April 2003
Volume 21, Issue 4
Kokomo PC
Users Group
A Message from the President:
April showers bring May flowers, but they also signal the end of prime PC computing season. I just put out the crabgrass preventer and started cleaning up the last of the fall leaves. My computer is starting to look at me with those sad puppy-dog eyes.
This month will be the 20th anniversary of the Kokomo PC Users Group. We have been in business for most of the personal computer revolution. We plan to celebrate with some cake and party favors, so be sure to stop in and see us at the regular meeting. The membership voted for a $45 budget for the festivities. I talked with our founding father, Greg Ogle, and he may not be able to attend our meeting. It seems that since he retired he has taken up teaching on Thursday nights. I can only say that leaves more cake for us! Seriously, he is trying to find a way to join us for this big occasion, but has not worked out a solution at this time.
The last meeting was a good one. We had a fair attendance and enjoyed another in our series of low-budget discussions of popular software packages. We looked at MS Excel. We learned how to import data and place it in columns. We also looked at the auto-filter feature. It was really cool. As usual even I learned something new … although at the moment I can’t recall what it was.
If you have any tips or tricks for improving our enjoyment of our PCs, please write them up in a sort article for the newsletter. We would love to hear how clever you are and would like to learn your secrets.
If you have a computer passion you would like to share with the Group, we would love to have you present it at one of our regular meetings. Some of our best presentations come from our own Group members talking about the programs and hardware they love.
If you think the current crop of officers of the group are a bunch of ninnies or you just think you have some better ideas to run the Group, please volunteer to be an officer. We are looking for warm bodies … I mean visionary leaders to participate in the leadership of the Group. Just contact one of the current officers and we will put you to work changing the destiny of the Group.
Mark Pendergast
Da Prez
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Microsoft Visual Basic.net
Back in my youth I had plenty of time to program. I used Apple Basic, then GW Basic and finally Visual Basic. Visual Basic was an easy to use program that was just right for simple applications and general fooling around. Needless to say, I haven’t programmed much for about five years.
I just purchased Visual Basic.net. My son expressed an interest in developing some game software, like some of the shareware he had been downloading. I figured Visual Basic would be the best place to start. I got a copy for about $90 at CompUSA.
I loaded the software on the Kids computer. I had planned to load it on mine, but if my son has an interest in it he would probably get more use out of it than I will. Also, I didn’t want him messing around in my den when I wasn’t there.
I make a backup of the computer configuration using the Windows XP System restore utility. This was just in case I wanted to undo the install. I have never done an undo, but I have made plenty of backups.
I should probably have been worried when I saw that there were four install CDs in the box. But, I just popped in disk number one and waited for the install screen to come up. The first thing the install told me was that I had several application components that were not up to date. It had me pop in the fourth CD and loaded a bunch of updates.
Once I had rebooted and got back into the install it asked me a few questions and then stopped until I had read the End User License Agreement (EULA). They provide an eight page written version of the guide in the software. (I suspect it would be impossible to read all eight pages in the little window they give you to view it in.) (To be fair to Microsoft - half of the eight pages were in a foreign language.) There was also an addendum to the EULA that had an update to the original agreement.
The first issue I had with the EULA was that it licensed an individual rather than a computer. Almost all the software I own is licensed for one CPU. That way the whole family can use it. I have worked through about a million interpretations of this license mode in my head and finally came to the conclusion that my son is a minor and can not be the registered owner of the software. He is under my guardianship as I provide instruction in the fine art of computer programming. Therefore he can use the software and I can use it to teach him how to use it.
I still don’t know what I just said in the paragraph above so I hedged my bets. I registered it in the name of M. M Pendergast and since we both have the same initials I can put off the decision of who owns the software until later. (My guess is that if I ever get enough free time to do any serious programming I will buy my own copy anyway. I had planned to do so when I thought it was a CPU license agreement.)
My second issue with the EULA was the requirements for distributing the software we right to other people. Microsoft requires that we send out a EULA - at least as restrictive as theirs - with all our software. I do not want to send out an eight page EULA with every little program that my son wants to share with his friends. I just want to teach him to write some cool stuff he can give away for free.
If Visual Basic is only for professional developers, then I need to find something else. Well, all this legal garbage made me pretty mad, but I decided that I might as well go ahead and agree. If Bill Gates wants to send me to the slammer over a calculator program my son sent out to a friend without an eight page legal contract written half in French - go for it.
I decided to go for it. I agreed to the EULA and was off to the races.
The application started loading. I was surprised when it said two hours remaining to complete the load. I was even more amazed when the first hour counted down at the rate of about one minute per second. So about a minute later the counter showed an hour to go. The installation moved along pretty well. I had to switch disks a few times. The install took half an hour
When I started Visual Basic the screen setup looked much like I remember it from the previous times I have used it. There seem to be more options and the menu choices are less intuitive, but on the whole it seemed friendly enough.
We started with a program with a menu bar that allows you to select File > Exit and actually exits. This is not a hard program to write if you can remember that the Basic exit command is really ‘End’. The new menu bar tool is easier to use to get started than the old one. You just drag a rectangle where you want the menu and the menu bar appears on the form. There is a highlighted box where it indicates where to type the command you want. You double click on the menu entry to add the code.
The big challenge was how to run the new program. I checked all the menus and finally found the run command. The program worked just fine.
Next we worked on upgrading our program to turn a picture box red or blue depending on which button you push. I used the picture box tool to add a picture box and the button tool to add two buttons. I double clicked on one of the buttons and tried to add the code to change the picture box red. It took about twenty minutes of looking in the help menus and playing around until I got the right combination. It looked something like this:
Sub Button1_click ()
PictureBox1.BackColor = Color.Red
End Sub
I added similar code for the other button to turn the box blue. We fired it up and it worked. We had fun pushing the button and changing the color back and forth.
The next project was to build a simple calculator. My son drew the buttons on the form and used a label for the display. I added some code to make the buttons stuff numbers in the display and increment by ten. When I got to the decimal point I had to do some fancy footwork to divide by ten if the decimal point had been entered. It seemed to enter the numbers correctly.
The wheels came off when I started to put zeros after the decimal. The number was correct, but the zeros did not show on the display until something else was added - back to the drawing board. I need to keep the keyed in number as a text string until I need it to do the calculation. Well, I did have some fun with my son and look forward to many more hours working on our program.
I would like to find a less restrictive Development system that is easy to use. Does anybody have any ideas? I will have to check on the internet for something. I remember that Borland had some pretty good development tools in the good old days. I might also move to Java if I can find a good development environment. I have heard of a tool called Visual Café, but have never seen it in a store.
Mark Pendergast
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Computer Problems...
I was having trouble with my computer. I called Rick the
computerguy, to come over. clicked a couple of buttons and solved
the problem. gave me a bill
for a minimum service call. he was walking away, I called after
him, "So, what was wrong?" He replied, "It was an
ID ten T error." I didn't want to appear stupid, but
nonetheless inquired: "An ID ten T?What's that, in case I
need to fix it again?" The computer guy grinned.... "Haven't
you ever heard of an ID ten T error before?" "No,"
I replied. "Write it down," he said, "and I think
you'll figure it out."
So I wrote out....
I D 1 0 T
Sent in by Wayne Dunbar
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MS Office Tips
In Excel you can have multiple worksheets (tabs) in a workbook. If you don’t like the order of the tabs you can change it very easily. Just click on the tab you want to move and drag it to the new position.
If you don’t like multiple worksheets in your workbooks and never use them you can banish them forever. From the Main Menu select Tools > Options to open the Options Menu. Click on the General tab. Then set "Sheets in new workbook" to 1.
Sometimes I just browse through all the options to see what cool things I can set.
A favorite of mine is to set the number of files in history (in the file menu) to 8 instead of the default 4. I have also been known to set the default font to a larger more readable value. (I would not suggest wing-dings as your default font. Although it may give you a good laugh to set it this way for someone else. Not a bad April Fools joke.)
If you hate the Office Assistant (the paperclip) you can just right click on him for some options. You can hide him or change him to a more agreeable form.
At the last meeting we talked about another cool feature of Excel—Auto-filter. If you have a whole spreadsheet of data and you only want to see certain rows Auto-filter will help you out.
Just put your cursor at the top of the data and from the Main Menu select Data > Filter > Auto-filter. This will add little drop arrows at the top of each column. Just press one on these arrows and select the value you want to filter that column on. All the rows that do not have that value will disappear. Notice that the little arrow is now colored blue. (This lets you know what filters are on or off.) You can have multiple filters on at one time.
To remove the filter just select the arrow again and select all. To turn Auto-filtering off select Data > Filter > Auto-filter from the Main Menu and it will toggle off.
One word of caution. When you filter data and then select a large number of rows and then do something with them you may get unpredictable results. Test any ideas on a test file before doing it to your main data.
Mark Pendergast
- - - - - News Flash - - - - - -
Bill Gates resigns as head of Microsoft to become a Hare Krishna.
When asked to comment on this change of direction for his career he was quoted as saying: "They are really not all that different. Today I sit on the sidewalk in holy clothes begging for money. Before I sold hole-y code and charged lots of money. It was April first and I needed a change."
Mark Pendergast
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