That isn’t to say that remote areas don’t have names that Google Maps will know about. I grew up in a region of Maine that, if you try to drive there from the Southern part of the State, you’ll actually drive through several “towns” with no names. They’re called “townships” and they’re followed by a number. For example, Township 44 in Northwest Aroostook county in Maine is a random spot in the middle of the dense and rugged forest of Northern Maine. Surprisingly, it shows up on Google Maps.

However, there are plenty of areas that you might visit, and may not remember the name. For instance, there was a pond called Deboullie Pond that we always visited when I was a kid. It was a deep-woods pond that you had to drive for hours through the forest logging roads to reach. These days, anyone traveling those roads would use GPS – it’s crazy not too. But coming across such a stunningly beautiful spot (many of which are not named on any known maps), all you’re really going to have to work with to get back to that location in the future are the latitude and longitude coordinates.

We’ve covered a lot about maps and navigation at MakeUseoOf. Chris wrote about navigating with Google Maps, I covered Google Maps GPS tracking years ago, and Saikat’s described how to geotag Flickr photos, which is pretty cool. In this article, I’m going to show you a few cool things  you can do on the Internet with such coordinates. Everything from gathering more information (and potentially names) from the coordinates, to doing things like checking out the planet Earth from space looking at those coordinates, or even displaying what direction you’d have to point a satellite dish to get a decent TV signal. Hey – we cover every base here at MUO.

Working With Latitude and Longitude Coordinates

To get started playing around with these coordinates (unless you’ve already gone hiking or traveling somewhere and have some from your GPS device that you want to check out), I’m going to have to find latitude and longitude coordinates from Google. Google offers this neat feature where you can look up the coordinates of any location on Earth just by typing “long lat of” followed by the location.

In my examples here, I want to use the location of Portland Maine. So I just type “long lat of portland maine” in Google.

The big, bold results show the coordinates in the very center of that location.

Off to the right side of the Google results page, you’ll also find a list of important facts and info about that spot, such as land area of the city or town (if there is one) and when it was founded, the current weather there, the time, population, and an excerpt about the place from Wikipedia, if one exists.

Now that we’ve got a useful set of latitude and longitude coordinates, it’s time to start playing around with them. One very simple page created by Stephen Morse in 2004 is just as useful today as it was nearly a decade ago. It’s a simple converter back and forth between address and long/lat coordinates. In my case, I just type the coordinates and it tells me the locations precise street address in the middle of Portland.

This would be useful in those cases where you might have been traveling, spotted a pretty small town somewhere, and recorded the geo-coordinates with your GPS device, but maybe had no idea what the name of that tiny town was. Morse’s online tool will pull the information from Virtual Earth or Google if the info exists.

Of course, it’s also true that you can pretty much do the same exact thing in Google Maps if you have just coordinates. Just type those numbers into the Gmaps search field, and it’ll take you right there, as well as give you the street address if there is one.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of Timbuktu or some jungle somewhere. If you’ve recorded the coordinates of the location you were at, Google Maps will show you an overhead view of that location. You can then zoom in and explore the area to see what you might have missed out on from the ground.

If you hit a hot spot that you want to remember or share with friends, don’t forget that in Google Maps you can create your own shared maps by clicking “save to map” and choosing or creating a shared map. Label the saved spot on the map by placing the label in parenthesis.

Even better than Google Maps, is using latitude and longitude coordinates in Google Earth. Not only is Google Earth a heck of a lot more fun to use (in my opinion), but you can essentially place place a whole trail of tacks (markers) listing your entire itinerary during your drip just from the collected long/lat way points from your GPS device. This is a great way to trace your route if you have a device capable of taking a snapshot of GPS coordinates while you’re traveling.

It’s a little bit of work after the fact, but it’s still fun to see the path you took as you traveled, from a bird’s-eye view in Google Earth.

One really cool tool focused on long/lat values is an online resource from Fourmilab that lets you view that precise location on Earth from a whole bunch of perspectives. Using the tool, you can enter the location by coordinate, and also include how many km above the Earth that you want to launch the view.

You’ll see what that spot on Earth looks like from space (or however high you set the distance).  This is cool, but the best part of this tool is that you can change the Earth view to a bunch of other viewpoints, such as what the Earth looks like from the Sun or Moon at any given moment, a view of the night side of the Earth, or just a simple map view of the location you typed in.

Although, I think my favorite viewpoint is the weather radar overview of that location, which shows you not only what the weather looks like over that spot, but you can pretty much see what the incoming weather pattern looks like nearby. Pretty cool for planning camping trips to one of those remote locations you visited before, but don’t know the name!

Another very simple tool for people using such GPS coordinates is the National Weather Service, which lets you type in two points, and it’ll immediately calculate the distance between those two points on Earth. Keep in mind that unlike Google Maps or other mapping services, this is a direct, birds-eye distance calculation between any two points on Earth.

That kind of information isn’t so good for driving, but when it comes to hiking between two points in the wilderness, that kind of information can be good to know.

The last online tool focused on long/lat coordinates is a funky service from Satellite Signals, a website devoted to Satellite TV. This page on the site actually lets you enter in your longitude and latitude point, and then you can choose from a long list of satellite TV providers.

The tool will actually show you not only the location using a Google Maps mashup, but it’ll also draw out the direction that you want to point your satellite dish to get the best reception from that satellite. The angle of the dish is indicated with a blue direction line. Don’t ask me how they do it, but I just know it’s a pretty neat tool if you do have satellite TV and want to get the best reception.

So there you have it, a whole bunch of fun and quirky ways that you can make use of latitude and longitude coordinates on the Internet. Are there any other neat or unique tools out there that I missed? Share your own insight and fun things to do with GPS coordinates in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Old Compass on Vintage Map Via Shutterstock

The post Find Latitude and Longitude Coordinates & Ways To Use Them Online appeared first on MakeUseOf.

It isn’t that I don’t want to do something nice, it’s just that the days are so filled and I work so hard to remember everything in the schedule, that there doesn’t seem to be any space for those occasional events that crop up once a year. I’m lucky I remember holidays. I hardly even remember my own birthday, for Pete’s sake.

Because my memory for birthdays and special events is so bad, I was pretty happy to realize that I have absolutely everyone’s birthday right at my fingertips thanks to Facebook Events. A lot of folks already know about this, but if you’re one of those that haven’t really explored the dark recesses of the Facebook menus on your account, then you may be just as surprised as I was how incredibly useful and versatile the Facebook Calendar can be.

We’ve covered a number of unique ways to celebrate birthdays using Facebook, such as how to give Facebook gifts, and Matt touched on Facebook birthdays in his pro/con article about Facebook as well. Dave also covered a useful app on iPhone that you can use to remember birthdays. In this article, I’m going to show you four ways that you can make use of your Facebook Calendar. This will include how to export Facebook Calendar events to Outlook, how to export them to Google Calendar, how to strip spam-events that you really don’t care about, and how to even set up notifications for upcoming events from your Facebook Calendar. We’ll do it all in just one article. Don’t believe me? Let’s get it started.

Finding and Exporting Your Facebook Calendar

To quickly get to your Facebook Calendar, just click on “Home” and then click on “Events” in the left navigation bar under your Favorites.

This is the List view of your calendar, and even if you’re unfamiliar with Facebook Calendar, you’ve probably seen this events list page in passing. It’s the default display for upcoming events, because it shows you in a very quick glance what events are occurring today, tomorrow and then into the near future. What we’re really interested in though, is to get to the Calendar so that we can export it outside of Facebook and put it to better use. So, click on the “Calendar” view on this page.

This puts the view into the classic calendar format that you’re used to, organized by month. You can see each of the birthdays and other events on each day box in the form of a small icon. To get to the export feature, click on the gear next to the “Today” button.

Click on the Export option in this menu, and this is where the fun starts.

First – a pop-up box will appear that actually looks like you don’t have many options at all, except to close the window. Don’t be deceived. There are two links tucked away in this text, and this is exactly where you need to be to export your Facebook Calendar. You can either click on the “export your friends’ birthdays” to just export birthdays and nothing else, or click on “upcoming events” to export just events.

Exporting Facebook Calendar to Outlook

When you click either link, you’ll get an “External Protocol Request”. Search through the confusing text in this box to find the link after “webcal:”, which should be something like “//www.facebook.com/ical/u.php?uid=xxxxxxxx&key=xxxxxxx”

Unfortunately, you most likely won’t be able to highlight and copy that link, so you’ll need to open up Notepad and type it in. This is the link you’re going to use later to export your Facebook Calendar to other email applications than your default. In my case, I have Outlook set up as my default mail/calendar client, so I can just click on “Launch Application”, and Chrome will automatically launch Outlook.

This part of the procedure could be different for you, depending on what Chrome wants to open, especially if you don’t have Outlook installed. If you’re only interested in exporting your Facebook Calendar to Google Calendar, then just take note of that URL link, click on “Do Nothing”, and then skip ahead to the Google Calendar section.

If you click to launch Outlook, you’ll next see an Outlook notification where you’ll need to provide permission for the new Internet Calendar to be added.

In Outlook 2010, this is essentially what your new calendar filled with all of your Facebook friend’s birthdays will look like.

That’s all there is to exporting the Calendar to Microsoft Outlook. Easy, wasn’t it?

Exporting Facebook Calendar to Google Calendar

Sending those Facebook events and birthdays to Google is a tiny bit trickier. You’ll need that URL you noted earlier in hand. Then, head over to your Google calendar account, and scroll down until you see “Other calendars” in the left navigation menu. Click on the dropdown arrow, and you’ll see an option to “Add by URL”.

This will pop up a window with the magic field where you can paste the Facebook URL you noted above.

Click on Add Calendar, and after a few seconds of processing time, Google Calendar will bring in all of the events. If you had chosen to export your Friends birthdays, you’ll now find your friends’ birthdays highlighted on each of the days when they occur.

It’s synced with Facebook Calendar, so you can rest assured you’ll never, ever, ever forget another birthday!

Adding Birthday Notifications

Of course, if you really want insurance against forgetting birthdays, then you’ll need email notifications like me. Just click the dropdown arrow next to your new “Friends’ Birthdays” calendar, and click on the “Reminders and notifications” link.

Here you can set an event reminder that will either issue a pop-up on your computer (if you’re online and connected to Google Calendar), or you can choose to have Google send you an email.

You may actually want to make it a little earlier than 10 minutes. Maybe a day or two in advance so you have time to pick up a birthday present…

Cool Things to Do With Facebook Events

There are a couple of other small, but important things that you need to know about Facebook Events and using them in external calendars. First – if you really hate those annoying events that you’re invited to all of the time, and are really only interested in events that you’ve accepted, or that you yourself have added to your Facebook Calendar, then go back into the Calendar settings (using the gear icon), and instead of clicking on the “Export” link, click on the “Settings” link.

This window lets you completely eradicate the suggested events or any events that you haven’t accepted or added yourself from the exported calendar and from your own Facebook calendar. This is really useful if you’re like me and really don’t like things added to your calendar without your express permission.

Finally, another insanely cool thing you can do if you exported your events to Google Calendar, is embed them in a web page. You can get to this in the same dropdown above in Google Calendar where you added email notifications. Instead, click on Calendar Settings, and you’ll see this page.

All you have to do is highlight the Iframe code, paste it somewhere on your website or some shared, private page you have with family or friends, and voila – all of those birthdays or events from your Facebook Calendar are now published online for other people to see.

There are probably very limited times when you’d want to do this, like when you’re building a private community page and want to use  your Facebook birthday events to quickly populate a shared birthday calendar, as one example.

As you can see, there is a lot of coolness to the ability to export Facebook events like this. Once you’ve shared it out to a Calendar system like Google Calendar, you can do whatever you want. Best of all, you have those birthdays and events in the places where you check every day, complete with notifications. It’s yet another reason to love the convenience of Facebook information about family and friends, while adding the functionality of external calendars. That combination is a beautiful thing.

Do you use Facebook Calendar a lot? How do you manage your Facebook calendar? Do you think exporting it would help remember birthdays and events? Share your own thoughts and opinions in the comments section below!

Image Credit: A Day With the Word Birthday Via Shutterstock

The post Best 4 Ways To Manage Your Facebook Calendar appeared first on MakeUseOf.

This is the question that I set out to answer at the beginning of this year. My goal was to start out small – only investing $8 per day. Not like the big advertising entities that Justin wrote about not long ago. The goal of my advertising campaign would be only to gain traffic at my site, not to sell anything or funnel traffic to a single “conversion” page. My hope was that the “seeding” of incoming traffic from the dozens of clicks on the ad would gradually build up a snowballing collection of loyal readers. That was the plan.

In this article, I’m going to share the results of my tests. The tests involved individually running a Facebook advertising campaign costing approximately $8 per day for a couple of months. I discussed how to set this up in a previous article about Facebook advertising. Next, I initiated a Google Adwords campaign for $8 per day for a couple of months. I’ll show you how I set up each advertising campaign, and reveal the final results – comparing Facebook advertising head-to-head against Google Adwords advertising. You can be the judge as to which investment is better for a small-scale blogger.

Facebook Ads vs. Google Adwords

I should disclose up front that I am by no means an advertising or marketing expert. My expertise in the domain of drawing in traffic is focused on SEO techniques, and the world of online advertising was relatively foreign to me up until January of this year.

Testing Facebook Advertising

Diving into Facebook Ads was only frustrating at the very start, because it took the Facebook team an annoyingly long time to approve my ads. I started out trying to create a static ad for my site, until I stumbled upon an interesting advertising option Facebook offers where they will dynamically create a new ad every time you publish a new post update on your Facebook page.

This not only avoids the need to have to invest time in developing an eye-catching ad that encourages clicks, but I also found that it really seems to encourage clickthroughs by a larger population of Facebook users. If one post subject doesn’t attract a lot of people, you only have to wait until your next page post – that ad could very well attract a crowd. This ability to dynamically publish post ads is, in my opinion, one of the biggest advantages about Facebook advertising. It is exceedingly convenient.

Also, Facebook has nice performance feedback reports. I’ve seen some big numbers here – with hundreds of thousands of impressions reported and thousands of clicks, but it’s really hard to verify these numbers, because those clicks go to your Facebook page, not your website.

You can create ads on Facebook that go directly to your website, but I found within just a week that the click-through performance was nowhere near the sort of numbers you can get from using the dynamic post engagement ads. So, after that first week, I switched to post engagement, established a limit of $8 per day, and waited to see what the results were like.

As far as accumulating Facebook page “likes” go, Facebook ads are the single-most effective ways to build an audience on Facebook. It is remarkable how quickly I was able to accumulate fans on the Facebook page – starting from just a few days after starting the advertising campaign. 133 likes on just one day that first month, and that was after getting only 2 or 3 likes per day before advertising.

I was definitely curious to see if the Facebook page traffic resulting from that advertising would have any effect on my site traffic, since that was really my ultimate goal here. What I noticed is that whenever there was a Facebook post that attracted a lot of interest, I definitely got a nice spike in Facebook referral traffic. In my case, that amounted to a hundred to two hundred folks per spike, but when you’re struggling to build traffic levels by a few hundred readers at a time, those spikes help tremendously. They bring new people to your site, and they can contribute to your growth over the long-term. Obviously, if you want more traffic, you’d increase your investment proportionally.

Over the long-term, I could see that I wasn’t imagining things. Over the course of about three months, you could see how before I began the Facebook advertising campaign, my site traffic was relatively flat. There was slow, steady growth, but no frequent spikes in interest. That all changed after starting the Facebook advertising campaign in January. I could see frequent spikes in my overall site traffic that coincided with the referral spikes from Facebook.

I was sold on Facebook advertising after the first month, and I continue to use it to this day. I love that I never really have to think about my ads, I just try to make interesting posts that may go viral, and hope that the post ad catches a lot of eyes and gets them to click, and ultimately discover my page and my site for the first time.

Google Adwords Advertising

Google Adwords was an entirely different beast. I’d been receiving $100 coupons for quite a while from Google as encouragement to launch my first advertising campaign. Of course, once I went to start using Adwords, I couldn’t find a single one of those coupons. Figures.

There’s a little bit more of a learning curve with Adwords than there is with Facebook. There are actually people out there that specialize in creating and running Adwords campaigns, so this is by no means a full-blown, professional test. The goal here was to create a very simple 1-ad campaign with a small budget and see how it performed compared to Facebook using the same budget. It turned out creating an ad wasn’t all that hard, and the steps are laid out in the tabs that you find in Adwords.

You start out building an Ad Group, and establish your daily budget for it in the settings tab. Then you move on to the Ads tab and upload the ad you created using your favorite image software. In this test, I created a basic image ad with some interesting text and a compelling call to action.  The ad was approved in just a day or so, as opposed to getting my first ad approved on Facebook, which took about a week.

Then, you need to dive into the heart of what makes Adwords work – the keyword phrases that you want to bid on. You need to choose these wisely. They should be phrases that are extremely popular, but also ones that are very relevant to your own site content – this way when people are on a website that is focused on those keywords, they’ll see your ad and they’ll be far more likely to click on it, because your ad serves up more content related to their interests.

You can just imagine that your choice of keywords – and the quality of your ad of course – will have a significant impact on your ad performance. In this test, I chose keywords that I knew were relevant to my site based on what Google listed in my Webmasters account, and that I also knew were very popular in the search engines from some of my past research.

Just as in the case of Facebook, I saw almost instant results. Also similar to Facebook, the claimed impressions were quite high, but in the case of Google Adwords, the clickthrough rates weren’t quite as impressive. While Facebook had ad-clicks of 40 to 150 per day, the Google ad averaged a steady 35 to 50 per day with no real spikes to speak of.

Again, these are the same costs, but a clear difference in click-through rates for each ad. This could probably be explained by the fact that the Facebook ads are based on posts and often times more enticing to click on than a standard, static ad.

To get a clearer picture of how these two ad services impacted traffic at the blog, I took a closer look at whether Google had a similar impact to site traffic as Facebook did. So, checking out analytics around the time that I launched the first Google Ad campaign, I saw just an initial spike right after the ad campaign started, and then it tapered back down to nearly no impact.

Unlike the regular spikes of incoming traffic that I can see coming from the Facebook referrals every now and then, I saw pretty much zero impact to the site traffic from the Google Adwords campaign.

However, Google Adwords does offer a nice, reliable clickthrough rate on a daily basis – which means if your goal is to drive people to a single sales page or some other page that can successfully convert visitors to buyers, Adwords may be a great resource. For $8, I can get nearly 50 people a day to visit a page and potentially buy something. For a larger investment, that could go up. With an even better ad, that could skyrocket.

However, as a way to drive traffic and grow site readership, a low investment at Adwords just doesn’t have the same impact as a small investment at Facebook. Even better, the impact to page likes has been tremendous. It took nearly two years to hit 1,000 likes on the blog Facebook page. After just a few months of Facebook advertising, that skyrocketed to over 11,000 fans – and the growth isn’t slowing at all.

That growth means a significant audience on Facebook, which will most certainly convert to very nice traffic spikes when particularly viral posts are published. That is the real beauty of Facebook advertising – it may not have a huge, direct impact on site traffic right away, but it grows your Facebook following quickly. That alone provides for a very strong foundation for your website growth.

It should be obvious by now that my selection of a winner between Facebook ads vs Google Adwords is Facebook. However, that’s for traffic growth. If this were a campaign to sell an item online, that could change the entire game, and it’s definitely worth  a future experiment.

Do you use either Facebook Ads or Google Adwords? What has been your experience with the services? Did you find great success with one or the other? Share your experiences and tips in the comments section below!

Image Credit: Advertising Megaphone Via Shutterstock

The post Facebook Ads vs Google Adwords: Which One Got Me The Most Clicks? appeared first on MakeUseOf.

That’s the beauty of data – something that most people look at and find boring, or overly complex, data-analysts find beautiful and revealing. We’ve covered a number of useful tools for analyzing data here at MUO, such as Bandalizer for CSV data files, which of course Excel can handle as well. Data analysis lets you do things like niche analysis research, and of course create cool data visualizations.

However, did you know that one of the greatest tools of all to conduct data analysis is actually Google Spreadsheet? The reason for this isn’t only because a Google Spreadsheet report can do nearly everything you might want to do with Microsoft Excel (although you can), but it’s actually because of a few very cool reporting tools that comes standard in Google Spreadsheet.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to use Pivot Report, graphs and charts in Google Spreadsheet, a few examples of how you can use them to analyze seemingly complex data, and how you can end up with some really awesome charts and graphs in the end.

Using Pivot Reports to Perform Wonders

If you’ve never used pivot reports, then you’re in for a real treat. In this example, I’m going to use Adsense data that includes three fields I want to analyze – the number of ads clicked, the number of ads viewed, and the length of my article titles.

What I’m curious to find a correlation for is whether title length of the article affects the number of Adsense ads that are viewed or clicked. It’s this kind of seemingly unconnected data that a pivot report can calculate and reveal.

When on the table with that data, just click “Data” in the Google Spreadsheet menu, and select “Pivot table report…” in the drop-down menu.

This will open a new sheet where you can start building your new pivot report. A “Report Editor” opens up on the right side of the sheet, which sort of acts like a wizard that guides you through creating your new report. You’ll want to start out by adding the rows – the main data that you want to start with. In this case, I want to know if title length impacts ad performance, so the rows in this case would be titles.

Next, you want to add values to the report. As you add new values, it’ll fill out the report with those values from the original spreadsheet, except the data is calculated in the way you define it in the report editor. In this case I use “SUM” because each title only has one value anyway. However, now I can sort by the title length under the Title row setting at the top.

You may notice some “junk” data in your sheet – things like zeros, or fields where there’s just no valid data. You can actually tell the pivot report to ignore those bad values by clicking on the “Add field” in the Filter section of the Report Editor. Then you can deselect all of the items that you want the report to ignore.

Now that you’ve summed and sorted all of the data, things may become much more clear. Suddenly you may see patterns, such as the fact that titles between 60 to 80 characters tend to perform much better for some reason (for example).

These are things that just aren’t quite as clear in the messy, chaotic spreadsheet world where the data is unsorted and unfiltered. Pivot reports are extremely flexible, and will let you do other things with each column of data like summarizing by count, average, max or min, standard deviation, and a whole lot more. The power of pivot reports really comes out when you start messing around with the data and watching what amazing things come out of it at the end.

Using Charts and Graphs in Google Spreadsheet

Another good way to analyze data is in a more graphical form. When you’ve got the data sorted the way you like using a pivot report, it’s time to start charting that stuff. Google Spreadsheet comes with a good array of charting tools to help you out. To get to those, just highlight the data that you want to chart, click the “Insert” menu item and choose “Chart” from the list. A chart editor will pop up, with a preview of your data charted in the right pane.

You can run through all of the chart types available to see what offers the best representation of data that you’re looking for. There are line charts, bar charts, pie charts, and even some really cool gauges and also map charts that I’m looking forward to playing around with at some point.  However, for my purpose here, the area line chart comparison really revealed what I wanted – two hot spot areas that seem to imply better ad performance at two specific title lengths of articles.

This is pretty interesting stuff, and not something that would be so easily revealed in a table full of raw data. Another cool tool that’s available in Google Spreadsheet to graphically display data is a function called “Sparkline”. This function actually lets you transform a cell in the spreadsheet into a bar chart. All you have to do is type something like the following into a cell:

“=sparkline(E8:F8, {“charttype”,”bar”})”

What does this do? Well, basically it lets you chart data right in the cell. In this case I’m comparing the numbers in column E and F and using a bar chart to show the percentages. Column F is represented in blue and E in orange, so with just a glance at your spreadsheet,  you can quickly identify where the scales have tipped when comparing data or identifying “alarm” conditions.

These are only a few ideas to make use of Google Spreadsheet to analyze data using powerful tools like pivot reports and the charting tools. Google Spreadsheet is fast becoming (or maybe it already is) a major contender in the data analysis business, and it’s accessibility online means that it’s also convenient and easy to use no matter where you are.

When you’re in a hurry and need to process a lot of information quickly while on the go, that’s a huge deal. And the fact that you can simply import data or a CSV file into the first sheet, and all of the pivot reports and charts get created automatically for you — that’s just pure gold dust.

So if you haven’t used it yet – I highly suggest giving Google Spreadsheet reports a try to automate your data analysis chores. And if you have been using it for a while but didn’t know about these tools – by all means, give them a try. You’ll be glad you did.

How do you make use of Google Spreadsheet? What are your favorite tools that you couldn’t live without? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below!

Image Credit: Businessman Hand via Shutterstock

The post Become An Expert Data Analyst Overnight Using Google Spreadsheet Report Tools appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I am ashamed to admit that I’ve only recently decided to start experimenting with Google Spreadsheets, and what I’ve discovered is that whatever allure or power Excel had over me due to the amazing things you could do with VBA scripting, is completely overshadowed by the awesomeness of the sorts of things you can do inside of Google Spreadsheets.

After playing around with Google Spreadsheets for just a few weeks, I can barely contain my excitement. Many of the things I’ve discovered one can do, I plan to cover in future articles. However, as a quick preview let me say — since Google Spreadsheets is an online application — it is far easier to integrate it with many of the online tools and services that you already use, like data from websites, information from other Google Spreadsheets, information from (or to) emails, and a whole lot more.

Honestly, I feel like a kid in a candy store here.

6 Amazing Things You Can Do With Google Spreadsheet Functions

In Spreadsheets, there’s an entire library of Google Spreadsheet functions that you can use in intricate ways to perform impressive feats of data manipulation the likes of which you’ve never seen before. If you thought the power of Excel functions were cool, you really haven’t seen anything yet. You can treat the functions in Google Spreadsheets almost like mini-scripts in themselves, nesting one function within another as many times as you like in order to produce some really cool output information.

I’ll cover how to do that in this article, as well as creating intelligent conditional formatting rules, creating output charts and in-sheet bar graphs, and much more.

Fun With Google Spreadsheet Functions

A good majority of functions that are used in Excel, can also be used in Google Spreadsheet. However, there are some neat little functions that are entirely Google specific, and one of those was actually mentioned by Ann Smarty years ago – adding current time to the sheet.

You can do this using the usual Text(Now()) function, but the problem there is that it only updates the displayed time when you edit the sheet, not whenever someone views the sheet. The better alternative is actually the GoogleClock() function.

This always shows the current date and time – which is really useful for sheets where the viewer needs quick access to the current date/time to either fill out forms or do calculations with data from the sheet.

The example spreadsheet I’m going to use in my examples in this article is one where I’ve imported data from Google Adsense. This was done simply by exporting an Adsense report into CSV and importing that into this Google Spreadsheet.

If you’ve never used conditional formatting, it’s a really useful method to quickly highlight important information at a glance. You can get to the conditional formatting feature by right clicking on a value or a column, and clicking on “Conditional Formatting”.

There are lots of things you can do in here, between controlling text color or background color based on a range of comparisons. In this case, I want to quickly identify articles that have a high clickthrough rate, and call attention to the ones that are performing very poorly. To do this, I set up the conditional formatting to change the background to dark green when the number is greater than 4, change the background to light green when it’s between 2 and 4, and red text (bad) when it’s less than 2.

Now, at a quick glance, I can see which articles are stellar performers when it comes to getting a great ad clickthrough. Another thing you can do to make decisions based on multiple pieces of complicated data is to create an equation and place it into a logical statement.

The “IF” function lets you perform a logical comparison. In this case, I want to check whether the number of ads clicked is low, and the eCPM is high. I use the average in each column as a baseline. You can do multiple calculations like this, and “AND” multiple comparisons like this:

=IF(AND(C3<AVERAGE($C$3:$C$502);E3>AVERAGE($E$3:$E$502)),”TRUE”,”FALSE”)

This basically embeds an “AND” function inside of an “IF” function, with two “AVERAGE” functions embedded inside of the AND function. The last two parts of the “IF” function let you define what to fill into the field if the conditions are true or false. In this case, I just use “TRUE” or “FALSE”.

So, here’s the function in action. As you can see, when there are just a few ads clicked, and a high payout, I’m alerted to that line with a “TRUE” result.

Now I can try to figure out why those articles have such a phenomenal payout, and try to do more of the same to increase revenue! You can do a lot of cool stuff with embedded calculations combined with logical comparisons. But for many spreadsheet aficionados, this is really what spreadsheets are all about, right? What’s new?

Well now, let’s move on to the other cool things you can do with Google Spreadsheets.

Playing With Text

In my opinion, the power of spreadsheets comes out when you start dealing with text. If you’re accustomed to programming, then you know that you can use functions like “Left”, “Right” or “Mid” to extract sections of strings in order to manipulate them and build them into new strings.  Well, Google Spreadsheets gives you the same ability to do these kind of things with functions by the same name – although they perform a little differently.

Here’s an example. My spreadsheet includes a list of my topic URLs straight out of Google Adwords, but it’s only a section of the URL that starts with the date. If I want to create a new field that provides just the title, I need to remove the date section. To clean up strings like this, you need to find a common pattern to identify the area you want to strip out. In my case I noticed that the dates all have three slashes “/” in it.

All I need to do is find the third slash, and extract the rest of the text after that point. You can find the first incidence of any text inside another text using the FIND function.

=find(find text, text, position)

So, in my case, I have three levels of embedding to get to the last “/” before I can extract the right part of that long string. This is going to get funky, so follow along. To extract the strong after the first slash, you can use the RIGHT, the LEN and the FIND functions.

=Right(A3,len(A3)-(Find(“/”,A3)))

This Google Spreadsheet function returns all of the text starting from the right end of the text, all the way to the position of the first slash. This leaves you with part of the date including two slashes, and the title. To remove the sections with two more slashes, you can embed that RIGHT function into itself two more times. Here’s what such a crazy function looks like.

=Right((Right((Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))),len((Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))))-(Find(“/”,(Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))))))),len((Right((Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))),len((Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))))-(Find(“/”,(Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))))))))-(Find(“/”,(Right((Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))),len((Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))))-(Find(“/”,(Right(A5,len(A5)-(Find(“/”,A5)))))))))))

If you try to follow that function all the way through, you’re almost guaranteed to get a headache. But check it out – it works (see column I).

How did I create another function with the URL link to the article? Well, at least that’s an easy task.  All I had to do is use the CONCAT function to glue together two strings – “http://www.topsecretwriters/” and the title from the first column including the dates.

=CONCAT(“http://www.topsecretwriters.com”,A3)

Easy peasy.

Importing Feeds From the Internet

Another very useful function that could potentially be used for some pretty cool uses inside of Google Spreadsheets is the IMPORTFEED function. If you consider the sheer volume of information throughout the Internet that are offered by feeds, just think of what you can do with this versatile function.

How it works is pretty straightforward. Simply fill in the feed details into the function itself, surrounded by quotes.

It’s best to do this in the upper left cell of a fresh sheet. This will allow all of the information to cleanly import into that sheet.

Depending on what’s included with the feed, you could dynamically perform calculations on the information in additional columns using other fun functions you’ve discovered. Maybe the U.S. census offers a feed of demographics? Maybe you can get a stock feed with the latest data on your top stocks – and have your spreadsheet automatically perform  calculations on them.

The possibilities are unlimited – and much faster and easier than if you were trying to do the same kind of thing in Excel.

Have you dreamed up your own creative uses for Google Spreadsheet? What kind of info do you import off the Internet? What else would you like to see us do with Google Spreadsheets here at MUO? Share your thoughts and input in the comments section below!

Image Credit:Pen and Magnifying Glass Via Shutterstock

The post Perform Amazing Feats With These Useful Google Spreadsheet Functions appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The prospect of trying to learn all of these things about a new community, no matter where you’re moving to, can feel like an overwhelming task. There’s just too much information to collate and from too many different sources.  Many times in the past, MakeUseOf has had you covered when it comes to moving, from finding a decent flat to live in, to mobile apps that will help you find an apartment. In fact apartment hunting articles are a bit of a specialty here at MakeUseOf.

However, it’s one thing to find a house or an apartment to live in, but learning about a State, town or a community where you’re planning to live is a whole different story. At least if you currently live within driving distance, you could always drive into the area, hang out at the local businesses and talk to the folks that live in the area to learn a little more about what it’s like to live there. But, if you live too far away, getting the real story about a place becomes a whole lot harder.

Luckily, there are a number of useful websites that can really help you out when you’re looking for a new place to live.

Finding the Best Places to Live That Suits You

The bottom line is that when you’re looking the best place to live, you’re really looking for not only the comforts of a decent home or apartment, but you’re looking for a community of people and a general culture that meshes well with your own values and interests. Obviously, if you’re an avid golfer and you live in a community where there are a lot of fellow golfing enthusiasts, you’re a whole lot more likely to make friends and really enjoy living there.

The same can be true for religion, income level, available jobs, gender makeup, and a whole litany of other demographics that can mean the difference between finding a community where you fit in and thrive, or entering into a nightmare situation where you feel like an outsider in the community.

Research the Statistics

The truth is, almost every region of the world has some organization that is keeping track of the demographics and statistics for a particular area. For example, if you’re looking for a place to live in Europe and you’d like to know what areas suffer from pollution issues, what communities struggle with not having enough resources, or whether there are public health concerns, the European Commission is the place to go.

The European Commission regularly conducts research on everything from GDP per capita and growth rate for countries, to where climate change is having the biggest impact, how dramatically demographics are changing in some areas, and other important social issues that will ultimately have an impact on whether or not you like where you choose to live.

The Commission provides very useful information in simple formats, so at a glance you can see the statistics that matter. For example, click on the link for reports on Socio-economic development throughout Europe, and you’ll find a table showing the change of GDP per capita and growth rates from year to year. Seeing the trends can help you identify a country that offers a lot of promise when it comes to economic opportunities.

You can also click on “Graph” to see details by country at a quick glance – a lot easier than trying to pour over the numbers in the table to figure things out.

Actually, my favorite tool at this site is the color-coded map, which lets you select the data that you want to see as a comparison between different areas. This shows you how living in a certain region may put you in a location with moderate economic growth, but if it borders on other areas with a poor economy, it could result in increasing crime rates.

So there are a lot of factors you have to consider, but the Commission offers a whole lot of that information all in one place on their website. It’s definitely the first place to go if you’re researching the best places to live in the world.

If you live in the U.S. and education is a primary factor for you when house or apartment hunting, then the Department of Education Dashboard is definitely the first place you’ll want to go. This dashboard – similar to the European Commission website – provides links to graphical tools that’ll show you important indicators of a good or bad school system for certain states in the U.S.

For example, one map gives you a quick glance at which states have the higher percentage of 3 and 4 year old kids enrolled in preschool (an indication that the community values education).

There’s a lot of other data you can research here, such as states with the highest percentage of 8th graders proficient in Math or Reading, states with the highest percentage of Freshmen that graduate high school in 4 years, and more. All of these things are indications of a strong school system, and can help you choose what state you may want to live in if education is a top priority for you and your family.

Another great international resource is a website called the OECD Better Life Index. This is a very creative online tool that lets you rate about 11 indicators of things you value the most in life. As you select options, an ultra-cool graphical symbol for each country shows you how the countries “measure up” in those areas by displaying a color-coded petal for that particular value.

I believe by “measure up” the creators meant which countries have the highest number of respondents that selected a setting for that value that was closest to yours. As those country settings are more aligned with yours, you’ll see the position of that country’s “flower” float higher or lower on the screen, indicating that country is a better choice for you.

Another site that gives you an interesting breakdown of issues surrounding certain countries that may matter a great deal to you if you’re moving internationally is a site called Earth Pulse. Earth Pulse is really interesting to explore, because it gives you a much higher-level view of what’s going on in the world versus many of the other tools.

You can see where most of the growth is occurring for things like urban populations, how plentiful natural resources are in the area, what sort of impact people are having on the natural environment there, and how wide the gap is between the rich and the poor in that part of the world.

Some of these things matter to some people, while other people really may not care about a lot of them. The great thing about tools like this is that you can hone in on exactly what issues matter the most to you, and see what areas of the world seem to deal with those issues better.

One tool that is more focused on the United States is an online tool called Find Your Spot.  This is actually a very thorough quiz that will gather a wide assortment of information about you, in preparation for matching you with your ideal “spot” in the country. It’s sort of like a dating site, I guess. Except you’re looking to date, you know, a community.

Okay, that didn’t come out quite right.

Anyway, start on the first page and just power your way through the Find Your Spot quiz. It really isn’t all that time-consuming, but if you want the results to be accurate, you’ll want to take the time to make sure you’re being completely honest with your answers.

You’ll be asked everything from your climate preference to your religious beliefs. It isn’t really 100% clear how the algorithm ties a specific city or town in the U.S. to your particular answers, but it’s either a very complicated and brilliant calculation, or it’s a gimmick. Either way, the results that I ended up with were pretty much spot on I think. I’d love to live in any of the places listed in my results (mostly in California, mind you).

When you click on any of the locations, you can see a pretty useful breakdown of the statistics for that city, like average rainfall and snowfall, housing costs, and the cost of living.

I don’t know if I’d base my entire decision about moving on just the one tool, but it’s certainly a great place to start.
The final tool to mention here is one called Maps Of The World. This is actually a website focused on all kinds of maps in great volume, but there’s one particular map that deserves mention here, and that’s the Top Ten Countries by Highest Quality of Life.

I don’t know if you’d want to go so far as to buy the map to post it up on your wall as inspiration for your move, but it does have a useful color coded legend that displays the general “quality of life” for different countries. Dark blue is the highest quality of life, and light yellow is the lowest.

In case you’re curious about the best places to live in the world, Norway tops the list on this map, and interestingly enough, Germany and Sweden round out the bottom (at least for the short list of countries rated on this map.

So, are you in the process of looking for a new place to live? Have you used any of these or other tools out there to help you figure out where you want to go? Share your own resources and experiences in the comments section below!

Image Credit: Young Woman Moving Box via Shutterstock

The post 6 Websites That Will Help You Find the Best Places To Live appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Here at MakeUseOf, we’ve covered a number of ways to make use of remote access tools. Aaron put together a very comprehensive list of remote access tools. A few years ago, I showed readers how to offer tech support to family and friends using Netviewer, and Justin exercised some creativity and showed you how you could use a remote tool to manage Torrents.

Whatever the flavor of remote apps we’ve covered, the meat and potatoes of the corporate IT remote management is still the good old Remote Desktop Connection built right into the Windows operating system. So long as the person using the tool has rights on the remote PC to access it using remote desktop, then it’s one of the easiest ways to manage that remote system or server.

There’s always going to be a place for remote control apps like VNC servers and clients, because those tools typically let the user see you log into the computer and watch what you are doing while you’re connected. With a remote desktop connection however, you are creating an actual session on that machine through the RDP. It’ll actually lock the computer out while you’re actively connected.

Remote Desktop Connections – Tips & Tricks

So, the process of “remoting” into a PC demands Remote Desktop when you want to use a remote computer without any local users interfering or seeing what you’re working on. When you connect, the PC screen will show a status that the system is in use and locked out.

Saving Your Connection Details

If you’ve ever used remote desktop, then you’re more than familiar with the main screen where you type in the name of the remote system and click the “Connect” button. This is where much of the knowledge out there on remote desktop begins and ends. This is really all a majority of people use it for. However, if you really want to customize the remote desktop connection to suit your style of computer use and how you like to view screens, then click the “Options” button and enter into a whole new world of RDP.

There are a number of ways you can customize how you create a remote desktop connection to that remote system, how you see the remote system, and your experience while working on it.  The key on the General screen involves login details. Do you want to have to enter in the server details and your credentials every time you connect to those servers that you support? To save your login details, check off the “Allow me to save credentials” checkbox.

When you do this, it allows you to check off the “Remember my credentials” on that first login screen, which will preserve your login details the next time you RDP to this system from this computer.

Once you’ve logged in, whenever you type in this same server where you saved your credentials, you’ll see the notification underneath the Computer field letting you know that you have saved credentials for that system. Now you just have to hit “Connect” and you’re good to go.

For systems that you support a lot, not having to enter in your credentials constantly can actually save a lot of time in the long term.

In the general tab in the window above, under the Connection Settings box, you can click the Save As button to actually save the server and user name details to a file on your local computer.

What’s the point of saving an RDP file? Well, let’s say you work on an IT team supporting 20, 30 or even 50 servers. Do you really want to have to try and remember the name of every one of those servers? This problem gets even worse if you work in a corporate office supporting field company locations all over the place with their own servers and unique server names.

Saving these connection details to file lets you organize all of them into folders (for each site, for example), and all you have to do is double click the file to open up the remote desktop utility with the server connection details already filled in for you.

Making the Display Look How You Like

The biggest complaint that I’ve heard about RDP is the fact that it often defaults to opening a non-maximized window. This is especially true on an oversized monitor, where the strange smaller RDP window docks to one corner of the screen and maybe only fills about a quarter to a half of the screen.

This can be really frustrating, especially when you want to open up a bunch of windows on the same screen, rather than having just one window up and not having really much of desktop space to work with at all.

That won’t do. Instead, go to the Display tab before you connect to the remote system, and move the Display configuration slider all the way to the right. You’ll see the status under the slider change to “Full Screen”.  If you have two monitors hooked up, you’ll see the “Use all my monitors for the remote session” enabled. If you really want to get carried away, select that and the remote session window will take over both monitors, just like you’re sitting at that remote system with two screens.

Selecting to display the connection bar with that bottom checkbox will show the info bar at the top of the screen – useful if you want to switch back and forth between full-screen and single window mode.

Local System Resources and Scripting

Another complaint that a lot of people have when using RDP is that when you’re connected to the remote system, certain Windows key combinations like alt-tab and control-alt-delete don’t work. To fix this, go to the “Local Resources” tab, and make sure the Keyboard setting for Windows key combinations is set to the display mode you typically use when using remote desktop.  Like magic – your local keyboard will act just like you’re sitting right at that remote computer.

Think you don’t have the option to use that memory stick in your pocket during your remote session? Nonsense! Plug that memory stick into your local computer, and under the “Local devices” section in the “Local Resources” tab, click on the “More…” button.

In this new window, you’ll see a whole collection of other devices that you can use during your remote session. If it’s the USB memory stick you’re hoping to use, just check off the check box next to the local drive for it. It my case, it’s the Cruzerdrive mapped as the E drive.

Now, when you are inside your remote desktop connection on the remote machine, all you have to do is open up Windows Explorer, and you’ll see your local USB memory stick mapped as a drive on that remote system. Cool or what?

You can also automatically launch a program on the remote system when you connect. This is actually more useful if you’re setting up clients that will be automatically connecting to a remote system, and you want it to open up some application automatically once connected to the server. This is often the case when connecting clients to a terminal server, for example.  Most people really have little use for this feature, but when needed, it can really come in handy.

As you can see, there’s a whole lot more to RDP than just connecting to a remote system. You can really customize everything about each individual connection – your credential, full-screen settings, local resources, remote scripts and more. Save those connection settings to files – and you never have to worry about customizing that connection again.

These are the sort of tips and tricks that make the difference between an IT person that wastes all kinds of time hunting down connection details, and one that has everything created, automated, and ready to go at a moments notice.

Do you need to use RDP a lot? What are your own little tips and tricks that you’ve learned over the years? Share your thoughts and insights in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Cloud computing concept (Shutterstock)

The post How To Use Remote Desktop Connections Like An IT Pro appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to be in shape, and everyone has different things that motivate them. One very powerful motivator has always been competition – or “gamification” as some people refer to it these days. One good example of this are the Expresso bikes at the local YMCA gym around here. They’re networked to the Internet, and will mark down your time/distance on a leaderboard that the YMCA staff post up on the bulletin board near the exercise equipment.

I have to say, seeing my name up there on the list is quite motivating. It becomes a struggle to move your name further up to the top of the list. Suddenly, you’re competing out of pride in a sense, but you’re also gaining the benefit of weight-loss and a fit body.

Another way to use this kind of motivation to drive your exercise regimen is by entering into fitness competitions – so-called best body contests – for cold, hard cash. If you’ve never heard about this, you may be surprised to learn that there are lots of “best body contest” sites out there that will give cash awards to people that transform their physiques dramatically through exercise.

Entering a Best Body Contest

Here at MakeUseOf, we used a whole lot of tricks to stay healthy and help our readers stay fit. We use exercise Android apps as a personal trainer or to track fitness goals, we use online programs to stay in shape; heck, we even use infographics for fitness inspiration!

Well, what I’m going to offer you in this article is a list of five websites that annually give away cash to people that have developed their best body through exercise and diet. Prizes can range from a few hundred bucks to several thousand, but you know what, when you’re making the choice to run that last mile, or eat that jelly doughnut in the break room at work – that money can really be a great motivator to do the right thing.

One site that has been doing this “Biggest Loser” style giveaway is a site called Healthy Loser. As far as I can tell, it’s also one of the bigger prizes I’ve seen for such an online contest.

The one drawback is that there’s an entry fee of $100. This almost made me close the page and search out better contests, but then I spotted the “Accredited Business” badge from the Better Business Bureau, checked out the actual link to make sure it was really listed, and sure enough, it was. The site is legit, and they certainly do give away a prize to the healthiest loser! The testimonial images are also pretty inspiring as well.

If big money is a motivator, and you don’t mind submitting your photos and proving weight loss with “weigh-in” sessions (via Skype, video-taped or from a doctor), then this is the contest for you.

Of course, one of the most motivational sites for me, any time I get back into working out, has always been BodyBuilding.com. So, it should come as no surprise that Body Building offers regular fitness challenges to its readers.

You do need to be a “BodySpace” member to take part in the contests, but membership as well as the entry to the contests are totally free. Plenty of these are actually fitness model competitions to not only win cash, but to be featured in the magazine as well.

However, there are plenty of other fitness contests for folks that are not aspiring models, and just want to see if they could actually win a best body contest at a bodybuilding site like this. Now that would be an amazing accomplishment. Prizes run the whole spectrum – everything from an opportunity to train with 50 Cent to the annual military challenge where you get a trip to see the Arnold Sports Festival.

Of course, some “best body” contests are exactly that – they’re about nothing except who has got the best body.  In that arena, TMZ has you covered with the TMZ Beachin’ Body Contest.

Given, you can win a $250 prize and other gifts in the process, but for that cash you’re pretty much presenting yourself to the TMZ readership as drool material for the opposite gender.  You would think that the people that enter these are mostly aspiring fitness models – but you’ll actually find a wide assortment of firm bodies of both genders and all walks of life in the annual slideshow of contestants.

If your speed is less about vanity and more about just melting off the fat and getting healthy, you may want to check out the Burn The Fat Challenge.  This is a fitness site owned and operated by fitness guru and author Tom Venuto.

The contest rules imply that you don’t need to pay and that entering the contest is free, but it does say throughout that you need to be a Burn the Fat inner circle member, and joining features credit card icons, so I’m assuming that you do need to sign up as a member to enter these contests.

With that said, the prizes aren’t too shabby – there are nearly two dozen sprees ranging from $500 to $100. This is an ideal place to enter contests if you’re looking for a fitness site to become a member of (with an associated monthly fee) – but if you’re just looking for a one-shot deal, you may want to go for one of the other contest sites listed in this article.

Years ago, I read the book Body for Life by Bill Phillips. It was a very inspiring book, and helped me drop about 30 pounds through weight training and aerobic activity as well as diet. Since then, Body For Life has become a total brand in itself. I’m not sure if Bill Phillips is associated with it any more, but the site remains as motivational as ever through continued Body for Life fitness challenges.

Grand prize is $5,000 cash, and you’ll also get a home gym. Not only that, you get to be featured in one of the famous Body-for-Life photo montages (this was plastered in the front and back of Bill’s book as well and was great motivation).

Oh – and if you’re up for the challenge, supposedly the transformations you see above take just 12 weeks. Seriously. I kept up with the program in my late 20′s and got about half-way there, before life took over (as it always does). The transformation was certainly happening, that’s for sure. Maybe if I’d been enrolled in an actual contest – I might have made it!

So, those are the 5 best body contests that have some of the better cash prizes out there. If you’re not so much into showing off your body in photos and just want some cash motivation – don’t forget to check with various health food or nutritional companies out there. Many times, they’ll encourage people to get healthy (and use their products) through cash motivation with such contests. One example of that is Your Best Body by YOR health products (located across the world).

In this case, smaller challenge awards are just for free products, but the large championship grand prize is actually $3,000 cash and a trip for two.

So, as you can see, there’s plenty of motivation out there to get back in shape and earn some moola in the process. It’s spring already, so you know that those beach days are coming soon. Why not sign up at a few of these sites and get yourself ready for that fateful moment when you know you’re going to have to strip down to your swimsuit.

Have you ever entered any fitness contests like this? Do you think you have what it takes to enter a best body contest? Offer your own experiences and fitness tips in the comments section below!

Image Credit: bodybuilding man and woman via Shutterstock

The post 5 Best Body Contest Sites Where You Can Win Money For Being Fit appeared first on MakeUseOf.

What aftermath? Well, regardless of the fatality numbers, any major crisis that shuts down communication systems or travel ends up breaking off a fairly large population of people from the outside world. This isn’t just the case when there’s some kind of violent attack, but it even more commonly occurs following things like earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters. When social infrastructure fails, family and friends out side of the danger zone really start to get nervous when they can’t get in touch with their loved ones. Add on top of that the fact that the news media starts immediately reporting the increase in body count, and you’ve got a situation of all-out panic.

The good folks at Google saw this communication void back in 2011, following the major Turkey earthquake, after noticing that the one communication medium that appeared to remain in place during events like a bombing is the Internet. Google Person Finder is offered as a free service for the general public, as well as emergency responders, to use following a catastrophe.

Using Google Person Finder

No, this isn’t a way to search for information about people on the Internet. It’s a way to search for people in real life. It’s actually a smart system that someone really should have thought up years ago.

The way it works is relatively simple, and there are some additional features that you can embed on your own website, which I’ll get to later in this article. When you first go to the Google Person Finder page, you’ll see a list of current active events for which the Person Finder is currently active. When I went in, there was already an alert box at the top of the site for the Sichuan Earthquake event. 

Inside of an event page, you’ll find two large link boxes. You’ll also see the current database size underneath those links. The Sichuan Earthquake event had already accumulated over 1000 missing persons records by the time I got to the page.

The goal here is basically to connect first responders, or locals that may have information about people that are missing, to the remote family members that are scared and worried about their loved one. Family and friends can visit Google Person Finder, click on “I’m looking for someone”, and then type the name of the person they’re looking for.

If someone has entered information about that person in the Google Person Finder, then you’ll see the details about what they typed in. This could be a first responder that used the Google system to report that “xx was hurt but not seriously injured in the Earthquake. Treated and brought to xxxx hospital.” Or local friends could have reported that the person was hurt, but that they’re alive and well.

That’s exactly what the “I have information about someone” link is all about.

Either first responders or locals can use the form to provide as much detail as possible about the person that they know can not contact their own family members on their own.

In fact, if you ever find yourself in an area – anywhere in the world – where such an catastrophic event takes place. If you’re one of the lucky survivors and uninjured, working on providing this kind of service for anyone that’s injured can do a great deal of good. Just having that little bit of information can mean the world to family members far away who are worried sick about their loved ones that are directly in the path of the destruction.

Advanced Google Person Finder Features

Now, if the service was that simple, it would be pretty drab. Useful, mind you, but kinda boring. Well, we’re talking about Google here, the land of APIs, code developers and app integration. Of course there’s more to Google Person Finder than that.

First, if you click on the “Developers” link at the bottom of the site, you’ll be able to access the GooglePersonFinder developer section, with a Wiki tab that includes information about the DataAPI that you can request a key for, and then start using to either pull data out of the Person Finder database, or insert data into the database with your own applications.

Doing that is a bit outside the scope of this article (although it might be a topic for another article), but suffice to say you can do some pretty cool stuff with this. Create your own web app right on your site to allow your readers to interact with Google People Finder right from your website. Create an Android app that people can use to access the database while mobile – which of course would be a pretty nice feature for people in the crisis area and may not have access to a computer, but do have their smartphone (if the cellular lines are still up).

Actually, my favorite feature – because of its simplicity – is the fact that you can actually embed the Person Finder iframe code right into your site. If you’re focused on a specific event, you can insert that event name right into the embed code.

This provides visitors to your site with an embedded box where they can interact with Google Person Finder right on your page, without leaving your website.

When they click on either link, it’ll provide the form within the iframe. Just make sure to size the box correctly so it doesn’t cut off any part of the forms!

Finally, there’s also an individual repository feed for each event, or the global feed to get updates about all events. The global one is the one that I personally prefer for RSS, because it alerts you whenever there is a crisis anywhere in the world that warrants the use of the Google Person Finder system. That global feed is “https://www.google.org/personfinder/global/feeds/repo”.

The service was activated during the recent Boston Marathon bombings, and it certainly proved itself to be valuable during that event. Cellphone service was disabled, so a service like this was critical. Although, according to the NY Daily news, at least 100 people were able to load up their own information via cell phone immediately following the blasts.

There’s a lot to be said for simple services that keep family and friends connected, and offer the peace of mind in knowing that someone you care a whole lot about is still alive. That can mean the difference between a sleepless night, or knowing and removing all worry. Hopefully, this will be one Google service that doesn’t disappear on us. Of course, these days, you can’t really depend on that, can you?

Are you familiar with Google Person Finder? Have you ever used it, or know anyone who had to? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Alexey Stiop / Shutterstock.com

The post How to Use Google Person Finder to Locate Loved Ones After a Disaster appeared first on MakeUseOf.

These days, a very big part of that life involves a whole list of online activities and data. More and more people are making use of things like a Picasa web album to store family photos, Google + to post daily life news and events,  YouTube to publish both public and private videos, and so much more. In a lifetime of over 20 years, that information can consist of a tremendous volume of private, personal, and sometimes even very important information and history.

If you think about it, through text, images, and videos, you’ve documented your own life through your online activities. In past years, a person’s life might have been documented in written form. A few of those became quite famous for representing an important era in history – journals like that of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne Frank, and so many others.

What will happen to your documented life when you die? Will it disappear into the digital sea after your accounts become delinquent and get deleted? Is that really what all of your online efforts were about – to disappear into a meaningless heap of deleted bits?

I say no, and Google’s solution that Joshua recently reported on called the Google Inactive Account Manager, can give you the peace of mind that your online information will not go to waste when you’re gone.

Protecting Your Documented Online Life

If you’re anything like me, then you probably have your online life centered in large part around Google products. Whether it’s YouTube, Google Search, Blogger, Google + or anything else offered by Google – the fact remains that Google is now handling the bulk of most of our online lives. This perfectly positions Google as the central place to go if you want to protect your online data.

Google has answered the need for a sort of online “will” with the “Google Inactive Account Manager” service. You can find this service in your Google account settings page, toward the bottom, under the “Account Management” section.

You’ll see some text explaining that you can control what happens to your account once you “stop using Google”. This is a gentle way of saying, “This is how you can control what we do with your stuff when you die.”

If you click on “Learn more and go to setup“, you’ll find yourself on a screen that walks you through each step of setting up your Google “online will”. Google provides several services that you can enact once your account goes inactive – including defining what “inactive” means, and what Google is supposed to do with all of your “stuff”.

The first step is to add phone numbers to your account for receiving an alert once your account goes inactive and the actions you define are about to go into action.

There are two ways you can use this. You can use your own phone number just in case you aren’t dead – maybe you’re off hiking the appalachian trail or something – and you’ll get a warning alert that your online “will” is about to go into action.

Or, you could set this number up to be that of a very close friend or family member that you want alerted to the fact that your Google Inactive Account Manager plan is going into effect.  This might also be the same person or people that you want to entrust the management of your online data after you’re gone.

The next step in the inactive account manager plan is to tell Google how long to wait before making the decision that you’re no longer around, and to put your plan into action. The time frame defaults to 3 months.

However, you can extend this out to 6 months, 9 months or a year.  If you are planning a very long trip somewhere that will take over 3 months, you might want to make sure to increase this time period so that your inactive account plan doesn’t go into action when you didn’t intend it to.

The most important part of that plan of course, is the next step. This is where you’ll connect up to 10 contacts who you want notified that your Google account has gone inactive. The heart of the Inactive Account Manager feature is the sharing data part – you can save your online life for future generations by having your account data shared out to all of those trusted friends and family.

Click “Add trusted contact“, and either type in the person’s email address or name. If you type the name, Google will look up the name from your list of existing Google Contacts.

To activate the data sharing feature, just check off the box next to “Share my data with this contact“, and then follow the wizard that will take you through selecting which Google products that you want to share data with that contact. What’s kind of cool here is that you can select contacts and products specifically, so for example if you have a friend that you know is brilliant at blogging, you can share your Blogger data with that person. If you know someone that would love to have the photos that you’ve stored on Picasa, you can share your Picasa data with that person.

This is how you can spread your life story and your legacy, but making sure your documented online life lives on even after you’re gone.

And of course, the next step is my favorite feature – the “auto response” email.

This is sort of a surreal “out of office” type message that Google will send to anyone that emails you after your account has gone inactive. You can basically take the time now to write up a deeply thoughtful and meaningful message to everyone for after you’re gone. Once those people email you when you’re gone, they’ll receive your customized “last words” – and it’ll be just like you’re speaking to them from the grave. It’s going to be the last message that they ever receive from you, so make it count!

Finally, you have the option once all of the previous steps have been completed, to entirely delete your account. This means everything. No more Google + account, no more Blogger blog, and no more YouTube videos. It all disappears when you do.

There are pros and cons to doing a total delete. Some people feel that it’s a privacy issue – no one needs to have some account laying around somewhere ready to be hacked and hijacked (I’ve seen this happen to a deceased person’s account before). On the other hand, deleting everything basically wipes your life away from the online world – everything you were and everything you represented online would be gone, at least insofar as it was hosted on a Google product. Basically, the decision to do this is a personal one.

So there you have it, Google’s Inactive Account Manager. It’s basically Google’s version of an online last will and testament. I actually plan to lay this all out for my own account, just in case. You never know what tomorrow brings – why not be prepared?

Do you plan to use the Google Inactive Account Manager? Which features do you think are valuable and which aren’t? Share your own thoughts in the comment section below.

Image credits: Envelope and Last Will via Shutterstock

The post Protect Your Online Persona If You Die With Google Inactive Account Manager appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Boy, was I ever in for a surprise. It doesn’t take much Googling to come across negative feedback out across the Internet about Office 2013. The most common complaints circle around how different Office 2013 is than Office 2010. There’s the odd splash page when you launch Office apps. There’s the strange menu bar without the ribbon that you became accustomed to in Office 2013. There’s the fact that saving takes a few extra steps, because apparently Microsoft is now using its Office products to try and promote SkyDrive.

MUO readers were well warned about these problems right from the beginning.  Christian described a lot of the issues you could expect with Word 2013 back in 2012. Christian then went into even more depth by writing a full guide to what’s new in Office 2013. In March of this year, Christian then offered a few tricks and tips to get rid of Office 2013 annoyances, and then apparently got so fed up with the whole thing that this month he’s started warning people not to buy Office 2013 at all.

Making Office 2013 More Like Office 2010

Let’s take a step back here – is Office 2013 really that bad? After all – it is still Office, and has all of the same functionality as Office 2010 did. So do we really need to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Instead, I wanted to see if there were any tweaks that could be done in Office 2013 to make it look and feel a little more like I was used to with Office 2010 (which, to be honest, I’d hardly even got used to after using Office 2003 for so many years).

Well, let me just say that trying to make Office 2013 look like 2010 really isn’t all that hard – it just takes a little bit of poking around, switching a setting here and there, and sort of forcing the applications to open by default with the behavior and appearance that you liked in Office 2010.

What You Want Office 2013 to Look Like

Taking a look back at Office 2010, it’s pretty easy to see what people miss when they upgrade to Office 2013. The ribbon that took such getting used to after the earlier Office products suddenly grew on you. Once you learned how and where to find everything, it just became second nature, right?

Every Office 2010 product had that ribbon bar. Once I learned how things were organized under each menu item, I honestly became much more productive using the last couple versions of Office than any other.

Then along came Office 2013 – and all that was laid to waste. When I first opened Word, I thought that it would be like starting all over again – trying to relearn everything.

Office 2013 Isn’t Really Much Different

When I first started using Office 2013, it really was shocking. First, there was that big huge splash page with all of the templates. My first thought was, “what the…??” After a few moments of hunting, I found the blank document that I wanted. How annoying!

And if you want to browse to a document to open it, you have to scroll waaaaaay down to the bottom of the left navigation area to find the browse option, except it isn’t called “Browse”.

Then, when the blank document opened, I thought maybe I had opened the wrong application. Microsoft Word had suddenly transformed into some cheap mutation that looked like a cross between WordPad and Notepad. Seriously – this is considered an improvement?

Finally, clicking on one of the menu items, I saw the ribbon bar that we’re all so familiar with. Not pleased, I struggled through creating and saving my first document – a letter that I was writing to someone. Not pleased with my first experience with Office 2013, I actually contemplated returning it for a refund.

Thankfully, it wouldn’t come to that. There are a few tricks you can follow to set things back in order, and get Office 2013 looking and behaving as much like Office 2010 as possible.

Tips to Revert Office 2013 back to 2010

The first is to disable the start page. In his article on getting rid of Word annoyances, Christian mentions getting rid of the start page using a registry hack. You actually don’t have to do that. Just click on File and then choose options Options, and finally click on the General tab. About halfway down the page, you’ll see a setting to “Show start screen when this application starts.”

Just deselect it. The next time you launch the application, the start page will never show up again!

Secondly, the ribbon bar. I really don’t like the ribbon bar disappearing on me. I want it visible and accessible at a moment’s notice. You can actually make it stay pinned down by going over to the lower right side of the ribbon bar and pressing the little “pin” icon.

Another way to do it is to click on the window icon with the up arrow in it, and choose the selection to “Show Tabs and Commands”. This will set the application so the ribbon bar is always accessible and visible, just like in Office 2010.

So, here’s my newly modified editing screen where I’ve opened a new document. The ribbon bar opened up automatically and stayed there. Now that’s a beautiful thing. I might keep Office 2013 after all…

Then there’s the save option where SkyDrive is relentlessly promoted. Every time you click Save As, it defaults to SkyDrive, and you have to click on Computer to see your local directories. It’s Microsoft’s effort to push the cloud, but this sort of in-your-face pushing of technology is not the way to get on the good side of consumers.

Well, never fear, because there’s a fix for that too. Go to File, Options, and click the Save menu item.  On this page, you’ll see a setting to “Save to Computer by default“. Select that box.

Now, when you go to “save as“, it defaults to your computer, and there’s the browse button on the right side. One click on Save As, and you’re there. Hey, saving clicks is what it’s all about, right?

So there you have it, with three little tweaks, you’re able to get rid of the annoying Start Splash page, keep the ribbon bar in place just like in Office 2010, and default the Save As option to browse your computer. The marketing of SkyDrive in Office 2013 was a huge complaint from everyone, so that particular checkbox is very much appreciated.

Now, I use my Office 2013 products all the time. With the tweaks above, it feels almost exactly like when I use 2010 at work, except there are plenty of little hidden features to discover, if you’re into things like saving to the cloud or using these apps on a touch screen display. Whether those features work well or not is another story entirely, and one meant for another article, another day.

Are you an Office 2013 user? What changes did you make to make the experience more tolerable? Do you love or hate Office 2013? Share your thoughts and advice in the comments section below!

The post 3 Ways To Make Office 2013 More Like Office 2010 appeared first on MakeUseOf.

So, as I always do when I need a solution, I turned to MakeUseOf. I found mention of an online goals management tool called GoalStacker, but the system there felt much too task-oriented for my needs. I was looking for a more broad approach, where you start out with general life goals, and then work your way down to the individual daily tasks. Next, I turned to Bakari’s review of 43Things, which looked very promising. Ironically, 43Things has the opposite problem. It is beautifully oriented toward those broad goals and dreams, but not so strong when it comes to breaking them down into small pieces and managing the daily tasks that’ll get you there.

One other goals management tool that I looked at was WeekPlan, which I thought had the most promise. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the limited role-based approach, and the fact that the line between life-goals and daily tasks was so direct. In my dream goal management system, I look for a middle area where you can break down those very large goals into smaller (but still large) goals to achieve along the way. Finally, you break those mid-level goals into a group of tasks that’ll help you hit each of those milestones.

Creating a DIY Goal Management System

As usually happens when I don’t find what I need in an existing system or application, I decided to create the ideal system from scratch. Now, I’m not talking about trying to code an application or create a website that’ll do it the way I want. No, instead, I decided to make use of two systems that I use daily and that I know well – Microsoft Excel and Google Tasks.

Organize & Compartmentalize Your Life Goals

If you’re ready to get serious about working toward those big dreams that you have, it’s time to sit down and put them down in writing. This re-introduces focus into your daily life. It gives you a reason to work on those seemingly mundane and meaningless tasks, because you know that task is but one step toward the big-picture goal. Despite everything else out there intended for goals management, Microsoft Excel still remains the single best tool to do this, in my opinion.

To get started, open up a new spreadsheet and create a new sheet for the 4-6 core areas of your life that are most important to you. In my case, in the final days of my life, I want to say that I’ve been able to leave great wealth to my kids, have had a wonderful relationship with each member of my family, kept in perfect health, and went on amazing adventures. So, my core areas are WEALTH, FAMILY, HEALTH and ADVENTURE.

On each of those individual “Core” goal sheets, you’re going to break down that core into 4 or 5 specific big-picture goals that signify success in that area of your life, in your mind. These are the items that you’ll list on this page, and include a target year in the distant future. Most of these will be close to retirement, but in some cases you might have a goal like getting rid of debt which could happen much earlier.

Now that you’ve broken down those big, huge goals into smaller “sub-goals”, they’re a little more manageable.  However, to make them into daily tasks, they need to be broken down further. Take each of those big sub-goals and list the major steps involved in getting there. These shouldn’t be daily tasks – they should be goals that will take you from six months to a year to accomplish. Each step gets you that much closer to the big sub-goal within your core value.

I also like to put a green “$$$” symbol next to the items that will require some investment – as a way to plan ahead for that cost. But most importantly, each of the steps should have a specific year applied that you want to accomplish that step. Make it realistic, but don’t give yourself too much slack either.  Finally, shade the steps that are due within the next year or two – these are the items that you need to plan out immediately.

Now that you have your core values broken down into major sub-goals, and then those sub-goals broken down into steps, it’s time to create the milestones, or tasks, that you’re going to work on to inch your way to the finish line. Create a new sheet next to the core-value sheet with a similar name. I called mine “Wealth_MS1″, where MS stands for milestones.

Within this new sheet, you’ll copy over the steps that are due within the next year or two. However, you’ll make each step becomes a header. Under each of these headers, you’ll finally create the specific, individual tasks that you can accomplish with a week to several weeks.

Each of these items can literally be called a “task”, because it’s something that you can sit down and really work on and accomplish after several sessions. It isn’t this pie-in-the-sky idea that feels unreachable. These are very reachable items that seem like a very, very tiny step – but each of these represents a rung in the ladder toward those life dreams. Give them each a specific date – and give that date a lot of thought.

Assign Actionable Tasks To Accomplish

Once you’ve created all of these “milestones” sheets, the next step of your goals management system is to assign those tasks to your to-do list. No matter what to-do lists I’ve tried, I absolutely always come back to Google Tasks. So, I decided to use it for this project too. Basically, you create a new list for every one of your core values that you defined at the start of this project.

Once you’re done, you’ll see all of those core goals ready to accept the individual tasks you’ll be working on to get there.

Now – go through the “milestones” sheets you just created, and place the most urgent items – due the soonest – right into the applicable list in Google Tasks. Don’t forget to assign it the date, and give it a good description so you remember exactly what you wanted to accomplish.

Once you’re done – you’ll have assigned yourself a list of the most urgent tasks.

Now you have real, actionable items that you know you’re going to accomplish, because they’re on your to-do list with deadlines!

Track & Monitor Your Progress

You have a really cool system set up now. Every week or every other week, you can open up your spreadsheet, update the items you’ve completed, and keep track of how much closer you’re getting to those big goals

It would be good to just check off items as done, but to be honest, I’ve found that visual feedback works as even better encouragement along the way. I’m going to quickly show you how you can set up a cool bar-graph to show progress. Go back to the “milestones” sheet you created, and create a “Completed” column next to the target dates. At the bottom of that column, create a field using the forumal, “=COUNTIF(cell1:cell2,”Yes”)/x)*100″

Just replace “x” by the number of rows (tasks), and make “cell1″ and “cell2″ equal to the cells at the start and end of the range.

What this does is creates a cell under all of the tasks that will update with the percentage of total tasks you’ve completed. Now, to make that graphical, click on Format and choose Conditional Formatting for the cell, and choose one of the data bars.

This converts the cell into a data bar. Now, just go back into the same menu item again and choose “Edit Rule”. Set all of the items shown below with a red arrow to the values shown.

This will make the bar fill up with green color at the percentage that represents the number of tasks that you’ve accomplished so far!

Is that cool or what? Okay, maybe this last step is a bit of overkill, and you could totally complete the goals management system without this graphical encouragement – but I love seeing the bar move across the cell as I accomplish one task at a time. Hitting 100% means you’re a very big step closer to those life dreams.

What do you think about such a customized system? Do you think it can give you more power and control to better manage your life goals? What systems do you put in place to break down your big dreams into manageable tasks? Share your own advice and tips in the comments section below!

The post Use Excel & Google Tasks To Create The Best Goals Management Tool Ever appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The technique to accomplish this involves installing the Office Web Components add-in. Furthermore, you just need to configure a few things inside of the Office application that you want to use to import the data, and you’re ready to start automating your reporting work. I’ve covered some of the elements that we’re going to use in this article in previous VBA articles here at MakeUseOf. A few of those included passing data between applications with the clipboard, exporting Outlook tasks to Excel,  and sending Emails from an Excel script.

What I’m going to show you is how to combine Office Web Components with text file scripting to create a seamless, automated stream of data from a flat text file on your computer into your Office product (in our case Excel). You can use this same technique – with a few small modifications – in Word, Outlook, or even PowerPoint. Any Office product (or any other product for that matter) that has a VBA back-end for developers, will allow you to use this technique.

Import and Create a Graph From Data Files

Before you can create a graph from data files, you’ll need to enable a few things first. In this example, I’m going to show you how to enable these features in Excel, but the process is nearly identical in every other Office product.

First, before you can do any VBA development, you need to enable the developer tab in the toolbar (if you haven’t already). To do this, just go into the Options menu, click in “Customize Ribbon” and enable the “Developer” tab. 

Back in Excle, you’ll now see “Developer” show up in the menus. Click on it and click on “Design Mode”. Then click on “View Code” to see the VBA editor.

Inside the editor is where you’ll need to enable the references that you’ll need for the code I’m going to give you to work. Make sure you’ve installed the Office Web Components add-in before you do this, otherwise the Microsoft Chart object won’t be available.

Click on Tools and then References, and you’ll see a list of all of the references that are available on your system. If you don’t know what these are – references are basically libraries of code and objects that you can pull into your own project. These allow you to do some really cool things, depending what reference you enable. If you’ve just installed Office Web Components in your system, you’ll need to add it as a new library, so click on the Browse button to find the correct .dll file.

If you’ve installed Office Web Components, then the DLL file is called OWC11.dll, and it’s stored in c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web components\11\

Click the checkbox for the “Microsoft Office Web Components 11.0″ reference, and also don’t forget to select “Microsoft Scripting Runtime” as well, which will give you access to read or write from data files.

Now that you’ve added the reference, it’s time to add the actual chart to your sheet. In Excel, you can add controls by clicking on “Insert” in the Developer menu, and clicking on the little tools icon in the corner under “ActiveX Controls”.

Scroll to “Microsoft Office Chart 11.0″ and click OK.

We’re finally getting down to business. Here’s what the MS Web Component chart looks like embedded into a spreadsheet. It’ll look the same embedded into a Word document or anything else.

So, in the case of Excel, I want the chart to instantly load data from the data file upon opening the workbook file. To do this, you go into the code editor by clicking on “View Code” in the Developer menu, and double click on the Workbook to see the workbook code. Change the right dropdown to “Open”. This is the script that will run when the workbook file is first opened.

To load the chart with data from code, the chart itself needs a name. Go back to the spreadsheet, right click on the chart and choose Properties. You’ll see the “Name” field with something like “ChartSpace1″. You can change this to anything. I’ve called mine “MyChart”.

Also, just so you know what the data file is like – mine is a text file filled with data values in comma-delimited format.  This file could be anything at all – lab data exported from sensors, financial information typed into the file manually by interns, or anything else at all. You’ll be reading the file in with your code, so it doesn’t matter what the data looks like, so long as you know what each line will look like when your program reads it in.

So, now for the fun part. I’m going to show you the code in small sections so it’s not overwhelming, and explain what the code does. The top of the code is first going to read in all of the values from the text file and store them in two arrayx, one for x variables (xVar) and one for y variables (yVar).

Dim fso As New FileSystemObject
Dim fnum
Dim MyFile As String
Dim strDataLine As String
Dim xVar() As Variant
Dim yVar() As Variant
Dim intNumOfLines As Integer
 
MyFile = "c:\files\MyData.txt"
fnum = FreeFile()
 
Open MyFile For Input As #1
intNumOfLines = 0
Do While Not EOF(1)
    intNumOfLines = intNumOfLines + 1
    Input #1, strDataLine
    Input #1, strDataLine
Loop
Close #1
 
ReDim xVar(intNumOfLines)
ReDim yVar(intNumOfLines)
 
Open MyFile For Input As #1
intNumOfLines = 0
Do While Not EOF(1)
    Input #1, xVar(intNumOfLines)
    Input #1, yVar(intNumOfLines)
    intNumOfLines = intNumOfLines + 1
Loop
Close #1

This code basically runs through the data file twice – the first time to dimension the arrays so that they are the exact length needed to store the data, and then a second time to read the data into those arrays. If you don’t know what an array is – it’s a variable or a storage area that will contain a long list of values that you can access by using the order that the value was stored in array. The one loaded third would be (3), for example.

Now that you have two of these arrays loaded with all of the values from your data file, you’re ready to load those values into the chart that you’ve already embedded. Here’s the code that does that.

With Sheet1.MyChart
    .Clear
    .Refresh
    Set oChart = .Charts.Add
 
    oChart.HasTitle = True
    oChart.Title.Caption = "My Data Values"
    'oChart.Interior.Color = "blue"
    oChart.PlotArea.Interior.Color = "white"
 
    Set oSeries = oChart.SeriesCollection.Add
 
    With oSeries
        .Caption = "My Data Values"
        .SetData chDimCategories, chDataLiteral, xVar
        .SetData chDimValues, chDataLiteral, yVar
        .Line.Color = "blue"
        .Line.DashStyle = chLineDash
        .Line.Weight = 2
        .Type = chChartTypeLine
    End With
 
oChart.HasLegend = True
oChart.Legend.Position = chLegendPositionBottom
End With

It’s the “Sheet1.MyChart” that connects the code to the actual chart you’ve embedded. It’s based on what you named it. This will be the case when you embed it in Word, Powerpoint, or any other Office product. You won’t be referring it using “Sheet1″, but instead whatever element holds the Chart in that case, such as “document1″ in Word for example.

The code above then sets up the labeling and coloring of the graph, and then loads the values using the “.setdata” method for both x and y values of the 2 dimensional dataset. Once the above code is done running, the following graph will appear.

This data is straight out of the text file. The only drawback here is that the data files would need to be two dimensional only if you want to use the code above. You could add more values to the data set, but you’d need to modify the code above to read in the third value each time through the loop, and then duplicate the “SeriesCollection.Add” section to create another series and then add it to the chart in the same way.

It may seem complex just reading the code above, but once you’ve done one of these, it’s a piece of cake to modify it for whatever your needs are. You could use the same chart and similar code to create a bar chart, a scatter chart, or any other chart type you want using this same object. It’s versatile and flexible – and it’s a powerful tool in your arsenal if you’ve a fellow fan of automation for greater productivity.

Play around with the code above and see if you can auto-load data into your applications. What creative uses can you think up for this type of automation? Share your thoughts and feedback in the comments section below!

The post How To Create A Graph From Raw Data Files In Any Office Product appeared first on MakeUseOf.

On the flip side, such a small community upbringing can be both a blessing and a curse. It can become a curse, because a small community can become closed off from the reality of the outside world.

I remember, when I was about 11 or 12 years old, I had my first taste of the outside world. An African American family had moved into town – as far as I could recall, they were the first non-white family that had ever lived in our town. Up until then, I’d met two types of people, native Franco-American folks with deep, Canadian-french accents, and people from “away” that had either gone away to college and come back home, or had moved up to Northern Maine for the first time for one reason or another. They were almost always white.

I honestly didn’t think much of it at first. Then the problems started. There was news one weekend that on a Friday night, some local kids had lit up a cross on the family’s front yard. A burning cross. I remembered learning about the Civil Rights movement in the 1960′s in school – and wondered how something like this could happen in the 1990s. But it did. The family eventually moved away. That event was my first clue that I didn’t want to live there for the rest of my life.

It wasn’t until the advent of the Internet – and coming in contact with some of the most amazing people I’d ever met from many different countries – that I realized just how much the world had missed prior to the amazing invention of the world wide web.

The Blessing and the Curse of the Global Internet

College brought me in contact with people of different nationalities, but I found that it took me a long time to evolve and understand how to interact with people from other far-away lands, and to understand how they viewed me. I remember making a great friend from Vietnam, and working together with him on engineering lab work. He told me amazing stories about his parent’s escape from Vietnam on a small boat following the war, and how his father had died during the escape.

By the second year of college, I started using the IBM-mainframe based computer system to start playing “MUDDing”, as it was called. A MUDD was a Multi-User Dungeons and Dragons game – a text-based virtual game environment of the sort that I’ve described before here at MUO. That experience put me in touch with some of the first folks on the “Internet” from other countries. It was great fun chatting with those players during our in-game “quests”. Simple text-based adventures often turned into hours-log chats about their lives in foreign lands – and of course they learned a few things from me about what it really meant to be a young American kid – things that TV and movies often got wrong.

The launch of Netscape and the adoption of the Internet was something I had the pleasure of experiencing while I was transitioning through college. Those “nerdy” computer clusters filled with IBM dumb-terminals quickly transformed PC labs with computers hooked up to the Internet and running Netscape browsers.

Being online was suddenly “cool”.

However, being online was also bringing together cultures and nationalities that had previously never really interacted very much. The introduction of bulletin board systems and forums brought a platform for anyone at all that wanted to spread their own personal prejudices and hatred toward people of other cultures – on both sides of every ocean. It didn’t take long for the Internet to become a battleground of people heatedly “debating” issues like the conflicts in the Middle East, tensions between Israel and Palestine, international terrorism vs. the Muslim religion, and many other hot topics where there were burning emotions and opinions on both sides. You know what else seemed to be prevalent on both sides? Prejudice about the other side.

Many of the forum debates that I observed where an American was debating someone from another country, each side clearly carried preconceived notions about the other country. The following are some of those notions that I realized people from other countries believe about Americans, and how Americans sometimes feed those beliefs through their online behavior.

Americans are Big-Mouthed and Opinionated

I personally have always behaved in a certain way online that reflects my personal belief in freedom of speech – a principle that I think most Americans hold near and dear to our hearts. It’s part of our heritage to protect the right to say what you believe without being persecuted for it. Because of this, Americans are usually quick to share their opinions – and to anyone outside of the U.S., I think this can easily come across as someone being overly-opinionated.

The problem is that in American culture, everyone is expected to feel welcomed and open to stand up and share your piece. Say how you feel about the situation without fear. However, there are other places where decisions are made with a different process – where there are individual roles that are important to a community, where self-sacrifice for the good of the group is more important than individualism, and where “success” is measured using different values than how it’s measured in America. This isn’t to say one is better than the other, only that it’s different – and those differences can lead to conflicts in the faceless, electronic exchanges so commonplace today on the Internet.

What’s a solution? Enter into dialogue with people from other countries with a more careful tone. Sharing your opinion is fine – but seeking out opinions from others will become more important, because they won’t be so fast or willing to open up so easily until they feel that you won’t judge them for having different values than yours.

Americans are Fat and Lazy

The myth that all Americans are fat and lazy is spread by documentaries, news organizations and other media outlets that cling to this meme, regardless of how true it really is. However, according to the World Health Organization, the countries with the highest percentage of overweight adults are Nauru, the Federal States of Micronesia, Cook Islands, Tonga, Niue, Samoa, Palau and Kuwait.  The U.S. makes number 9 on the list. Egypt number 14. Greece number 16. U.S., Egypt and Greece are actually only 5 or 6 percentage points apart.

This isn’t to say that obesity isn’t a problem in the U.S., but that the problem of health and inactivity isn’t primarily an American problem. In fact, generally speaking, I’ve found that my colleagues and friends from around the world have the exact same health and exercise issues and problems that many of my friends in the U.S. have. I can’t find much of a difference, yet throughout the Twittersphere and on Facebook, on Forums and even in email exchanges, the reference to Americans being fat and lazy constantly rears its ugly head again and again.

What’s a solution? There really isn’t much, except as a country to collectively exercise, get back in shape, and share those exercise experiences and your health successes on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Once America starts getting on the top 10 lists of healthiest countries in the world, that’s the only way to shed this particular prejudice.

Americans are Ethnocentric

There is one last perception about Americans on the Internet that I’ve seen very often when communicating with friends and colleagues from other countries. That is that Americans are, in general, very ethnocentric. This is the one perception that I personally find to be true more often than it’s not. I think it stems from the fact that America had the highest Internet adoption rate at the very beginning.

Now, as a greater percentage of Internet users join Americans at the table, we tend to continue talking about things as though America is the center of the Universe. Cool online services and mobile applications are often only available to U.S.-users only. This creates a greater sense of us-vs.-them that only serves to grow the chasm between America and the rest of the world.

It’s important now, more than ever, for American companies, programmers, social media experts and marketing gurus to approach every new project involving a product or application introduction online to include as many countries outside of the U.S. as possible. In former years, it was certainly enough to cater to just the U.S. market, but with the breakdown of the Internet finally leveling out in terms of user numbers from every major country in the world – it does both a company and the Internet user community a disservice to make any product or service only available to the U.S. market.

Not only that, but it leaves the rest of us with good friends in other countries, feeling guilty and apologetic about the fact that we can access those services, when they can’t. It’s beyond unfair – and hopefully it’ll be something that changes quickly as more and more companies become aware that the Internet is a healthy mix of every nationality.

If you’re American – what are some of the prejudices that you’ve encountered from users in other countries? If you are from outside the U.S., are there any prejudices you formerly held about Americans that you realized were completely untrue – or true?

Share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Boy with American flag via Shutterstock, Earth Planet via Shutterstock, Fat Guy eating Chocolate via Shutterstock, Businessman Text Balloon via Shutterstock

The post How To Be A Better American On The Global Internet appeared first on MakeUseOf.

What all of these have in common is that through some external stimuli, over time you can somehow influence the functioning of your brain. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work in theory. In practice, it’s a whole different story. Claims about the ability of classical music or “brain training” videos to increase the intelligence of toddlers abound, but to date not a single person has been able to scientifically prove that those external stimuli really have any influence on the normal brain development of a child.

That influence was known as the “Mozart Effect”, from a study published in Nature in 1993 by Psychologist Frances Rauscher. The study set off a flurry of products promising to raise the IQ of any baby that came in contact with some video or CD filled with classical tunes. The debate went on for years as to whether the effect was actually real, and as late as 2007, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany performed a decisive study and found that the effect does not exist.

What does exist, more than ever, is the human desire to influence fate through some kind of external manipulation. Why leave the future of a person’s IQ to natural genetics and human development, when you can influence it with music? Well – the same can be said for the modern-day phenomenon of binaural beats. People are using binaural beats in droves to accomplish all sorts of things – from better relaxation to better concentration, and even to simply get high. I’m totally serious.

Test Binaural Beats to Improve Concentration

When I previously wrote about binaural therapy apps for Android, I didn’t just write about them, I actually tried all of them – and continued testing them out for some time. I’ve always been into using meditation for relaxation and to remove stress, and binaural beats went right in line with that. The theory behind them seemed fairly solid, and I’d appreciate anything that would accelerate that wonderful feeling that prolonged meditation can create when it’s done right.

What are binaural beats? They are essentially sounds of different frequencies that play in each ear. The premise is that by playing a different frequency in the left ear and the right ear, the brain’s effort to sync up the two sounds into one perceived sound eventually “tunes” the brain to operate at a mental state within that range. The makers of binaural beat products tweak each frequency range to create a sort of “resonant frequency” in the brain that matches known mental wave pattern frequencies for things like concentration, relaxation, and excitement.

In order to test binaural beats theory, I decided to do a personal experiment of my own – completely unscientific, mind you – to see if binaural beats would improve my own concentration. The concentration test that I used was an Android game called Bubble Bust.

Bubble Bust is a typical bubble shooter game – where you launch bubbles toward the like colors in order to pop those bubbles. If the lowest bubble touches the blue line at the bottom of the screen, it’s game over. First, I did a few trial runs of the game just so that I could get used to the controls and warm up a bit. After the training sessions, I launched into the “control” run – simply playing the game in my normal mental state.

During this control run, playing to the best of my ability, I hit a score of 39,750 in the first level.

Continuing on to level two, I achieved a score of 56,500 points. As you can see, each round sets the highest score – in this case the only score so far – as the “best” score for the game. This will make it easy to see, later on, whether my next tests through the game beat my old score.

I blasted through level 3 with a cool 74,700 points.

Finally, finished up level 4 accomplishing 62,310 points.

Once I had my baseline scores set for how I play the game under my normal abilities and concentration levels, I went into my room, shut the door, and launched an Android binaural beats app called Binaural Beat Therapy.  This app offers frequency settings for “Highest mental activity”.

I affixed my earphones, laid down on the bed, launched the frequency therapy session and closed my eyes. After about three minutes, I started feeling that surreal “resonant” frequency in the middle of my head. The app screen shows flashing red lights over a black screen, and shows the current frequency settings for the left and right ears.

The full session in the app is 14 minutes or so. I relaxed and let the frequency fill my entire head. One thing I have to say about binaural therapy – whether it really works for improving brain function or not – is that it definitely creates a very real “buzz” after using it for a long while. It’s a very weird feeling – and after you take the earphones away, you’ll still hear a weird ringing frequency in your head for a few minutes.

After two full sessions of listening to the “highest mental activity” therapy, I went back to the same room where I last played the game, and launched the therapy session a third time, figuring that the frequency would maintain my brain in its peak performance state.

With the binaural beat running into my ears, I launched the bubble blaster game once again. I played level one to the best of my ability, and reached a score of 35,000 – almost five thousand short of my “non-therapy” score.

This surprised me, because I really felt like the binaural therapy had done “something”, but at the same time, I found it hard to concentration on the game with the binaural beats going on in my ears. I continued on into level two, and once again fell short – 400 points short of my initial score to be exact.

Motivated to prove that binaural beats work, I launched into level 3 and will all of my effort, concentration and willpower, tried my best to beat my old level 3 score. Once again, I fell short – this time by 5,900 points.

Finally, after putting everything I had into level 4, I hit a score of 63,700, beating my old score by 1,390.

I was starting to wonder whether maybe the real effects of binaural beats take effect after the therapy is over and not so much during a therapy session.  To test this out, I turned off the binaural frequencies that had been going on in my ears for about 45 minutes at this point. I could still hear the phantom frequency in my head – a very weird feeling.

I launched into another round of the game. Once again, I failed to beat my best scores. I managed to beat my initial score in round two by 3,700 points.

Feeling like I had discovered the secret of binaural beat therapy, I launched into round 3, sure that I would blow my old score right out of the water. I didn’t. Like a trooper, I launched into level four with everything I was worth. I felt focused, fast, and quick-witted. I was positive that I was going to blow all old scores away. What happened?

The bubbles hit the blue line, and I completely failed to complete the level at all.

In all honesty, the results of this little personal experiment surprised me. Just given the feeling after a binaural beats session, I really expected to see some sort of positive results afterwards. True, this test was only for concentration – I did nothing to test the beats that supposedly can create feelings of relaxation, a better memory, or better sleep. However, given my results above, I am moving a little bit further onto the skeptical side of things regarding binaural beats.

With that said, the one thing I can personally attest to after I test binaural beats and feel the effects, is that long sessions listening to binaural beats can definitely create sort of a “high” that lasts during the session, as well as lasting effects for about 10 to 15 minutes afterwards.  Whether there are any actual effects on the functioning of the mind? I say the jury is still out.

Have you ever tested binaural beat therapy? What have your experiences been like? Share your own personal thoughts and experiences about binaural beats in the comments section below!

Image credits: Yoga Man in Lotus Pose

The post Using Binaural Beats to Improve Gameplay Concentration – Does It Work? appeared first on MakeUseOf.