---

Microsoft Word has a little feature called 'Track changes', which allows for collaborating with colleagues on documents. When enabled it will keep a running history of changes made to a document, kind of like a built-in version control. Add to that the ability to accept/reject changes, highlight text and add comments and you've got quite a nice little document collaboration package.

An important fact that you need to remember, however, is that this history lives with the document. This is an obvious necessity when you start passing it around to various colleagues as part of your work/review process. However, it is surprisingly easy to forget that this change history and comments still live in the document when you've got the feature turned off. And if you're not careful you may be setting yourself up for some embarrassing moments (or worse) if you send this marked-up document out to a customer or client.

---

Phishing sucks (if you're not familiar with the term you can find some details here). It has just always really ticked me off that there are people out there that feel that they somehow have the right to just take something from me that I've worked hard to earn. Not only that, some of them will work harder at figuring out ways to steal my money than they would need to work to make their own. Just go get a job, creep!

So believe me, I am all on board for any technology that will thwart (or at least slow down) these morons. One of the best ways (besides educating the end user) would be to create a database that would hold the URL's of the offending sites, then to have the browser warn folks when they are about to enter a known phishing site. The key to getting this to work would be to get any new phishing sites added to the list ASAP, as these bogus sites are usually only active for a day or so, sometimes only for a couple of hours. This means that you would need to provide an easy means for allowing your average good Samaritan to tell you when they've come across a phishing site, so that it could be verified and added pronto. Sound hard? Maybe, unless you've got the resources of Microsoft and are about to release a new browser to the world.

My sister-in-law is a certified Excel genius. Back in the early 90's, when I was just getting interested in IT, she was writing programs in Excel running on DOS(6, I think?) that were being used to simulate nuclear meltdowns at actual nuclear power plants here in the states. They would enter in the baseline parameters, programmatically create a failure in some internal system, then run the simulation and 'see what happened'. They actually somehow linked it with the internal systems at the facility, right down to the sensors, alarms, monitors, etc. Really wild stuff. Whenever she would change some of the formulas she would wait until the weekend and then have their brand-spanken-new 486 DX2/66 with 8 mb of ram (8 mb of ram cost north of $2000 back then) chew on the spreadsheet for 3 days to finish the re-calculations. I've probably just violated a whole bunch of national security guidelines by writing this, so if this site's gone next weekend and you never hear from me again [hey, did I just see a black helicopter?!!?]...

Anyhooo, I remember her saying to me "You want to be a programmer? Start by figuring out a lookup function in Excel. If you can get your head around that then you 'may' just be smart enough ..."

Funny how things change. What was once the lofty domain of the geek elite is now common ground for every weekend warrior with a beat up computer on their desk. These days I see formulas in Excel from computers on our plant floor, written by grandmothers, that would have knocked me off a chair 10 years ago. Lookup functions fall firmly into this category - it just ain't rocket science anymore.

---

I've been away on vacation this last week, so I'm just getting back into the swing of things. I wanted to take a minute to thank my sponsors for July, they help keep this site up and running, and they help to keep me motivated....

Thanks to:

• Azavar, DengSoftware, Pexagontech, Superwarehouse, New Horizons Computer Training, Dorian, Network Insight, breathe2media
• Mozy Remote Backup

---

There has been a nice little utility called Briefcase that has been part of the standard Windows operating systems since way back when. I seem to remember it being part of Windows 3.1, or at least Windows for Workgroups, but I guess that doesn't really matter. Windows briefcase was originally designed for keeping files synchronized between computers - desktop to server, desktop to desktop, laptop to server, you get the idea. You would create a briefcase, pull the files that you wanted to keep synched into it, then periodically synchronize the files so that any files that had been modified (in either location) would be updated.

These days I'm finding a new use for the briefcase - keeping data synchronized between my USB drive and my laptop.

---

I get requests to review and/or promote products on a fairly regular basis, like everyone else with a technology-based website. My typical response is "OK, I'll look at the product, and if I like it and think that it's something my readers will be interested in I'll write something up on it". Usually these items are things that I don't believe are really relevant for my readers, or aren't very far along in the development cycle, or are just bad products. For whatever reason, I usually don't feel that I should waste your valuable time with them. However, every once in a while I'll bump into something that I get genuinely excited about. This service, Mozy Remote Backup, is one of those products. And while on-line backup services are nothing new, free ones can be pretty hard to find.

Details:

• It's in beta, so expect some bumps (although I have to say I didn't have any real problems)
• Windows XP only, 1.5 MB client download (Mac client in development)
• NTFS required to backup open or locked files
• Broadband connection required (may be self evident, but uploading gigabytes of data over dialup is not feasable)
• 2 GB storage is free, 30 GB available for $4.95USD per month
• Referral program, 1 GB additional storage for every 4 people referred
• Limited to 5 restores per month
• Local drives only

---

So you've been toiling for a week over your latest and greatest Powerpoint presentation, and you're sure it's going to get you booted right into that corner office you've been drooling over. Just to make sure you haven't misspelled the new CEOs name, you decide to e-mail your creation to a trusted co-worker for proofreading. That's when you discover it: You've created a 50 mb monster! The last thing you want to do is to delete that cherry graph showing your main competitor's tanking stock market valuation. But you need to get it under your company's 2 mb e-mail attachment limit, and you don't have time to burn it to a CD and FedEx it. What's a wannabe-executive to do?

---

I received a call from one of my co-workers in the UK the other day, looking for some help with a quick, down-and-dirty database to help him track company assets held by employees. Just something to track the details on all of the computer and peripherals, phones, cars, things like that. He already had it started, and just needed a little help getting the report built and formatted. So, being the nice guy I am, I say 'Sure, zip it up and send it to me, then I'll give you a call back'.

A minute later I had it opened up and was looking at the tables. He actually did a pretty good job, and had the different 'objects' in their own tables. He had a user table, a phone table, a car table, and an IT table. He had, however, fallen into a typical trap that novice database developers often fall into. He had set up a 'name' field in the user table, then had used that name field for the linking fields in the other tables. So what's wrong with that, you ask?

---

This will be old news to some of you, and a complete revelation to others: You can use Google for a whole lot more than just finding out the nature of that nasty looking growth coming out of Uncle Henry's neck, or how many worms you'll find when you put in your new swimming pool. You can use it to add! And while that by itself is certainly worth the price of admission, the Google Calculator will perform all sorts of common (and not so common) stuff that's even cooler than adding! Just ask it a question....

---

No, it isn't a misspelling, or a way to entertain yourself by playing a game on your computer. It isn't a game at all, millions of people succumb to these well thought out and cleverly devised scams every year:

• You receive an e-mail from your bank, asking you to confirm a charge from a hotel that you have never been to.
• A credit card company sends you an e-mail telling you that you need to log in to your account within the next 24 hours to confirm your account details, or your account will be suspended.
• You get an e-mail from Amazon explaining that during their last account update they could not verify all of your account information, and that you need to log in to your account to verify that information.
• PayPal sends an e-mail telling you that they have reason to believe that your account has been hijacked by a third party, and that you need to log in to your account to verify your identity.

In all of these cases there are helpful links embedded in the e-mail, so that you can simply click here to quickly address the issue that is described.