Back up!

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

I keep all my clients' info on an Access database and all my accounts on an Excel spreadsheet. I'm quite proud of the database - in a modest sort of way. I devised it after several months of self-imposed study of SQL Server so that I had some idea of relational databases, all part of a rather desperate strategy to add to my fledgling programming skills and make myself more employable. There's a whole story there which I won't bore you with now. Anyway, by the time I'd waded through a whole fat blue Microsoft "Self-paced Training Kit" I had the basics of how to set up a home database and make queries of it.

I'm lucky to have Access. Time was when you could buy the full "Microsoft Office Suite" for a reasonable price. I'm talking Office 2003 here, which included:

• Word
• Outlook
• Access
• Excel
• Publisher
• PowerPoint
• Office Tools

Since the 2007 edition of Office, Microsoft have been less generous - oh let's call a spade a spade, they've got greedy - and although you could get Home & Student editions of Office 2007 and Office 2010 which included Word, Excel and the PowerPoint Viewer, you would have had to buy Outlook, PowerPoint and Access separately - at considerable expense! 

When I bought my latest desktop PC in 2007 it had the Vista operating system installed, but I'd read some reviews by then and the first thing I did with my new computer was to wipe Vista off and install good ol' Windows XP. Although I didn't realise it immediately, this was a good move for my "Office" as it enabled me to keep my old 2003 suite, including Access. 

And since then I've been happily keeping my records on 2003 software....until last week, when I came home from a client and tried to open my Excel spreadsheet to record my acquisition of yet more hard-earned loot.

It wouldn't open! 

A little window popped up to tell me that something "couldn't be found" and please put in the Office 2003 disc. Well, the disc "couldn't be found" either - heaven knows where I've put it! -  and panic nearly ensued. None of my Excel spreadsheets was working, so all my accounts for four years were inaccessible. 

But it's not like me to panic - not immediately anyway. My Access database was working, so was Word, so was everything else, so perhaps I'd done something inadvertently stupid to Excel. I tried looking for answers on Google, and after browsing through several forums (fora??) someone mentioned "restore point". It's something I have very rarely used but I thought this might just save the day - or save four years, to be more precise! Excel was working the day before - and the day before that - and all through 2011....so if I could take my PC back a couple of days all might be well. 

And so it turned out. I used the System Restore and took the PC back. My spreadsheets are miraculously working again. But it gave me a scary few minutes and reminded me of the advice that I read on other tutors' sites: 

BACK UP YOUR FILES! 

For something as important as the accounts, I really should get in the habit of storing them on a disk......and I shall.

PostScript

After the initial panic, a little analytical reason kicked in and - before I tried the System Restore - I did successfully right-click on an Excel icon and "Open with..." OpenOffice.org 

I installed this suite some time ago and have worked with it, mainly so that I could help a client use it a couple of years ago. It's free to download and is generally very good. I'd recommend having this as a backup office suite - you might prefer it to Microsoft's. 

Colin

That was Summer

by COLIN MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Very slow over the summer. Well, you know - June, July and August, what we usually call "Summer". Looking back over my records 2009-11 I see that this time of year has been not quite as lucrative as Autumn and Winter and I put this down to the good weather that we expect. My clients get out in their gardens or just get out and about, but as the weather cools and the nights draw in business picks up dramatically through September and October.

Well, so I fervently hope! I thought that all the rain we've had would have kept people indoors and they'd be on the phone asking for lessons - something to do while the rain poured down! Maybe these same people left the country, seeking the sun elsewhere. Or maybe it's The Recession. Whatever the reason, it's been a bad summer for my business. How was yours, computer tutors?

Still, I haven't been idle. I'm looking to expand the web design side of my services and have been searching out techniques and practising them. I am determined to keep my websites "Web compliant", strictly in line with the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines. I'm not a SEO guru - huge books are written on the subject and people run businesses totally devoted to Search Engine Optimization - but I do know that the search engines favour webpages that follow the W3C. The basic good design principles are:

• Use W3C-approved HTML for your content mark-up
• Separate the styling from the content 
• Make sure each page has a relevant title

And then some 'Dont's':

• Don't use table HTML for the layout of your webpage
• Don't use JavaScript
• Don't stuff 'keywords' into the head metadata 
• etc
• etc

So I keep all the styling in a Cascading StyleSheet (CSS), or maybe use more than one. And I'm always looking for ways to achieve the effects I want by using "pure CSS". Google's wonderful for this. Recently I wanted to find a way to make a picture viewer, where the user can click on a little 'thumbnail' picture and the big version appears in a window on the page:

You can see an array of thumbnails on the left and the main viewer window showing the beautiful Monica Bellucci. Any pictures will do to experiment with - I found a gallery of the lovely Monica on the web and borrowed some of the pictures!

All done with clever CSS. You can make the thumbnails 'opaque' until you hover over one. Here, they are 40% opaque except one on the right (because I left the mouse pointer 'hovering over it)

This is a very useful technique which I'm longing to use on my next project - if it demands it, of course. Bed & breakfast and similar websites will benefit from this viewer showing pictures of the different rooms, for example.

Also found a way to make pretty coloured columns all the same depth, no matter how much content is in them, like this:

Most webpages are arranged in columns. The really good thing about this is that the columns are defined as a percentage of the total width available on your screen, so however small the screen is, you can still see the full width of the page.
Very pleased to have found this technique. I shall be using this a lot if I get the chance. Do contact me if you'd like to know more.


August Charity

Very briefly.....

Bumped into Sam in High Town, Hereford, who was toting Friends of the Earth. It was very near the end of the month and I hadn't decided on a charity, so I said hers would be it. Realise now that I did FoE back in the Spring, but never mind. Sometimes it's just first come first served!

Colin