David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog » Excel http://davidlai101.com/blog Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:53:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Error opening Excel files after installing Live Office http://davidlai101.com/blog/2010/07/23/error-opening-excel-files-after-installing-live-office/ http://davidlai101.com/blog/2010/07/23/error-opening-excel-files-after-installing-live-office/#comments Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:53:28 +0000 David Lai http://davidlai101.com/blog/?p=267

I’ve had this error pop up while trying to open Excel files (Excel 2007) after installing Live Office on several machines where it says “There was a problem sending the command to the program“. A couple other people ran into the same issue, so I’d like to post a quick solution.

1. Open the Excel program
2. Go to Excel Options
3. Go to Advanced
4. Go to General
5. Make sure “Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)” is unchecked.

That’s all!

]]> http://davidlai101.com/blog/2010/07/23/error-opening-excel-files-after-installing-live-office/feed/ 0 Alpha Numeric Sorter http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/10/08/alpha-numeric-sorter/ http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/10/08/alpha-numeric-sorter/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:32:43 +0000 David Lai Many of you may have had the trouble of trying to sort a table of data. If you only need to sort alphabetically, then the listview object works fine. [...]]]> Here is an Xcelsius Example that ranks your table based on whether you want to rank it numerically or alphabetically.

Get Adobe Flash player
Many of you may have had the trouble of trying to sort a table of data. If you only need to sort alphabetically, then the listview object works fine. However, it does not work with numerics where 12 will come ahead of 6.

Ranking your rows

The first picture shows how to rank numbers. As you can see the alpha will come in as ascending order. This can easily be done through your Live Office or Web Service Query. If the data is static you can just go to Data -> Sort in Excel and choose Data Column A. The reason for this is that the Countif function has a bug in Excel where if you execute COUNTIF($A$2:$A$6,”>” & A2), it will interpret it as COUNTIF($A$2:$A$6,”=” & A2)

The simple Rank formula for the numeric column that I used takes the rank of each row and spits back the number. It also takes into account if there are duplicate numeric columns. If there is then it uses the COUNTIF($B$2:B2,B2)-1) part to increment the rank accordingly.

index match

Once we have our ranking setup, we have our index match formula that will match the appropriate column to the index.

I’ve attached the source files below that you can reuse for your own pleasure. There are some additional comments in the Excel file that explains more about what is going on for those of you who are curious.

Download Source

]]> http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/10/08/alpha-numeric-sorter/feed/ 2