A writing and research partnership | Karl Wright & Karen Brown
In part one of this post, I covered how to use formulas and conditional formatting to create an auto-updating Gantt chart in Excel. Now, let’s find out how to add different coloured bars to your Gantt chart for each task owner and how to stop tasks starting or finishing on non-work days.
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Occasionally, I want to check and see what the kids are up to online. I don’t have a content filter set up yet (it’s on the to-do list) but we run Bind as a local-network domain name server (DNS). To see what someone’s doing, I just use the tail and grep utilities to view Bind’s log files.
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For a while, when I was working as a content manager on the HP account at Publicis, we used Microsoft Project. I loved it and so did the rest of the team. But none of our clients used it. We got used to them asking for “something like this, but in Excel”.
So that’s what I created. I didn’t have the patience to manually colour rows of cells, only to change them all when the start date or task durations changed. So I used formulas and conditional formatting to create a sheet that would auto-update if you changed either of those values. [Read more…]
Want to watch videos or listen to music over your network, without having to copy files from one PC to another? If your PCs run Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10, then you can do it easily.
From your Start menu, open Windows Media Player. In the Windows Media sidebar, you’ll see Other libraries. This lists all Windows User Accounts in your home network. Click on one of the names to see what that person is sharing and play or view any files they’ve made available.
If you have a user account on more than one PC, a desktop and a laptop for instance, you can play your music collection over the network without having to go to the trouble of copying the files.
For this to work, your PCs all have to be members of the same Windows Homegroup.
Homegroups are Microsoft’s way of making it easy for normal people, who just want their PCs to work, to share files over their home network. They were introduced with Windows 7 and every time you install Windows it nags you to set one up.
Ideally, it’s better to use a low-power network-storage device to share files. This stays on all the time, so you don’t have to go and boot two PCs in order to get to the files you want. But if that’s not an option, Homegroups are an easy-to-use alternative.
1. Open Control Panel
From the Start button, open the Windows Control Panel. Click on the button labelled Create a homegroup.
