Ben Sullins Tech

Below is a recent screencast I recorded showing how to build a project timeline (gannt chart style) using MS Excel. It’s simple and easy and works great for porting it around to other office apps (eg. Word, PowerPoint). Let me know if you have questions by posting a comment and enjoy!

I was recently fighting with Excel because I was sick of it wanting to run in Compatibility Mode by default. Everything I found out there said that you simply need to change the option for Save-As to be the 2007 format. This only seemed to work on the workbooks I had open. If I closed and re-opened Excel it would be back in Compatibility Mode.

Remembering from my old days of hacking Excel 97 workbooks and creating templates with Macro’s I recalled a way to change the default workbook that Excel would use when starting up. This is where the ‘ah-ha’ happened.

Below are the steps you may use to force Excel out of Compatibility Mode when it starts up if changing the aforementioned Save-As method does not work for you.

1. Open Excel (you should get Book1 [Compatibility Mode] by default)
2. Save-As (F12) and save it as Book1.xlsx (the 2007 format) in the following location:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\XLSTART

3. Restart Excel

That’s it! Excel by default will look in this location (based on where you installed Excel) for the default workbook it uses when starting up. Since you have saved it in the 2007 format Excel will no longer run in Compatibility Mode by default. It will only do this when opening .xls files that were saved in Compatibility Mode. For those, just save as .xlsx and you should be good.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Ben

Recently I was on a call with a client and one of their IT guys asked if the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack can do everything Exclesius can do. In short, the answer is sorta. Through reporting services the MS BI stack can provide similar functionality however, it cannot provide the flash animations you get in Excelsius. The good news is however, that Excelsius can use the MS BI stack as a source for its data. This means if a client has already invested in Excelsius they can still reap the benefits of using the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack and are not locked in to using Business Objects for their entire Business Intelligence platform. I have included some links below of Excelsius demo’s you can view if you’re unfamiliar. Hope this helps!

Excelsius Demos – link

Business Objects SharePoint Integration Options – PDF

Just had some ideas from class tonight regarding Earned Value Analysis (EVA). If you’re unfamiliar with EVA google it and you’ll find it is basically a way to measure a projects performance. Microsoft has a small ‘about’ page found here that might help as well – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HP010342581033.aspx

The three key elements of EVA are:

1. Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled
2. Actual Cost of Work Performed
3. Budgeted Cost of Work Performed

These are the ‘Measures’ of the project. The Key Performance Indicators you can derive based on these measures are:

1.  Cost Variance
2.  Schedule Variance

Sounds just like a dashboard right? Anyone interested in coming up with a PerformancePoint dashboard with these metrics based on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server? I know I am…

Thanks to “jaegd” for his post here: http://forums.microsoft.com/… on how to accomplish this. Below please find some more details along w/ a example which can be downloaded here (ssis-2005-excel-2007-source-example).