Webspace of Eric Brodeur

Perspectives on storytelling and digital cinema technology

Category: Windows

iTunes iconIf your Mac gets a new logic board you'll find that many of your software licenses must be re-applied or re-activated. For example, iTunes wouldn't recognize my newly repaired MacBook Pro as being authorized.

My former authorization was orphaned and iTunes doesn't allow its removal. Being forced to re-authorize used another one of my five precious authorizations…putting me at four. I began to wonder the consequence of orphaned authorizations but fortunately Apple has solutions for this.

If you reach the maximum of five authorized computers you can use the "deauthorize all" option in iTunes which resets the count back to zero. At that point you can authorize your primary computer and whatever others you wish. This can be done once per year.

Read the iTunes Authorization FAQ for everything you ever wanted to know.

Free disk catalog software for Windows

Windows logoFor years I used (under Windows) an application called WhereIsIt for cataloging files on hard drives, CD-ROM, DVD, etc. Unfortunately I lost my license and the developer snubbed me with an obnoxious (and inaccurate) denial.

Since then I’ve been searching for a Freeware replacement. A recent post at Gizmo’s Freeware identifies three actively maintained disk catalog applications called Cathy, Gentibus, and Visual CD.

Enable the Tab auto-complete in DOS

Windows logoSome of the Windows Server 2003 boxes I cross paths with were upgraded from Windows Server 2000. In each case the [Tab] character shortcut for auto-completing a command line didn’t work. Pressing [Tab] simply resulted in a tabbed cursor.

Fortunately the [] character works in a pinch. Typing cd c:\doc brings you into C:\Documents and Settings but it’s not quite the same as the [Tab] shortcut.

This article from Online Tech Tips describes how to enable auto-complete using the [Tab] key. After reading you may notice the numeric value supplied is actually the hexadecimal value of the character you wish to use as the shortcut.

File compatibility with Office 2008 for Mac

One of the hassles with Office 2008 Mac and Office 2007 Windows is the new document format which ends in the letter X: DOCX, XLSX, PPTX. These new formats cannot be opened in older (and perfectly usable) versions of Office without installing a special (and free) plug-in from Microsoft.

A question recently came past me about Office 2008 for Mac and using old file formats as the default. Fortunately, the folks at MacLife confirmed you can use DOC, XLS, and PPT as the default format.

Trouble with Excel toolbars

One of my clients needed a floating toolbar in an Excel worksheet for quick access to macros. Creating the toolbar was easy but trouble began when file names began to change.

The toolbar worked properly in a file called WORKA.XLS and a copy of the file was made as PROJECTA.XLS. The moment the toolbar button in PROJECTA.XLS was clicked, Excel opened WORKA.XLS and used it to store the relevant data. Whatever tactics I used to re-create the toolbar, Excel insisted on using WORKA.XLS for everything.

Next I changed the name of WORKA.XLS to WORKX.XLS. Opening PROJECTA.XLS and clicking the toolbar button generated an error along the lines of "cannot locate macro." Excel was still trying to open and use WORKA.XLS.

After a bunch of research, including numerous references to PERSONAL.XLB files, I couldn't find a solution to make the toolbar independent and portable between XLS files.

What finally worked was using Visual BASIC to dynamically create the toolbar. Not an elegant solution (nothing seems to be with Microsoft software) but this solution did the trick. Scroll down the page for the VB code.

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