YellowRiver.IT

Pet Detective app for iPhone

2011-01-16T17:02:00.011+01:00

Hi guys,

we have published an application for iPhone - Pet Detective.

This is an application that helps pet owners find their lost pets. It is free and we encourage you to download it and form a community of pet finders. If you find some lost pet it costs you almost no effort to notify the potential pet owner about your finding. So, the more iPhone owners have Pet Detective app on their iPhone the more pets get found. Let's help each other. :-)

Read the description below:

The Pet Detective interface is the following:
1) once you run the app, you see a login page:

2) you have to create your account by specifying a valid email and a password:

3) after this you open a Profile page where you can manage your Contacts, Tickets (for lost pets), Spots (for found pets):

4) the Contacts page shows your personal name, email and other contacts for the pet finders to get in touch with you. The personal details are private unless you specify them as public while opening a ticket:

5) the Headline page gives the information about the lost pets and the offered reward for them:

6) the Nearby page shows the nearest lost pets to your current position:

7) from the Headline and Nearby pages you can open each ticket and check the information about the lost pet:

8) if you go to the Profile page you can check the status of your tickets and find out if your pour lost domestic animal was spotted somewhere:

9) from the same Profile page you can create a new ticket which must contain some specific information about the lost pet like its photo, the location of probable loss, its name and the reward. Please note that a percentage of the reward will be deducted from your account as a service fee:

10) the minimal service fee is 5$:

Whenever someone finds your pet he creates a FREE spot on your ticket. The spot contains the information about the found animal like its kind, photo and others. The very same moment you can see that you ticket was spotted and check the spot. You can reject or approve the spot. If the found animal is your pet you just personally reward the promised amount of money to the finder and get your pet. This transaction is not managed inside the application.

When you approved the spot and confirmed your animal found, you would close the ticket in order not to receive any more spots.

When you reject the spot your ticket remains open and we all keep hoping your animal gets found.

Feel free to read more on our application web site LocoJet: www.locojet.com

And download the application from AppStore: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id402324218#

Activities report in Infopath

2009-09-27T18:22:00.002+02:00

Description

Activities report manager is an Infopath solution which automates the work with the Techedge web time report. It is dedicated to my colleagues who work in Techedge.

This project was experimental. I wanted to discover deeper the functionalities of Infopath and the opportunities for creating automation applications.

The project could have been published a couple of weeks earlier, however, in the phase of final testing I discovered that it posted data on the web time report disregarding the month's state. This means that basically it could submit data to the web time report for any period of any year. So, it took me some time to implement additional conditions to make the submitting of data available only for the open months.

How this works

Check the presentation video to see it in action:

For working with the application you need Infopath 2007 and .NET framework 2.0 installed. After the installation you will find an .XSN file which is an Infopath template. Based on it you can create new documents with your data (xml file).

Download

If you liked the tool and wish to download it feel free to do it. We provide it free of charge. Use and enjoy!

ActivitiesReport.msi

CBI (Customer to Business Interaction) Excel data export

2009-08-29T17:26:00.019+02:00

Hi guys,
we are back. It took us some time to restart the blog activities. Though, we never ceased our business activities and are always open to help businesses in automating tasks. :)

Recently we had an opportunity to develop an Excel add-in to carry out custom export of data regarding the employees salary payments into a CBI (Customer to Business Interaction) format. This is a standard for the text flat file data formatting implemented by banks for batch data loading. More information could be found on www.cbi-org.eu

Preface

As it happens often small companies manage data about their employees in a kind of database which can be MS Access or even MS Excel. The easiest way to handle the task of data management at this level is to use an Excel table where insert salary data in one column. The bank requires the information to be sent in a text file which is specifically structured. the data export in this specific structure has been implemented in the add-in.

Description

In order to create the table correctly formatted for the add-in to function it's necessary to open Excel, in the menu YellowRiver/CBIexport find the button Create new sheet.

A new worksheet will be created for you.

The data table would have the following columns:

Fiscal code of the employee
His address
ZIP code
Commune he lives in
His Bank name
ID (currently not used)
Name and surname
IBAN (International Bank Account Number)
Issue date
Comment
Amount

Notice that some of the columns are hidden.

Toghether with this information the add-in needs also to know the following information about your company:

Company registration code
IBAN to transfer money to
Payment issuer (generally, the company's registration code)
Bank's registration code
Company name
Company address
Region
VAT account

The add-in allows you to have a multiple choice of company registration code and bank's IBAN in case if you have different company registrations and need to vary the account you transfer money to.

When you have your table filled with data just navigate the same menu and find the button Export. The exported document is ready less than in a second and a window showing it is opened.

You will notice that the generated text file contains all the data from Excel. Now the file is ready to send to the bank on the bank's web-site.

Installation

The installation of the add-in is simple as it is. Just run the downloaded file and select the path where you wish to install the add-in (the file .XLAM). The default path is OK since this is the default MS Office add-ins path.

To activate the add-in you have to go to Excel options\add-ins\Excel add-ins and select ExportCBI.xlam.

When you do it you might encounter a security warning.

Authorise the macro execution.

As soon as you do it you will find the afore mentioned menu YellowRiver\CBIexport in the Add-Ins tab of Excel.

Miscellaneous

The add-in is not protected so you may change it. This add-in is not universal so if you need any custom changes feel free to contact us.

The add-in's language is Italian. But I tried to give the English names for the fields. You can easily change them.

The application is freely available on our web-siteWWW.YRIVER.IT in the chapter SOLUTIONS where you can also find out how else we can make Excel work for you.
Download it ExportCBI.exe.
Feel free to contact us if you have any ideas, suggestions and proposals.

Excel PACMAN

2009-04-26T22:16:00.006+02:00

Hi all,

We are currently a bit busy with our jobs. The crisis makes it feel. But even though we do not manage to update our blog regularly it does not mean we do nothing. :)

Today we are glad to announce that we have finally finished the testing phase of the great old and well-known game Pacman created in Excel'2007! Admire once again the huge potential and power Excel (and basically the whole MS Office Suite) has!

Check the video presentation to understand what it really is. :)

And here's the link to download the game:
ExcelPacman.rar

Feel free to contact us if you experience troubles with the game.
Feel free as well to contact us if you experience any difficulties in solving problems in Excel and MS Office, we will most probably be able to provide you with help and support within hours! :)

All the best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Automate Excel charts building and moving to PowerPoint presentations

2009-03-06T10:00:00.001+01:00

Hi,

Today we would like to present you yet another Excel add-in that we created for one our client. This is another implementation of the tool to build and transfer Excel charts into PowerPoint presentations.

The tool is quite universal so you could easily adapt yourself to use it.
The solution is quite simple and it uses at maximum the natural capabilities of Excel.

So, imagine you have a huge set of data which you have to analyse somehow, create charts on separate subsets of data and transfer them into PowerPoint presentations to then submit them to your clients. With this add-in you are actually supposed to have
- a table with data
- an area where you can insert row numbers
- an area that is filled dynamically with data by means of formulas and that takes a row number as an input
- sheet charts that have as data source the before mentioned area

What you then have to do to automatically build and transfer dozens of charts into a Power Point presentation is:
- you select the rows you are interested in
- you select button Build charts from the YellowRiver menu bar
- you indicate the row input cells and select the chart to be built and transferred
- and you run the tool
These are the simple clicks to do with your mouse to build and transfer charts.

Below you can see how the application works on practice:

Visit our web-site WWW.YRIVER.IT to see other projects, solutions, ideas and find out more about how we can make Excel work for you.

BOM - Bill Of Materials

2009-02-27T10:00:00.003+01:00

Hi,

today we would like to tell you about our new solution that we created to provide you with a simple and available instrument to calculate the production cost of your products.

Quite often working with small “factories” we faced the situation when the factory owners could not tell us the exact production cost per unit for the goods they produced. It was a pity situation since the pricing policy is totally distorted in this case. And in addition the management had no idea about the rate of use of the resources, about inefficiencies, about additional opportunities etc.
Therefore, we created this very simple, intuitive, and powerful tool to manage the hierarchy of products – the Bill Of Materials.

By means of this tool you can:
- Define multiple parent-child relationships between your raw materials and components which are made of them (different components can be done from the same raw materials)
- Define the process time for the raw material to become the component (in minutes)
-Define the amount of raw materials needed to produce one unit of some component
- Define the acquisition cost per one unit of raw materials
- Define fixed costs (labour, energy, administrative, other) which are then allocated to the products and components based on their process time
- Visualize and navigate the hierarchy of your materials
o Drill down
o Drill up
o Refresh
o Display only raw materials
o Redisplay all
- Change the visualization mode from table to hierarchy (or tree) with different indentation types per elements

Below you can see the working example of the BOM application:

The application is freely available on our web-site WWW.YRIVER.IT in the chapter OUR PROJECTS where you can also find out how else we can make Excel work for you.
Download it BOM.ZIP.
Feel free to contact us if you have any ideas, suggestions and proposals.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Permeability of soils – the Excel application

2009-02-22T21:20:00.004+01:00

Hi,

Today we would like to introduce you one of our projects that we did for Politecnic University of Insubria. This is an Excel application that helps calculating the permeability of soils.

"Why in Excel?" you might ask. Excel is a powerful and flexible framework to create applications with dynamic interfaces. In this project we needed to implement the tool to manage different points that took measures of different parameters of soils. Their particular feature is that each point is characterised by a variable number of discontinuity families. Therefore, one point had to expose an interface to input data in 3 families, the other one – in 15 families, yet another one – in 35 families etc.
At first we were requested to develop a stand-alone application. However, after having thought carefully of the problem we offered to develop the application in Excel.

Here are the advantages in using Excel:
- Familiar and simple user interface (it’s Excel itself)
- Open code (yep, Excel with its native VBA support provides us with a possibility to create applications with open code; the University, in turn, wanted to have the possibility to control and modify any time the business logic of the application)
- Ease in creation of a beautiful and dynamic interface (one point has k discontinuity families, each has a number of parameters for input, but that also serve as output parameters, k! angles between families to input and output, k ^ 2 interconnection values for discontinuity families and k hydraulic conductivity values per each point – and this all dynamic and on a single worksheet)
- Fast development (Excel is already a powerful tool which we only enhance with our advanced functions. Anyway, 50% of all the work has already been done by Microsoft)
- Data and application in one place (Excel application can be a calculation engine and a database in the same time)
- Flexibility in distribution and power of management (if you want to change the year and archive your database or switch to another measurement area or start new measurement period you have to simply create a copy of the workbook)

Below you can see how the application works:

Visit our web-site WWW.YRIVER.IT to see other projects, solutions, ideas and find out more about how we can make Excel work for you.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Spam. Crisis. Spam, spam, spam, spa.....

2008-11-24T10:45:00.004+01:00

Beep! Hi!

Sorry for the delay in updating our blog. Too many events happen nowadays. First of all, this is the economical crisis. Since the advertising and marketing department of our company (in my face) is located in Russia, I myself see how this crisis impacts the advertising budgets. Many companies started to reduce them, they ask 40-50% discounts and postpone the approval of the budgets to Spring.

Second, our blog is exposed to spam attacks. :) We already hardly distinguish between men and robots! Therefore, if you are a man write "BEEP!" in your comment! ;) In this way we will deceive the foul robots! :D

All the best wishes from YellowRiver,
Alex

BOM (Bill Of Materials) in EXCEL

2008-11-16T17:29:00.005+01:00

Hi,

today we would like to present our new project for small and medium enterprises - BOM or Bill Of Materials. This is a tool implemented in Excel that laves you all the flexibility of Excel itself and adds some additional funcionality to manage your bill of materials.

Each of your products can be split into its components and primary materials, out of which your product cost and production time derive.

Now that the solution is in Excel you can easily create your BOM hierarchies and calculate precisely the time and the cost for the production of your products. In addition, we also realized the function for fixed cost allocation based on the production time allocation driver.

Find below the demonstration video of the alfa version of the tool:

Feel free to send us your comments, ideas, proposals and suggestions. We are always happy to receive any feedback from you.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Currently busy with...

2008-10-30T10:45:00.006+01:00

Hi guys,

these days we are a little bit inactive on our blog. It seems to me that the economical crisis impacted even on our activities. Now we have to do more to maintain the levels of income as a year before. :) So, we are a little bit busy with projects.

So, since I am the representative of the IT part I will tell you in brief what I do. Then maybe on week-end we will have the report from Alex who represents creative design part. :)

Today there will be just text, no videos, no images... We are in design and development process.

Well, there are several projects that I am currently busy with at my primary work place. The first one is the application to manage order and sales simulations. Before the company we do the project for extensively used "unmanaged" Excel spreadsheets. Why unmanaged? Because every single simulation was created manually on four sheets with huge amount of information. Now that we work with SAP BPC (ex Outlooksoft) we keep on working in Excel but now every single sheet is 100% managed! :) B-)
So now we automate at maximum the process of simulation! :) All the data are stored in a central database, Excel becomes as a user interface to access the data in a correct way. :) The user makes selections of products, product types, production sites etc., get automatically generated templates for data input, inputs data with all the necessary data validation controls, the data is then passed to SPSS for optimization and returned to the user for eventual modifications.

The other project is the application to manage the company's where I work internal budget. This is quite a standard project also done by means of SAP BPC. Here the particular feature is that we are trying to overcome some natural limits of SAP BPC to create flexible applications.

And the last small project (small compared to the previous two, but not less important) is the creation of web-services and components to use in Excel to make it programmatically easily communicate with them. Very often our clients ask us to provide some interface to manage some simple tasks on the server like database optimization, update, file launch, data report etc. So, we traditionally provide interfaces based on Excel and program it to easily communicate with the web-services.
Therefore, if you have some applications and you want to stay in touch with them even when you are away (not away from Internet though) we will be able to help you. :)

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Slide progress bar UPDATE

2008-10-24T08:05:00.005+02:00

Hi,

today we would like to announce about the release of an updated version of the SlideProgressBar for PowerPoint. B-)

Here is the original link to the explanation of what this solution is about. :)
http://yriverit.blogspot.com/2008/02/power-point-slide-progress-bar.html

We also introduced some support for shape filling and line dashing. Actually, now you can build slide progress bar in many variations using gradient filling, dashed lines, various line weights etc.
What you have to do is to create any shape (let's say, a rectangle), change its properties (line weight, line style, color etc.), select the option DEFAULT FOR NEW OBJECTS and click OK.

Watch the example:

Here you see that the line became dashed, styled as double line and the fill effects were set to a vertical shading style of two colors (the colors themselves are not important since you are to define them).

Pay attention that the flag DEFAULT FOR NEW OBJECTS is checked.

All the modifications to the default shape will be reflected in the newly built progress bars. :)

When you rebuild the bars you will see the result of your modifications:

(the fill type is gradient, the lines are dashed and double) :)

We actually build slide progress bars even for Office 2003 styled as Office 2007 making them more robust and beautiful. :)

Enjoy! :)

As usual, you can download the add-in
from our web-site www.yriver.it
(PPT_SlideProgressBar.exee [you've to change the extension from .EXEE to .EXE since this is a self-extracting WinRAR archive])
in the category OUR PROJECTS.

Field exploration!!!

2008-10-10T12:28:00.003+02:00

Check out a new view on the "space" exploration!!!

Alex

Hello, George Soros!

2008-10-08T19:48:00.001+02:00

Good news everyone!

Today I’d like to tell you about a good means of communication with your potential clients. It should not be neglected. This means is just a simple direct contact with the customers. It allows analysing your offer and adjusting it to a certain person in the best way. This will obviously increase the probability to make a deal. Additionally, in contrast to working with mass media you will always be able to get the hottest client’s feedback and calculate the effectiveness of the potential contact. :)

Once I had an order to create an advertising campaign for promoting some country cottages on the market. Their distinctive feature was large plots sold together with the cottages. The circle of people able to buy such houses was very limited. I suggested to my client that we targeted exactly this small circle of people. Therefore, we sent to the preselected people who might become potential customers a courier with a parcel which contained a box with a piece of sod with some uncut grass on it. :) On this box we put small garden shears and a small card with a slogan saying something like: “You can create a park to your taste!!!”

Alex

Transfer Gantt charts to Power Point presentations III

2008-10-02T07:05:00.000+02:00

Hi,

today, we have updated our "internal" tool for transferring Gantt charts from MS Project to MS Power Point to the version 1.5.5. The tool serves to map Gantt charts from MS Project on one slide of MS PowerPoint. Since we have to do it often, we did our best not to do this "work" manually! ;)

This is a video of the tool's general functionality:

There are several interesting improvements. First of all, we decided to add a table with task names to each slide. It gives you an access to the task names in the whole slide, not only in just one shape.

Then we decided to give you the possibility to choose how many symbols of the task name to display in the shapes of Power Point. Since task naming approaches vary from person to person it became quite difficult to provide automatic truncation of long task names that would satisfy everybody. Now you can decide whether you want to see the whole task name or just the first 10 symbols of it.

We also worked a little bit on the design of the resulting presentation. My personal recommendation, though, is that you use PowerPoint2007 which provides very good default "beauty" to the newly created shapes and tables. But since still a lot of people use PowerPoint2003 we tried to format its Gantt chart presentation in a similar way to PowerPoint2007. Hopefully, you will appreciate these design improvements.

There were also added some other minor improvements, but they were not so critical. :)

And finally, we would like to draw your attention to the speed of presentation building. Having to choose between simplicity and functionality we, as for the time being, choose simplicity. Therefore, the add-in is built purely in VBA which is a little bit limited in respect to the languages of .NET platform. Therefore, the construction of the presentation, especially if over 100 slides are to be created, is slow. To drastically improve the speed we recommend that before transferring your Gantt charts to a new presentation you close all open PowerPoint applications. When no PowerPoint application is open the tool creates a new instance of the application which remains hidded. Then, while building the presentation, PowerPoint does not have to display all the modifications in the slides. Or better, it does not have to redraw every single step. As a result, it works much faster!

We thank everybody for feedbacks, collaboration and interest in us and our solutions.

You can find this solution on our Web site YellowRiver (www.yriver.it)
(GanttCharts2PowerPoint.zip)
in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you can also find other projects, ideas and solutions.

Your internet, sir!

2008-09-30T21:55:00.002+02:00

Hi,
We are again on the ether. Today we’d like to speak about one basic principal of successful business – loyal customers. This topic has already been written about in many intelligent books and articles, this topic is taught at courses at high educational establishments. And nevertheless, every time we face some low quality service we put a question: “Why do people not follow such very simple principals in working with clients as smiling to customers, listening carefully their requests and appreciating each single client?”

The client is a king! This should be clear to all service or product providers because operating in the world of overproduction the only thing that can save a company is the love of its clients! :) For, the Chinese will copy any product and immigrants from the third world countries will provide the same services at a much lower price! ;)

Let me show a typical example when a company loses the loyalty of its customers. My internet provider and I cooperated together for 4 years. I paid the most expensive tariff, technical services and other related services. Sometimes there were problems with the connection quality but they usually were quickly eliminated. And all of a sudden I find myself without internet for 1 day. Surely, I call to the technical service and the answering machine responds that there are problems on the line and provides no information about the terms of problem removal. Two days after, when I had already lost my patience, I called to the client support service and told them how long I had been the client of the company and how much important it was to retain customers (since we truly believe that it is much more beneficial to maintain contact with clients rather than to obatain attention of potential ones) and asked them to give me any information about when the problem with my internet access would be resolved. I was promised that my internet connection would come alive within one day.
A day after I call the client support service again and they communicated again the same message: technicians were working to fix all the breakages on the line; nobody knew when they would finish.

My patience has run out and consequently I am with internet now… and with a new provider! :)

How to find a client or why androids need electric sheep

2008-09-26T09:55:00.011+02:00

Good news, everyone!

For already a long time did we have an idea to conduct our blog not only on the IT topic, but also to write about our work, problems we face, about our projects.

And of course being those who produce products and services we have this key question - how to find clients. And thus that we have worked for a long time in marketing and advertising field. ;) Our problem is that classical communication channels do not suit our needs, our resources are very limited and our capital consists only of our energy and will to conquer clients. :)

Therefore, JUST DO IT!!!

Surely, our primary channel to attract clients is Internet. It connects us to the whole word and the whole world is our potential market.
Firstly, we created our web-site, then - our blog. In future we plan to link these two resources to context advertisement (of course we will publish the results in the blog).

You might ask: "What is the result of the chosen strategy?" Well, in fact we had only a couple of clients come to us during the functioning of our web-site. There are a great number of people entering our web-site, downloading those demonstration versions of our tools that we uploaded and going away not becoming our clients and not offering any collaboration.

We would appreciate a lot your feedback in this blog about how to convert our site surfers into clients. :) What is there that is missing in our web-site and in our blog? What is it that our products need?

Thanks.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Alex

NEW data export from Excel

2008-09-23T10:24:00.003+02:00

Hi,

today we would like to present you our new small and handy solution in which we provided a functionality to export Excel data into a fixed column width file format. This means that all your data columns in the file will have a fixed length.

This is an Excel add-in which can become usefull for those who have to work with integrated legacy systems where the input data format should be (or was configured to be) in this fixed column width format. This was actually our case when we had to work with some legacy system which contained some dozens of transformation rules that worked with this data format. In order not to change the system that already worked we just created this handy tool to simplify data export. :)

So, how does it work?! As soon as you activate it in the Tools/Add-in menu, you will find YellowRiver menu item with Export to fixed width file submenu which in turn contains (by now) one button of data export. ;)
This add-in is also supplied by a custom function to be used in Excel cells. It is used to determine the maximal text length in the selected range of cells. The function is situated in the Export2File function category and has a name MaxWidth.

So, before the data export you have to prepare your spreadsheet. You need to have a region of data to export (the type of data is irrelevant) and you need a region of data indicating the desired column width in the output file. Note that the number of cells in the "column width" region should be exactly the same as the number of columns in the selected data region. The tool also allows you to export data by columns or by rows depending on the direction of the "column width" range: either by column, or by row.

Find below a video presentation demonstrating how the add-in actually works. :)

Don't forget that to activate the add-in you have to keep the Macro security level at Medium at least.

As usual, you can download the add-in
on our web-site www.yriver.it
(Export2FixedWidthFile.exee [you've to change the extension from .EXEE to .EXE since this is a self-extracting WinRAR archive])
in the category OUR PROJECTS.

Here you can also find our other interesting solutions. ;)
We would also be happy to receive any your feedbacks! :)

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Product support via Skype Prime

2008-09-15T08:23:00.003+02:00

Hi,

we have activated a Skype Prime service which will allow us to provide cheap support services on YellowRiver products to our clients and other interested parties. :)

You can contact me, Valeriy Shylin, when I'm available. I'll try to do my best in being always on-line. ;)

Feel free to contact if you have questions regarding our solutions or if you have difficulties in solving simple problems in Excel or Word! If you need immediate help this service is for you! :)

In order to benefit from the service your Skype account should have some money on. I'm not sure if it is possible to do Skype Prime calls from Skype simply connected to a PayPal account but suppose it can be done.

Actual tariffs are the following:
- 25 eurocents per minute for our clients wanting to receive technical support about some our solutions;
- 75 eurocents per minute for other interested parties who want to receive support in fast solving relatively simple problems in Excel and Word.

This is my Skype status button:

Looking forward to hearing you soon and often!
Let's solve your problems immediately, fast and cheap!

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Arrow charts update...

2008-09-04T20:26:00.002+02:00

Hi,

today we updated the add-in for building Arrow Charts in Excel.
From now on it supports Excel 2007.

Here is the original presentation and description of how it works.
http://yriverit.blogspot.com/2008/08/arrow-charts-in-excel.html

Feel free to contact us in case you experience problems. In any case, that's still a beta version... ;)

Traditionally, you can find this solution on our web site www.yRiver.it
(ArrowCharts.exee [the file you download is a self-extracting archive; change its extension from .exee to .exe])
where in the category OUR PROJECTS
you can also find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Slide progress bar update

2008-09-01T10:00:00.000+02:00

Hi,

Today we would like inform that we have updated the Slide progress bar Power Point add-in. Some add-in load problems were corrected and a possibility to indicate the progress bar width equal to the slide width was added.

The original blog post describing how the add-in works is located here:

http://yriverit.blogspot.com/2008/02/power-point-slide-progress-bar.html

Feel free to contact us with any questions, suggestions and ideas about this topic.

Traditionally, you can find this solution on our web site www.yRiver.it
(PPoint_SlideProgress.zip)
where in the category OUR PROJECTS
you can also find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Arrow charts in Excel

2008-08-30T19:53:00.002+02:00

Hi,

Today we would like to present you another solution that we started to use in our company. This is a tool for automatically building ARROW CHARTS!
After spending some time searching for ideas or similar tools in the Internet we found nothing that would perfectly fit our needs, thus, we created our own solution. :)

To make the story short, this is how it works:

The tool works with a 4-column table of data where each row starts with a name of the series. An XY chart will be created (or you may use any already created XY chart). Only four columns after the title column are considered. The tool will use the first 2 data columns to put the point and the arrow from the second point will point to the first one. :) (I hope I made myself clear...)

The current version does not work correctly in Excel 2007. In fact, it works perfectly well in Excel 2003. So, make sure you updated your MS Office software. Since this is our tool for internal use, we did not test it on Office 2002 and Office 2000.
Soon we will introduce the support for Office 2007.

This tool can become very useful for the companies which conduct marketing research and need to build dozens of arrow charts. Since Excel does not provide tools for doing that automatically the work is typically done manually. From now on we make Excel do it for us!!! :)

Feel free to contact us with any questions, suggestions and ideas about this topic.

Traditionally, you can find this solution on our web site www.yRiver.it
(ArrowCharts.exee [the file you download is a self-extracting archive; change its extension from .exee to .exe])
where in the category OUR PROJECTS
you can also find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Trying to do the impossible

2008-08-28T20:11:00.009+02:00

Hi,

today we are not presenting any new solution even though there are some (their traditional video presentation will be ready soon). Today I will talk simply about my last two day activity.

Actually, the day before yesterday I had a task to do two things at my principal job. They both regard creating applications in Outlooksoft (already BPC bought by SAP).
The first one was to create an input form to make the user select an intersection where he will then put data (well, we are in the context of OLAP - on-line analytical processing, so, we work not with relational databases but with OLAP ones).
So, I solved this problem somehow in this way (a beta version, tomorrow we check if it is what the client wants and restyle it):

On the left there is the Current View with dimension names and current members. In the centre there are input cells (in green) and there are two buttons: OK and SEND.
The user does all the necessary selections and inputs, clicks OK, a new record is added to the table below. As soon as the table is ready, SEND button is pressed to simulate Outlooksoft's SEND_AND_REFRESH function. Well, that was not difficult at all. :)

OK and SEND buttons are not real buttons, these are just cells that behave like buttons. :) So, I decided not to load the worksheet with OLE objects... The input form is naturally Excel. :)

The second thing to do was more diffucult. I called it DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE. :)

The idea was to change the value of member properties in Outlooksoft dynamically. Officially it is not possible to do at all!!! But I tried. :)

Actually, I found almost all the stages of how property values are saved in Outlooksoft, tried to change values in MS SQL Server, almost created a web-service to change Outlooksoft's cache file on the server from client...

Everything turned out to be useless - the property's value remains the same as created until it is not modified directly from the Outlooksoft management console...

So, the impossible proved to be quite impossible. :) Now I'm going to check if the problem can be solved without changing those properties. :)

This is all for today.

All the best from YellowRiver. :)

Transfer Gantt charts to Power Point presentations II

2008-08-26T11:25:00.005+02:00

Hi,

today, 26.08.08, we have updated our "internal" tool for transferring Gantt charts from MS Project to MS Power Point to the version 1.5.0. The tool serves to map Gantt charts from MS Project on one slide of MS PowerPoint. Since we have to do it often, we did our best not to do this "work" manually.

This is a video of the tool's general functionality:

Initially, this tools was developed exclusively for internal use. Therefore, it contained a number of limitations like 50 tasks per project, 20 days per project and other. That fit well our needs.

But we have received a number of feedbacks from you and decided to take those limitations away. :)

From now on, the are no limitations on the number of tasks mapped. According to the project duration the tool will choose the best calendar table to fit in one slide. The minimal time unit for the task is DAY so the tool will skip tasks that last, for example, one hour and 30 minutes. The resulting PowerPoint presentation tends to be the map of the project expressed in Gantt charts. Being a map it will not display units that are less than one point width due to scale transformations. So, don't be surprised if you don't find all your charts in the resulting PowerPoint presentation. :)

We thank everybody for feedbacks, collaboration and interest in us and our solutions.

You can find this solution on our Web site YellowRiver (www.yriver.it)
(GanttCharts2PowerPoint.zip)
in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you can also find other projects, ideas and solutions.

MS Access and Web: making them understand each other

2008-08-17T19:20:00.001+02:00

Hi,

This time we would like to make a presentation of a solution in MS Access. From the general point of view, the solution is very common. It provides interfaces and logics for a user to deal with data in a database. However, the trick here is that some data is taken by the application from a web catalogue supported by the user.

This is how it is done:

With this presentation, we wanted to underline the ease with which it becomes possible to implement the cooperation between your desktop applications and web. Think of the automation of many processes that you might experience: tracking site changes, retrieving web content, getting data from your web site and using it in your applications and many more.
Feel free to contact us with any questions, suggestions and ideas about this topic.

This time, unlike usually, we could not publish the solution. So, this video remains a pure demonstration.
However, you might still want to visit our web site http://www.yRiver.it
where in the category OUR PROJECTS
you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Techedge timesheet with Excel

2008-07-20T15:42:00.007+02:00

Hi guys,

I finally want to publish the tool that I use to fill in my timesheet web report. Maybe it will be useful for someone else from Techedge or KPedge if there are people who dislike spending time doing repetitive click-wait-copy-paste-click activity in their browser. Things are much easier and faster if done in Excel. :)

Below you can see a brief video presentation of how it actually works.

It is already a tradition that you can freely download the application from our web-site http://www.yRiver.it
(TimeReport_Example.zip)
which is actually located in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)