Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 November 20#Excel Question

I have word 2000 and lately, my documents will not send in email because Gmail has decided that it has a virus. So does every program out there. The only thing that I can figure out is that in other computers, they ask about disabling macros. I did not install a macro, nor do any show up in the macro list. What is going on? --Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:04, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:What's going on? You have a virus!! It is writing itself into your Word files as a macro so that it can try to infect other computers. This is seriously bad stuff! Have you tried running a full virus scan first? Get AVG Free if you don't have one that is up to date. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:36, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Ooh, thanks. Any other suggestions for free Anti-Virus. Last time I tried installing AVG, this computer crashed. So, Id kinda rather not use AVG. I'm running a Trend Micro scan now, is that sufficient?--Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:If it detects it then it's sufficient. Avast is also free if you don't like AVG --ffroth 02:04, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It found it. It actually found two things; 3 instances of W97M_GENERIC in what looked like the word program files, and 16 instances of W97M_MARKER.A in the actual word documents. It says that the second one sends a log to its author via FTP once a month. Seems to me that some computer savvy person with the necessary authority could track that back. Why hasn't this been done? Thanks for all the help. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:23, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:::It's author is probably using another computer that's also been taken over as its ftp destination...or perhaps the destination account is simply outside of the juristiction of anyone who cares. Many countries have too many other problems to be bothered with arresting people who are perpetrating "Internet crimes" that don't affect them and they may not even understand. SteveBaker (talk) 12:33, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I recently normalized my PostgreSQL/pgforms database of Magic: The Gathering cards to deal with split cards. The result is that each physical card now requires a row on two separate tables, and it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth between two forms when entering one physical card. But pgforms can't handle more than one table in a form, and I'm told that using a denormalized view with rules at the back-end would be nearly impossible, even with the rules already [http://sh.nu/p/23587 pseudocoded]. Is there a standard solution to database situations where unnormalized storage would cause problems and normalized input would be awkward? NeonMerlin 01:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Anyone reading the pseudocode should know that the PK of cards is "Name","Set", the PK of spells is "Card","Set","Spell", and the FK of spells onto cards and left outer join of the denormalized view is cards."Name" = spells."Card" AND cards."Set" = spells."Set". NeonMerlin 02:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I have excel 97 on another computer. Recently, it has decided that when I double click on a .xls, it tries every group of letters before trying the whole filepath. So, for example, if I was to try opening C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Test Spreadsheet 2007.xls ...

First an error message pops up saying that it cant find C:\Documents.xls, then one for and.xls then one for Settings\Owner\Test.xls, then Spreadsheet.xls, then 2007.xls. After clicking OK on all those error messages, it opens the file. Why is it doing this and how can I fix it? --Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:45, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:Never use spaces in your filenames- it breaks old programs and command-line syntax. Use underscores instead --ffroth 02:03, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It has never done this before. Besides, the "Documents and Settings" is where "My Documents" is, and those are XP defaults.--Omnipotence407 (talk) 02:11, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:Try switching to OpenOffice.org Calc. It's free, more secure against macro viruses and compared against such an old version of Excel should be fully compatible (except for the features OOo will have and Excel 97 won't). Or, you could switch to a Linux distro such as Kubuntu (which doesn't force or default any folder names to include non-alphanumeric characters) and run Excel through Wine. Either Excel 97 or Windows XP probably has to go sooner or later, but it doesn't have to cost any money. NeonMerlin 02:40, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

::Oy, except that Calc kinda sucks at the moment, like much of OOo. Slow, ugly, unintuitive, not-quite-fully-documented; reproducing all of the worst features of Excel... but even worse! --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:::What department of Microsoft are you working for? Even if it's not unqualifiedly better than Excel 2007, Calc should dominate Excel 97 in any fair comparison. NeonMerlin 02:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

::::Believe you me, I hate Excel too. I think Calc's biggest problem, aside from having its interface standards set by computer geeks, is that they are trying to replicate something that is barely usable in the first place. Excel (like all of Microsoft Office) is a shitty program and making a free version of a shitty program is not an improvement, especially if it is a very slow version of said shitty program. But I digress. My hope is that once OOo gets into a more stable phase a bunch of designers will descend upon its code and make a fork for people who actually want to not have to battle with their office tools to get them to work. But if I am going to have to battle with my software, I want to at least battle at a good pace, so the slowness issue (and the fact that everything produced with OOo looks about 200% more ugly than the already ugly things that come out of Office) means a lot to me. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:::::The interface standards are not set by geeks: one of OOo's strengths is that it's good at responding to bug reports and feature requests from non-programmers. As for it looking ugly, the only significant difference in appearance from Excel is the icon theme, and that can be changed (Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > View > Icon size and style). Many other aspects of the GUI can also be customized that can't in Excel. NeonMerlin 03:09, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

::::::Sorry, but the interface is super ugly and super clunky looking. Alas, the ugliness does not end there. Try to make good looking graph with Calc. I dare you. One that doesn't look like it was cobbled together by programmers with no idea of how graphs should look, one that takes Excel's already ugly approach to making graphs and makes it even uglier. It can't be done, as far as I can tell. Everything looks like crap; it would be totally unusable in anything but a setting where apperances did not matter (which is unfortunately the case amongst programmers). Not to mention they seem to have spent more time allowing you to make 3D graphs (which are methodologically problematic, as anyone concerned with visual representation of data knows) than they have on simple things like simple XY plots (you can't plot circles at all unless you are using ugly drop-in bitmapped "custom" plot images). This is the sort of thing that consulting with people who actually care about visual representation of data (or at least had read a book or two by Edward Tufte) would have stopped from the get-go. But the culture of OOo is to create a "replacement" for MS Office; recreating a flawed product will not end up with a good product, and everyone knows how awful MS Office is. (And I won't get into things like OOo Base, which is totally unusable for even basic things as far as I can tell, as a database programmer.) Anyway, I wish the OOo people all the luck but at the moment it's not a great program and I wouldn't wish it on anyone who has to use programs like that on a daily basis (like myself). As far as I'm concerned its a neat tech demo (based on a flawed idea). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 14:59, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:::Wow, didnt mean to start this argument, but I have to agree with 24. I tried using Impress for a presentation for school, and it just kept crashing, and took about 5 minutes to save any progress. I flipped back to powerpoint, and whipped off the presentation that had been taking days, in a matter of an hour or two. Ive generally found OOo to be pretty slow, and not a viable alternative to Any Version of Microsoft Office, including 97. Only thing that OOo seems to have on Microsoft in my use is the pricetag. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:The odds are that somehow the file association had gotten whiggy and it is trying to execute it without the quotes it needs around the filename. If I recall you have to fish around in the registry to fix it. [http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1078784492 This post] sounds like what I am talking about—it's the quotes around the %1 that are probably missing (for some reason). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I'm gonna try the registry fix tomorrow after the computer is scanned for the same virus my other computer had. I'll let you know if it works. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:The regedit worked great. Thanks--Omnipotence407 (talk) 02:01, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

(This is not a Wikipedia question)

If I have my own MediaWiki system, can I add JavaScript or PHP to specific pages in the Wiki to make them interactive? For example, if I have a JavaScript snippet to create a little interactive widget to convert fahrenheit to centigrade - can I set up the system to allow me to put that into a regular Wiki page? How about PHP code to do stuff on the server-side?

I could obviously do this outside the Wiki on some other web page - but I want the ability to edit it in a browser and to use the Wiki to do version control. Since this is for a private Wiki, I'm not concerned with vandalism or anything.

TIA SteveBaker (talk) 03:18, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

:Well for Javascript you can edit the skin's js file and do something similar to all the javascript tools on here like WP:POPUPS. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:05, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

::Yeah - I knew about that - but it's not what I need. Editing your monobook.js allows one user to stick in some JavaScript that affects all pages he visits. I want the opposite - something I can stick into one page that affects all users who visit it. Think specificially about something like having a little type-in box in the article on Temperature that would let you type in a temperature in Fahrenheit, click a 'Convert' button and see the result appear in Centigrade. This is really easy to do in HTML - but MediaWiki kills the usual comment tags for JS. I'm kinda hoping there is a configuration option to change that behavior. SteveBaker (talk) 05:21, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

::: I don't have an answer to your question since I don't know MediaWiki all that well (although I doubt it'd be hard to implement a