Ehsanul Haque

Tricks for MS Excel: Add a frozen header row and set alternate background colors for rows

Here are couple of tricks for MS Excel users.

First we take a look at how to add a “Frozen” header row. Frozen header row is the one you could have for a very long worksheet. This row will be frozen (to act as the column header) and rest of the rows will scroll. Here’s how to do this.

1. Select the row below the one you want to be the header (or be frozen)

2. From Window menu select Freeze Panes (for MS Excel 2007 click on the View tab and inside Window panel click on Freeze Panes and pick the first option which is also Freeze Panes)

The frozen row will have a border at the bottom. Simple but an essential option for MS Excel users.

Second trick is the alternate background color for rows in the MS Excel worksheet.

1. Select the rows

2. From the Format menu go to Conditional Formatting (or in MS Excel 2007 under Home tab click on Conditional Formatting from Styles panel and click on New Rule)

3. When the window appears select Formula Is… (or on MS Excel 2007 select the last option Use a Formula to Determine Which Cells to Format)

4. Add this formula: =mod(row(),2)=1

5. Then click on Format button and go to Fill tab

6. Pick the color that will be used as the alternate color

7. Hit OK and go back to the worksheet

You will see the worksheet has alternate background colors.

Grab Yahoo class is in “coma”

Grab Yahoo class was one of my works that has been used by many people around the world. Since I released this class I did  not have a single month without comments or questions or suggestion about this class. Some people have copied the class, released it under their name (simply taking out my comments and added their own) to increase traffic to their site probably. But more importantly this class was appreciated by many. This was one of my finest contribution to the open source world.

How did I come up with this idea?

Well, I cannot remember which user group but in one of the groups I participate in had a discussion over if PHP can pull data off from places like Yahoo and use it for some purpose. Users on the group said this can be done (easily) with Java, but cannot be done with PHP. So I started researching over it. I found the cURL extension for PHP which seemed the good candidate to do the job. So I started working on it. After days of coding I finally wrote a script that will allow someone to login to their Yahoo account and fetch data from their address book. Initially I simply had a script but then I converted it to a Class allowing people to grab their address book, messenger list, number of new emails and calendar data.

What is happening now?

As per the title of this post this class is in “coma”. The reason is the update to Yahoo address book export mechanism. They have placed a CAPTCHA validation page in the export feature and, therefore, my Grab Yahoo class cannot go any further to grab the content it needs. Same thing happened with the LinkMeIn class which stopped working after LinkedIn added the CAPTCHA validation.

Why is this class in “coma”?

I have looked at the Yahoo address book export feature and found the CAPTCHA validation which will not allow the class to work. But I’ve not done my complete research on it yet, to make sure there is no other way to make this class functional. So, for the time being, this class is in “coma”. If I fail to revive this class I will probably officially pronounce it “dead”.

Can you help?

Yes, of course, you can. I hardly have time, these days, to sit with these side projects. If anyone from the community has time to research and help me revive this class it will be appreciated. Your name will go into the credit section of the class, well that is all I can offer!