Maria’s Guides

• Why Google is the service of choice for sploggers
  A good article about why sploggers host on Blogger rather than WordPress and why Google isn’t doing much about it. On Guardian Unllimited.
  (tags: splog Wordpress Google)

Information from Software Update.

With iTunes 7.3, you can now activate iPhone service and sync it with your music, TV shows, movies and more. Also, you can now wirelessly share and enjoy your favorite digital photos from any computer in your home with Apple TV. iTunes 7.3.1 addresses a minor problem with iTunes 7.3 accessing the iTunes Library.

Information from Software Update.

QuickTime 7.2 addresses critical security issues and delivers:

• Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player
• Updates to the H.264 codec
• Numerous bug fixes

This release is recommended for all QuickTime 7 users.

Another quick spreadsheet to show off the capabilities of Excel.

Site visitor Jamie left the following comment on my recent post, “Random Number Generator for Excel“:

maria dont spose u know how to split a four digit number like 2365 into 4 different numbers 2 3 6 5 in all different cells in excel without having to do it manually just wandering please tell me if you know a way thanks

I had an idea of how to do this with the MID function, which is a text function. I just didn’t know if I had to convert the starting number to text before extracting the digits.

So I whipped up the attached worksheet and popped in the formulas. The answer: no, you don’t need to convert the number to text first.

The MID function has 3 arguments:

• text is the text you want to extract characters from. For this example, it’s the four-digit number.
• start_num is the number of the first character in the string you want to extract. For this example, it’s the digit number (1 though 4).
• num_chars is the number of characters you want to extract. For this example, it’s 1.

You can examine the formulas in the spreadsheet for yourself to learn more. Download it here.

Hope this helps, Jamie!