Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 December 2014
Using an existing flat file in SSIS is straightforward, but creating a new one can be a pain - this blogs gives some steps to follow.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 07 July 2023
One owl's sad story of addiction to a simple computer game: a tale of lost time and lost sanity.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 October 2014
Charts in VBA are a bit weird: this blogs highlights some of their foibles, by showing how charts are really just special shapes, which contain shapes of their own!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 15 September 2014
I've already pinched (with permission!) the ideas of Fergus Cairns to explain ways to run automatic searches on popular websites like Google; this blog gives an update on the same topic.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 July 2014
Integration Services include a Slowly Changing Dimension transform, which is designed to make loading dimension data easier. This blog explains how it works, and discusses whether it achieves its objectives.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 16 May 2014
Did you know that Excel workbooks are really just a collection of XML files, all zipped together? We didn’t either, so we thought we'd tell the world.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 19 February 2014
This blog provides the SQL, C# and VB script needed for the Integration Services script components tutorial.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 13 January 2014
You can use VBA to extract data from web pages, either as whole tables or by parsing the underlying HTML elements. This blog shows you how to code both methods (the technique is often called "web-scraping").
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 25 November 2013
You can get at all sorts of system information within Visual Basic for Applications by using environment variables - this blog shows you how to get at your user's name, computer name and much more besides.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 07 November 2013
A short blog explaining how to use Visual Basic for Applications to loop over enumerations.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 November 2013
Range names can have either worksheet or workbook scope - this blog shows how to make sure that you're referring to the right range names!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 November 2013
A short blog showing how to stop Excel hiding duplicate values for pivot table groups.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 November 2013
The SUMPRODUCT function is one of the hardest ones to understand in Excel, but it's also pretty useful. This blog gives clear examples of how to use SUMPRODUCT for conditional sums, weighted averages and the like.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 13 August 2013
A previous blog showed how to get Excel to speak to you; this one shows how to change the voice in which it does it!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 12 August 2013
Deep within its bowels Excel contains a feature allowing it to read out the contents of cells (you can also get your VBA macros to talk to users). This blog goes to those deep places hidden within Excel!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 18 September 2024
If you have a colleague who trusts you, you could always betray this trust by sending them a workbook which misbehaves: it won't close and you can't leave it!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 April 2013
How to store the name of each file in a folder in a SQL Server table using an Integration Services package.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 April 2013
If your chart has more than a thousand data labels, this blog explains why you may experience problems.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 October 2012
By default SSRS will create files with extension .rdl.data to cache data. This blog gives two and a half ways to ensure you're always seeing the latest data in a report.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 August 2012
To make report navigation easier, you can create a 2-dimensional matrix of clickable links at the top of a report. This blog shows you how!