Soccer game tomorrow at the Hershey field in Stuarts Draft. 2nd round of the tournament. Everyone is welcome to come to the game. The first round went well. I had a good night and contributed 2 goals to help with our first win in the tournament.

I helped get DSL working at church tonight. The DSL setup went fine and all the computers were easy to setup except for one. Why is there always one? And why does the one take 3 times the time as the rest of the work?
I plan on replacing the offending PC soon so that it can do no more harm.

Flickr is a well know site for sharing photos. For a number of months I have been using a little software tool to get a new wallpaper image for my PC every 10 or 20 minutes from flickr.

A flickr account is not needed. All that is needed is the software below and an internet connection. Once installed you can set how often a new picture is downloaded and the ‘tags’ for the type of picture you want. I suggest you try Oregon Coast for some beautiful pictures.

Flickr Wallpaper Rotator

If you want to try out a different tag combinations before you put them in the software just search using the tags on Flickr.

My experience with the software hasn’t been perfect. Sometimes the program will freeze when trying to download a picture. I have found I can wait for it to finish or just close it and re-open it. I also found that it stores the downloaded picture in the program’s installation folder. The pictures can take up significant space so I clean them out every now and then.
Even with some minor problems the program is worth trying and its fun to have ever changing wallpaper.

I read that 2007 had an IFERROR function but I needed it now for 2003 so I did some searching around a found a solution!

I’m working with a complicated Excel workbook with multiple queries covering many worksheets. I’m currently using many VLookup functions to pull the data together on one main worksheet. The problem is that when a VLookup doesn’t return true data I end up with a ‘ #N/A ‘ entry. I needed to have a null value or a ‘ 0 ‘ when a false statement is produced. The first solution I found was to use a IF statement with an ISERROR funtion but that was a lot to type and caused the VLookup function to happen twice in many cases which seemed to increase the calculation time. I needed something better and that is when I read about the IFERROR function available in Excel 2007.

While I will have Excel 2007 in a week or two (I’m also looking forward to faster calculation because it will use both CPUs) I couldn’t delay this project. I searched around a little more and found a helpful Microsoft support article. It said that I could create my own user-defined IFERROR function for Excel 2003! I did and it seems to work well.

Here is the VB code from Microsfot’s site and a link to their page.

Basically you go to Tools -> Macro -> -> Visual Basic Editor (or hit ALT-F11)
Select Insert -> Module
Paste in this:

Function IfError(formula As Variant, show As String)

On Error GoTo ErrorHandler

If IsError(formula) Then
IfError = show
Else
IfError = formula
End If

Exit Function

ErrorHandler:
Resume Next

End Function

Then File -> Close and return to Excel.

IFERROR is basically used like this:
=IFERROR(Calulation or Function, alternate result)

If the Calculation or Function doesn’t return an error then the results are used. If it does return an error then the alternate result is used in the cell.

Support Article - Should work for older versions of Excel also!

In the end I can not guarantee that this is quicker to run but it is a lot quicker to type and cleaner to read.

Blog upgrade = small problems

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