Maria’s Guides

Use your Dashboard to keep track of new content.

The idea has been brewing for a long while. After all, there are a ton of widgets out there that seem to monitor just one RSS feed. Why not cook up one to monitor my feed? So I can offer another way for Mac users to keep track of new content on the Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide book companion Web site?

I did some research. Apple’s Web site has a lot of good reference material for creating widgets. And it’s not as tough as you might think. These documents are extremely helpful:

• Developing Dashboard Widgets
• Dashboard Tutorial
• Dashboard Tutorial (980K PDF)
• Dashboard Sample Code

But what was most helpful to me was the article I found on Make Magazine’s Web site: “Make an RSS Widget” by Jake McKenzie. It concentrates on the kind of widget I wanted to create.

After fiddling around a bit with his code, I had a workable version of my very own widget: MacOSVQS 0.1.

The widget is pretty simple. It presents clickable links with the titles of the most recent posts on the Mac OS VQS Companion Web site I maintain to support my Mac OS books. That site has articles of interest to Mac OS users, as well as information about software updates for Mac OS.

Of course, since this is my very first widget and my knowledge of CSS and JavaScript are limited, I have no idea what some of the code does. I need to go through it and understand it to make more modifications. Now it just looks like Jake’s widget with different window dressing and different content — although I did manage to change the dimensions of the widget to make room for my bigger title area.

I’ll be updating the widget periodically, so keep checking in. You can always download the latest version of the widget from this site.

Comments? I’d love to read them. Use the Comments link for this post.

A how-to for Excel users.

My Visual QuickStart Guide books for Excel — from the edition for Excel 95 for Windows through the edition for Excel X for Macintosh — have always included an Excel function reference. In an effort to make pages available for other content, however, we’ve cut that appendix from the Excel 2007 edition of the book. I don’t feel badly about the cut, since this information is readily available in Excel Help and on the Web.

Here’s how you can find a function reference for your version of Excel and print it for your own hard-copy reference guide.

In Excel 2007 for Windows

1. Click the Help button in the upper-right corner of the Excel window to display the Excel Help window.
2. Enter function list in the search box and press Enter.
3. Among the search results that appear, you should see an item titled “List of worksheet functions (by category).” Click its link.
   
4. A help document titled “List of worksheet functions (by category) appears in the help window. It includes a complete list with brief descriptions of all Excel 2007 functions. You can read through this document and click links within it to learn more about specific functions.
   
5. To print the reference sheet, click the Print button in the Excel Help window’s toolbar. Use the Print dialog that appears to set printing options and click the Print button.

Note that you may need a connection to the Internet to access the Function List from within Excel Help. And remember that you can always resize the Excel Help window to better read what’s inside it.

Get this Information Online

This reference information is also available online for some versions of Excel. Click this one of these links:

• Excel 2007 List of Worksheet Functions (by category) - Microsoft has added dozens of new functions to Excel 2007.
• Excel 2003 List of Worksheet functions (by category) - These functions also apply to Excel 2000 (for Windows), Excel 2001 (for Macintosh), Excel 2002 (for Windows), Excel X (for Macintosh), and Excel 2004 (for Macintosh).

These pages contain clickable links to details about specific functions. They can also be printed from within your Web browser; use the Print command.