Pat Howe's Blog

How to build Microsoft Excel powered ASP.NET websites

Microsoft Excel provides easy to use and very good (in my opinion) functionality for most business applications and with its charting capabilities and extensibility through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and data links to other storage applications it gives you a powerful tool at your fingertips on your desktop or laptop. That is great if you are with your client or don’t mind sending them your Workbook to use on their machines but it’s not very practical if you want to protect your intellectual property or view on different devices

Why driving traffic to your website should be your marketing plan

Anyone that conducts any sort of business now-a-days must have an internet presence. You will not survive or grow (the aim of any successful business) without providing a place online for people to find you. Most people looking to engage with the services you offer or to purchase the products that you sell will do some sort of research online. They will use a search engine directly; they will find a link on another website, an email or get a recommendation from one of social media friends. They could also

Managing your dual-band wireless broadband router

This article covers setting up a dual-band broadband router and managing connections. Most modern routers in the UK are dual-band meaning they operate a wireless signal at both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. I was having some problems getting devices connected to wireless but mostly it was with connections dropping. I was considering getting a signal extender to cover more of the house with thinking that my BT router wasn’t good enough and a stronger signal was needed even though connections were failing in the same room as the router.

Using conditional formatting and functions in Microsoft Excel

This is another one of my articles about Microsoft Excel covering conditional formatting and conditional statement functions such as TRUE, FALSE, NOT, IF, AND, OR, XOR, IFNA and IFERROR. Conditional formatting allows you to display your workbook cells differently based on specified criteria (the values of cells). Conditional functions allow you to present results in your cells based on different criteria. So one is for the display conditions and the other for the values returned based on a conditional statement. Conditional formatting We will start with conditional formatting and with

Manipulating and formatting text using functions in Microsoft Excel

In this short article I run through some examples of using Excel’s text functions to manipulate or format data. This follows on from my other Excel related articles. Quite often I use Excel to change data to the format that is required in a database and text functions come in very handy in all sorts of situations. I also use Excel to format data into HTML code for use in web pages and I’ll give an example of that. In the descriptions below I refer to the values within the

Using dates and date functions in Microsoft Excel

Following on from my article about using names for cells or a range of cells, I have decided to continue writing about Excel and today’s subject are Excel’s use of dates and its date functions. As I am in the UK the default way to show dates in the screenshots will be the UK format but that is just something to be aware of rather than any issue as following through with the examples on your own machine will display in default format for your location. In this article we

General Availability (GA) of Top Level Domains (TLDs) in 2014 and 2015

This is my first update in 2015 on domain names that are now available. So far in 2015 we have had 34 new top level domain names released for general availability (GA). Many more are in the process and will go to GA soon and others are under consideration. In this short article, I have provided a list of the top-level domains (TLDs) released in 2015, a summary of those released in 2014 and a list of those that are at an earlier stage for delivery to GA in 2015

Creating and using scalable vector graphics on the web

This article is about Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) on your web pages. I would have classed it as a HTML 5 tutorial but it is not strictly speaking to do with HTML 5 although it does use HTML to display the images. An SVG is a file that has been written in XML and contains all of the information needed to draw the image on the screen in text. This way the browser knows exactly how to re-scale it depending on the viewing area so there is no loss of

Latest news and website work from My Web Minder

When if first started this site I had intended to write some updates about the work going on at Pat Howe Web Solutions which now trades as My Web Minder. However, after two years I still haven’t provided any news in that respect but I’m not going to list out all the work completed in the last two years as I want to make this short. Apart from registering domain names for people/businesses or setting up email/web hosting accounts, we’ve been adding bits and pieces or making changes to a

Animation example using the HTML 5 Canvas

Following on from my article Getting started with HTML5 canvas, this short article adds another example of what you can do. If you haven’t already done so, it is worth revisiting my previous article to get familiar with the terms and Canvas setup. This article shows you that animation on the HTML 5 Canvas is really quite simple. The example here moves a small box around the screen and changes its direction and colour when it hits the boundary of the canvas. As there is not much to it so

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