

I called one of the guys responsible for our Sharepoint site to see if he could move a list from one place to another.  I sort of got this response about things working out badly for that type of operation.  Blah blah blah.  Since I don't usually accept that type of answer, I consulted my BFF, Google, to find a solution (and this one is from Microsoft), I realized that I could do it and make sure that other people could do it to, too.  Enable users, right?
I started the blog off thinking this won't take very long, but that's actually in the end dependent on the number of items in your list.  And how many attachments are with the items.
Here goes!  (Start by going to the list you want to move to another subsite.)

1. Click Actions|Edit in Datasheet
2. Save the sheet to wherever you personally save things with a name that indicates this is what you're looking moving.  (You know, in case you get interrupted 500 times a day like I do.)  Remember, this extension will be .iqy, not .xls or .xlsx.
3. Next, go back to the list and click Actions|Open with Access.  Save to a location you'll be able to find again.  This Access file will have all the attachments in it.
4. Go to the site you want to put the list in.  Click Site Actions|Create, under Custom Lists click Import Spreadsheet.  Give it a Name.  Probably the name you had on the other list is a good idea.  Click Browse, then select the file location for the .iqy file you backed up.  Click Import.
5. On the Import Window, under Range Type, use the drop down to select Table Range.  Below that on Select Range, use the drop down to select your table.  Click Import.  You will return to the import screen in Sharepoint.  Click Import again.
6. Now that your list has imported, you probably need to go delete a couple of extra columns.  In my list, since the original had approval settings, I had Approval Status1 to delete.  I also had to recreate a calculated column since those don't back up.  That only involved copying the formula from the original list.  So again: not hard!
7. So now the attachments...  Open your Access file back up.  The go to your newly copied list.  Open this one up in Access as well.  You should have the same number of items.  But it's unlikely that the original list and the new list are in the same order.  So this is where I started pasting OVER the items in the new table by column, not by row.  Once you're comfortable that the data is in the right place, you can scroll to (defaults to the far right) column on the original Access and copy the column Attachments.  Again, this may take a few minutes.  Once this process is done, go to your new Access list, select the Attachments column and paste.  Now you're done!

Post Microstrategy World 2010

As I'm sitting in the airport thinking about everything I learned over the past two days, I gotta say this:
I am blown away at the potential Microstrategy Office has for reporting and what it can do through Sharepoint.
I'm rethinking the direction I want to take The Big Project.
The amount of time this will save in a number of processes is phenominal!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The biggest, most complicated project of my entire career started 3 months ago.

It was what they actually promoted me to do at work.  And I mostly have the skills to do it.  Unless you count project management as a skill.  And then I don't.

What I'm doing is automating a giant set of processes that are a hugely manual, redundant, labor intensive mess.  Ok, mess is probably an unkind word.  But it's certainly time for an overhaul.

I am starting it out taking what's in Excel, optimizing formulas, eliminating links to outside workbooks, cleaning it and sending the components back to the group that uses it.  The next step is to use our SharePoint site to get the team that uses these workbooks into the habit of going in & out of that instead of emailing things around for approval.  Once I can get them into that mode of workflow, I'm planning on building the necessary tables in Access, publishing it into the SharePoint location, and then designing the components in Infopath.

Oh, and I'm not a programmer.  Every day I'm grateful for Google!