A while back, someone I know here in Wickenburg called me with an Excel question. He needed to calculate the date of the Wednesday least 90 days from an entered date.

So, for example, if he entered 2/14/2009 in a worksheet cell, he didn’t want 5/15/2009 (a Friday), which was 90 days later. He wanted 5/20/2009, which is the Wednesday at least 90 days after the date he entered.

The solution was to use nested IF statements to evaluate whether the day of the week 90 days after the entered date is a Wednesday. If it is, it uses that date. if it isn’t, it does the same evaluation for 91 days after the entered date. And then 92 days. And so on.

The spreadsheet I came up with can be downloaded here. This screenshot shows what it looks like. It has a lot of other stuff in it that I used to test the formula. Notes in the worksheet explain. I saved it just to share it here. You might find it useful if you have a similar need.

Just watch those parentheses.

The Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update contains several changes that improve security, stability, reliability, and performance. Additionally, this update includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of a computer’s memory by using malicious code.

This is a critical update and is highly recommended for all Office 2008 users.

For more information, visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958267

The Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.2 Update contains several changes that improve stability and performance. In addition, this update includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of a computer’s memory by using malicious code.

You can learn more at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956344.

Note: This update is huge: over 100 MB. If you’re updating on a laptop, make sure you have a good Internet connection and your power cable attached.

This update contains several improvements to enhance stability and performance.

For detailed information about this update, visit
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=119963.

Note that this is a huge update: 150+ megabytes! Be sure you have a fast connection and enough time to complete the download before beginning the update.

This update to Microsoft AutoUpdate for Mac is part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to provide the latest product updates to customers. To receive future Microsoft product updates, you must install this update.

For additional assistance, or to obtain a downloadable version of this update, visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac.

Flying M Productions has a limited number of copies of Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide and Creating Spreadsheets and Charts with Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for WIndows: Visual QuickProject Guide for sale at $10.99 and $8.49 respectively — that’s 50% off retail price. This offer is good for books shipped to U.S. address only. (Sorry, but they’re not willing to deal with overseas shipping because of the extensive customs paperwork involved.)

To order a book, click the appropriate Buy Now button below. All payment is via PayPal, which accepts payment via all major credit cards or bank account transfer. Books are shipped out within 48 hours of order receipt.

When Flying M Productions runs out of copies, this offer will end, so don’t delay if you want to take advantage of it.

There is no easier or more convenient way to follow a blog-based Web site’s content than to subscribe to its RSS feed. Today’s Web browsers and other applications make it easy. For example, RSS feed reading capabilities are built into Safari and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Mail application. Firefox’s Live Bookmarks display new content from your favorite feeds. And there are numerous RSS feed reader applications — NetNewsWire and endo come to mind — that help you manage as many feeds as you have time to follow.

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I built my first Web site back in the mid 1990s. It was a simple site, created in HTML, that provided information about me and my books.

A [Very] Brief History of my Web Site(s)

The Internet was young back then — at least as far as the masses were concerned. Few people surfed. In fact, the whole idea of going online was so new and radical back then that my first book proposal, which was about telecommunications on a Mac, was turned down because publishers felt that there wouldn’t be enough people interested in it.

Anyway, as things heated up, I soon saw the benefits of putting more information on the Web. And then, in 2003, I discovered blogging. Surely my personal blog should be separate from what I write to support my books and articles, right? So I spun off a new site, LangerBooks.com, and published plain HTML Web pages with book promotional and support information.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the whole blogging interface. There was no question in my mind: a blog was a perfect tool for presenting new content while automatically archiving old content. So I got LangerBooks.com into a blog format, with a separate blog for each title.

Back in those days (2003-2004), it wasn’t easy for me. I’d decided to blog with a program called iBlog that had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, its author wasn’t willing or able to keep up with technology. His software generated static HTML documents for each page of a blog. The more you wrote, the more cumbersome the whole blog updating process became. And, as those of you who read this blog regularly know, I can write an awful lot.

So in January 2005, I made the jump to WordPress. It was a big jump indeed, since I knew absolutely nothing about PHP or MySQL and very little about CSS. (What made it even bigger was that I was hosting my own blog on my own server.) I learned what I needed to know. One of the best things about WordPress is that you don’t need to know much to build a really professional looking site.

Around the same time, I decided that I didn’t want to maintain separate blogs for my books. So I brought all the books back under MariaLanger.com and came up with some creative ways to keep Book Support topics separate from the rest of the site. Creative, yes. Effective, perhaps.

One Blog to Rule them All?

Of course, the whole time I was doing this, I was reading from “pro bloggers” about how important it is to keep your blog on just one topic. These guys were blogging to make money, I argued to myself. They weren’t in it because of a need to blog or a desire to provide additional information to book readers. So I pretty much ignored them.

But their advice was eating away at my brain in the back of my mind. After much thought, I realized that having too many widespread topics in my blog was preventing the blog from being more popular. For example, people interested in my flying and lifestyle posts — which, according to a poll on my site, is about 30% of the site’s visitors — were probably bored silly with my Mac OS and Excel and WordPress posts. And people interested in getting book support (16% of visitors) weren’t interested in wading through the other content to get the bits of information that could help them. This was preventing me from getting more site subscribers and regular readers.

So about two weeks ago, I decided to make the split.

Drumroll, Please

The question of how I did it is something I can discuss as a WordPress-related post. Let’s just say that I’ve done the basic work and have enough content in the new blog to open it to the public.

So here’s the formal announcement:

Support for my books and articles can now be found at the Maria’s Guides Web site: http://www.mariasguides.com/.

If you’re reading this post there, you’ve already found it. Otherwise, if you’re interested in articles, tips, and downloads related to my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, and WordPress, please go check it out.

And yes, occasionally there will be cross posts, like this one. But I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

Why Maria’s Guides?

A few years back, I made a false start on a line of eBooks. I abandoned the project, primarily because I got busy with other things that were more interesting (and lucrative). I’m thinking of revisiting the idea with shorter eBooks covering a wider range of topics. Maria’s Guides was the working title of the series and I own the domain name, so why not?

Want to see some sample pages from my Excel Visual QuickProject? Here are a few links.

• Front Matter (including complete Table of Contents)
• Excerpt from Chapter 3

Just a quick note to pass along some info I got in e-mail from Peachpit Press, one of my publishers.

Over the last several months, you’ve been talking and now it’s our chance to show you that we’ve been listening. You told us you wanted better and faster searches for our books and content. You said you wanted more videos, better access to our authors, and more ways to get involved. After listening to everything you had to say, we’re proud to introduce the newly redesigned Peachpit.com.

They’ve added features to the site, including online video tutorials, access to blogs, and online reference guides. But the news that might interest you most is that they’re also offering a 40% discount on all books purchased on the site:

To thank you for your feedback and to celebrate our new site we would like to offer you a 40% discount on your purchases. Just order before September 15 and enter coupon code PPT-NEWSITE-EM01 during checkout!

Sounds like a good deal to me. I hope you’ll take advantage of it, perhaps to buy one or more of my books?

This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. For more information about this update, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (KB940763).

System requirements

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.6 Update is installed on your computer. To verify that you have installed this update, select the Microsoft Component Plugin file in the Microsoft Office 2004/Office folder on your hard disk, and then on the File menu, click Get Info.

Additionally, your computer must meet the following minimum requirements:

• Operating system: Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Jaguar) or a later version of Mac OS

Note:To verify that your computer meets these minimum requirements, on the Apple menu, click About This Mac.

More information

If you have technical questions or problems downloading or using this update, visit the Microsoft Support page at www.microsoft.com/mac/support to learn about the support options that are available to you.

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!

This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. This update also addresses an issue with using public folders in Entourage, and it contains the latest postal code information for Japanese addresses.

System requirements

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.5 Update is installed on your computer. To verify that you have installed this update, select the Microsoft Component Plugin file in the Microsoft Office 2004/Office folder on your hard disk, and then on the File menu, click Get Info.

Additionally, your computer must meet the following minimum requirements:

Operating system: Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Jaguar) or a later version of Mac OS

Note: To verify that your computer meets these minimum requirements, on the Apple menu, click About This Mac.

Improvements for Excel 2004

• Security is improved. This update fixes vulnerabilities in Excel 2004 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.

Improvements for Entourage 2004

• Microsoft Exchange public folder data loss issue is fixed. This update fixes an issue that causes data loss when public folder users who have a permission level of “Editor” or greater use Entourage to empty the cache for all public folders on the server running Exchange Server.
• Japanese postal code dictionary is updated. The Japanese postal code dictionary is updated with the latest information as of May 2007.

More information

If you have technical questions or problems downloading or using this update, visit the Microsoft Support page at www.microsoft.com/mac/support to learn about the support options that are available to you.

I just happened to visit a Web site that used another Web site to generate random numbers for contest giveaways. To me, an Excel user, that seemed like a silly place to go to get a random number when you could easily generate one on the fly within Excel.

So I whipped up a tiny Excel spreadsheet to do the job. You just put the minimum value in one box and the maximum value in the other and Excel generates a random number between the two for you. To generate additional random numbers in the range, just press Command-= (on a Mac) or Control-= in Windows. The worksheet is protected so you can’t accidentally delete the formula that does the magic.

Although I created the worksheet in Excel 2004 for Mac OS, it can be opened in Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows, too.

Want a copy? Download it here.

Just a quick note to let Excel 2007 users out there know that Informit has published an excerpt from my Excel 2007 Visual QuickStart Guide on its Web site. The piece is titled “Working with Excel Files.” Access to the site is free.

I’m pretty sure the book is out, but I haven’t had an author copy in my hot little hands yet.

I think my recent article about using WordPress with Google sitemaps will be online there next week. Stay tuned for more info.