Topics

1

Clipboard Help+Spell / Stripping to Text Format

« on: July 13, 2015, 03:18 PM »

Is it possible to strip text (e.g. copied from web page or MSW) so that all formatting is removed and it will paste as plain text?  I looked both in the CHS help and in other comments here and didn't see anything directly addressing this issue.

Please tell me when I'm overwhelming with specific desires and I'll back off.

2

Clipboard Help+Spell / Pasting From Stack - Questions

« on: July 13, 2015, 08:16 AM »

I'm still trying to make pasting from a stack as efficient and rapid as possible because I do it frequently.  I'm using as a standard what I was able to do in my former clipboard helper because it minimized the keystrokes necessary to paste a longer list of clips.

There I was able to

•   Select a group of clips by highlighting them in the main windows
•   Select whether I wanted FIFO or LIFO
•   Select (optional) whether I wanted the cycle through the stack once or multiple times (I didn't use that often) - default was once-through

Once I'd selected those it was just a matter of repeatedly pressing Ctrl-V to paste the sequence of clips.

How close to this is it possible to come in CHS?

3

Clipboard Help+Spell / Update Comment on TechSupportAlert

« on: July 12, 2015, 06:53 AM »

One of my favorite sites for freeware is TechsupportAlert.com.  Today I posted this comment updating their 2013 review that noted as a deficiency the lack of image support.

Clipboard Help+Spell (CHS) has been markedly improved since the 2013 review date.  Now it's at v2.29 and HAS good image capability.  It can be used very simply or can perform complex useful feats with a reasonable amount of extra time spent learning its features.  One of its many excellent features is the ability to clean up clips in almost any ways imaginable:  removing extra lines; removing unwanted characters at the beginning of lines; find and replace; on and on. 

I'm a longtime Clipmate user, one who never grudged paying for it because I used it so much, but CHS converted me - and inspired me to make a contribution to the totally non-profit, non-adware, DonationCoder(DC) site that uses only Google-analytics as a tracker for page views.  Note that Mouser, the creator of CHS has several other excellent programs on DC.  There are programs by other authors as well.

4

Clipboard Help+Spell / Quick Paste Question and Suggestions

« on: July 11, 2015, 10:39 AM »

Question
What is the function of the quickpaste group in the navigation pane?  It seems as though it duplicates what's in the "new" clipboard without any difference.  In particular, deleting clips in QP deletes them in the main clipboard, which doesn't seem logical.  I'd think that it would be a location to identify and order clips that may be pasted in order.

Suggestion 1 - Following from above
Revise quickpaste so that one can add and delete clips here without deleting from the main clipboard.

Suggestion 2 - Allow identifying clips in main clipboard to be put in QP group en masse

Suggestion 3 - Make it possible to paste starting from top or bottom of clips in QP group

Suggestion 4 - Make it possible to cycle through repeatedly.

Suggestion 5 - Provide a toggle to automatically replicate new clips from main clipboard or not to QP group

5

Clipboard Help+Spell / Paste Directly from CHS Main Window

« on: July 11, 2015, 10:26 AM »

Is it possible to select an item in the Main Window and paste directly?  That would seem to be a natural option, but I couldn't find it.

I realize it's possible to copy an item to the clipboard and then paste it, but that's a two-step process.

6

Clipboard Help+Spell / Text Modification Issues Updating - question/issue/bug

« on: July 11, 2015, 10:21 AM »

I believe CHS (2.29.0) has a minor, but annoying bug.

One thing I typically like to do is remove all blank lines from a clip.  I found that "Trimming and Wrapping"  with "extra lines" and "even between par" does exactly what I want - hooray.
I see in the preview that it looks the way I want and click accept.
I then immediately use Ctrl-Alt-Q to bring up the dialog and paste that item.  It pastes in the original form rather than in the form with line breaks removed.  Bad

If, however, I copy something else into the clipboard between cleaning up my text then what pastes is cleaned up.


BTW - Clipmate has long been my invaluable assistant, but so far (first day) it appears Mouser has performed his usual magic with CHS.  It caused me to donate again.

7

Post New Requests Here / IDEA - Macro to Convert OneNote Output to Word Headings (Styles)

« on: November 14, 2008, 07:32 PM »

I'm a devoted OneNote user and a Word (2007) user because both do outlines very well.  Unfortunately OneNote's outlines do NOT transfer to Word's outlines - a known issue that eventually the OneNote people plan to address.  In the meantime I'd love to have a way to convert OneNote output to Word headings (styles).

If one exports from OneNote to Word you get tab-indented text - one tab for each heading level.  There ought to be a way to write a word macro (I assume) to count the indents and convert them to a heading (which has a style).  That's what I need, but am not knowledgeable enough to create.

If this is the wrong place to suggest this I'd appreciate suggestions on where I should - in DC or elsewhere.  It matters enough that I'm willing to pay a small amount, though obviously I hope the challenge intrigues people enough to get it done without cash.

8

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Year Calendar on a Single Page - Excel-2007 Template

« on: August 30, 2008, 03:21 PM »

David Seah produced a very nice Excel template that allows one to print out a year's worth of calendar on a single piece of paper that will fold to fit with 3x5 cards.  It's great for planning because it's continuous, not starting a new line for each month.
http://davidseah.com...og/compact-calendar/
(Images of my version at the bottom of this post 9/1/2008)

I took that idea, with his blessing, and gussied it up to be more automatic and to allow the user to pick any start date.  It uses Excel-2007 conditional formatting so wouldn't work very well with Excel-2003.

Here's a link to my blog where I posted it.
http://aedesigndu.bl...-calendar-excel.html

There's no money involved, I just got a kick out of generalizing it.  I hope it's useful to others.

Jim Mitchell


9/1/2008 At the request of others I've added the following information and pictures of how the end product and the data entry portion of the sheet look - there's also a sheet of instructions.

What I did:
David Seah's version had to be manually updated whenever you changed the starting date of the calendar, picked a different starting day of the week, or decided to insert a holiday.

Month Labels:
If the end of the week is in a different month than the prior week then display the month for that line.
To get the banner effect I had to develop conditional formatting.  Since this was the first time I used it the "rules" that I used are a bit clunky, but they work.

Start of Year:
Make it a single named entry that is used in the first cell of the calendar.  All the other cells flow from that one (and did in David's).

Holidays:
Make a lookup based on the week of the year calculated as a simple  sequence starting on the first week of the calendar (the lookup is hidden in a grouped column).  This got a bit tricky because I had to write some logic to ensure that a holiday falling on a row that displayed the month name shows up in the next line.  To make this work I decided to sacrifice David's ISO calendar week numbering scheme.
It could produce problems if someone puts holidays in succeeding rows starting with a month name - otherwise it's fine.

Column Formatting
This is set to be formatted with conditional formatting using the "Weekday" function looking for either Saturday or Sunday.  This makes them move in the display depending on which day of the week you use to start the calendar.

Protection
I protected the sheets so that users couldn't inadvertently put entries in the wrong place.  There's no password so anybody who wants to modify the sheet can do so with no problems = opensource(?).

Hope this helps.

9

General Software Discussion / Energy Saving Setup for XP

« on: August 15, 2008, 01:18 PM »

I leave my home machine on 24x7 (monitors off when not using) because I have it set to do several automatic backup tasks (net and local) in the middle of the night and because it's often still syncing files (Foldershare) when I head to bed. 

I'd love to be able to tell it to go into hibernation (ideal) or sleep when I head to bed after it's finished the syncing, but wake up in order to perform the backup tasks, going back to the energy conserving state afterward.

Is anybody aware of a way to achieve this?  I suppose the criteria would be:
- Wake on local demand - when I sit down at the keyboard
- Go to energy saving mode after identified tasks have gone to 0 activity for x minutes
- Wake at scheduled time(s), and return to energy saving mode after identified tasks have completed.
- If in hibernation mode, go to sleep mode at a scheduled time so that the wait on physically arriving at the machine is minimized.

Machines I'm concerned with are all XP

PS - Feel free to move this to another forum if that's more appropriate.

10

Living Room / How to achieve High Resolution for Text Reading

« on: August 15, 2008, 01:05 PM »

I've just been working with my wife on switching to digital for newspapers.  She finds that she cannot comfortably read on a regular computer screen (Philadelphia Inquirer on Lenovo V100 - Screen 1280 x 800), but is quite happy reading on my Kindle.  Both she and I believe that the difference is the increased pixels/inch on the Kindle (167 ppi, 4-level gray scale).  This leads to several questions.

1) Does anyone know of a monitor/card combination that we could use to achieve the same kind of flicker-free resolution with our desktop machine at a vaguely reasonable price?

2) Am I missing something in my analysis that might make it more palatable for her to use the laptop for reading?

Thanks

Jim Mitchell

11

Mini-Reviews by Members / ZohoDB - Online Free Relational Database

« on: May 19, 2008, 08:27 PM »

Basic Info

App Name	Zoho DB & Reports
App URL	http://db.zoho.com
App Version Reviewed	As of 5/18/2008 - Constantly updated
Test System Specs	XP-SP3, on Dell P390 2GB RAM
Supported OSes	Web-Based
Support Methods	Forum
Upgrade Policy	Currently Free - They update online
Pricing Scheme	Currently Free - I'd expect a  "Pro" in future.
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	REVIEWER: I'm a simple user - no financial relationship

Intro:


Who is this app designed for: Someone with minimal programming expertise who wishes to create a moderately complex relational database online - although an understanding of relational database tables is probably a good idea.

The Good
 

• It works
• Pretty easy to learn
• Easy to embed what you create in your own web page via an iframe (they provide the code) or directly publish a particular view
• Database can be shared in part of whole (though I haven't tried this)
• Pretty good reports that allow summarizing and a crude form of grouping

The needs improvement section
 

• Little control over format yet - the output is a spreadsheet in appearance with no obvious way to control column width, font, weight etc.
• No auto-incrementing the key field in tables - it's up to you to ensure that you have a unique entry so far as I can tell
• Sometimes slow to accept updates, though generally pretty responsive.
• Help is not evident. You need to figure it out yourself. Presumably it's in the forums, but I didn't find much helpful there.
• If you make relations between tables you must put an entry in every linking field or the record won't show up in a query - this one took me a while to figure out.

Why I think you should use this product
If you need to produce an updatable list for a small-scale website this is great - no worry about PHP, MySQL (and less control of course). I tested it by creating a six-table database of equipment that my academic department has for common use in the department. After stumbling a bit with the problem noted above on required entries in linking fields it all worked as I wanted. Total time to learn, setup and populate the tables (only about 20 pieces of equipment), create the website to embed the result was 3 hours - vastly better than an effort with PHP a year or two ago. Here's what the output looks like.


How does it compare to similar apps
I'm not aware of any similar web-based apps that are free with similar functionality, though I'm sure Google is working on one. The closest approximations in the desktop world are Access, FileMaker and OpenOffice Base. All offer far more control and features for the single user, but they don't allow easy creation of a web page. Here are some others that I believe are less capable either because their not as fully relational or because the fees kick in very quickly.

 

• Lazybase.com - I took a quick look at this by creating a test DB. It doesn't seem to offer as much user control. It's more aimed at a rating system for restaurants, books etc.
• Quickbase.com (Intuit) - This one has been around a long time and is clearly very capable. The problem is that the minimum appears to be $250/month - not for me.

Conclusions
As I've emphasized throughout, the beauty of this app is that it's web-based and thus able to be readily shared and published. It's nowhere near as finished as even OpenOffice Base, but it sits cleanly in it's own niche and can be very helpful in a rapid manner.

Links to other reviews of this application
I'm sure that there must be some, but I couldn't find any devoted to the database portion of the much larger Zoho suite . It's fairly new.

12

Living Room / How to Access Data in US, Britain & France

« on: March 26, 2008, 08:23 AM »

I'm going to be traveling a fair amount in the US, Britain and France over the next several years. A good part of that time I'll be in places where I cannot count on a Wifi connection for my laptop.   I'd like to see if there are ways of making my Motorola L6 work for me, or if that doesn't work I'd like advice on the best way to achieve my goals.

Data: - I'd like to be able to connect my Lenovo 3000 V100 laptop to the web via the phone for EMail etc.  If I understand things correctly this is called tethering in the mobile world.

Expected Usage:
Daily EMail checks - some of which probably will have significant attachments
Maps
Check news
NOT - major downloads of programs etc.
Perhaps some photo uploading to Flickr

I'd appreciate suggestions on the following:

1) Should I be able to do this with my existing unlocked Motorola L6?

2) Which  Carriers make sense- Particularly in the UK and France - I'll only be there for less than a month each time so availability is possibly a real issue. I'm hoping that I can get the data service for about $60/month.

Thanks for any thoughts

Jim Mitchell

13

General Software Discussion / Equivalent to Foldershare?

« on: September 20, 2007, 02:24 PM »

I've been a very happy user of Foldershare for quite a while.  I sync about 30G of data between five PCs (and formerly a Mac) almost effortlessly.  Its big limitation is that (thanks to MS buying it), it doesn't do linux.

Now I'm thinking of trying to incorporate a linux box into the mix.  I'm looking for something that will do the same thing as Foldershare.  I'd appreciate suggestions.  Here's what my research so far seems to tell me:

 - rsync and its offspring might do it but - they seem to be 2-box only and probably hard for a novice to configure

 - Powerfolder looks like a candidate, but I found their documentation tough to evaluate - any users here?

- I could probably do a kluge and run a VM with windows on the linux box and thus continue foldershare, but that does not appeal at all.

Thanks

14

Find And Run Robot / Appreciation

« on: July 07, 2007, 03:42 PM »

No complaints.  No "I don't get it's" (though I'm sure I don't understand all FARR-II can do.) 

Just "THANKS" for such an amazing program!

15

Word Processor Roundup / Outlining

« on: February 08, 2007, 06:54 PM »

One feature that is key to some of us is outlining.  I would gladly switch to OpenOffice, but its capabilities in that area are so poor that I cannot conceive of working effectively.  I therefore unhappily stick with Word.  I'd be curious if any of the other WPs have capabilities to Word.  None that I've looked at over the years come close.

Jim Mitchell