Had a lot of grief setting up networking for a training course this morning. Our wireless access point seems to have broken so I hurriedly plugged in some old hubs. Take it from me, arsing around with network cables is not a good way to start the day.
Fortunately I'm now on the train to Ilkley to meet a client, so if anything else goes wrong it's not my problem. I don't think I was ever cut out to be a sysadmin anyway, but it seems to be something you just end up doing by default.
(Update: whaddaya know, when I get to Ilkley I end up arsing around with network cables again.)
DBD::Excel error when reading formulas
Here's a little tip from a bug I fixed this morning. We have some
data read in to Perl from an Excel spreadsheet using
DBD::Excel, but after
I'd put in a new version of the spreadsheet I was getting errors
because some of the numbers were coming out as the string
‘GENERAL’. Turns out that happens when the numbers are
actually formulas. Not the most obvious thing for it to do, at least
for someone like me who doesn't know much about the inner workings of
spreadsheets.
OpenOffice.org doesn't seem to have an ‘fill in the values of formulas’ button, but you can get that effect by copying everything and doing a ‘paste special’ over the top. Uncheck the things you don't want to be pasted (probably just leave ‘numbers’ and ’strings’ checked) and it will boil them down to simpler values.