A Fun New Excel Macro With An Excellent How-To

flipText is a small Excel macro that easily reverses the order of text in a spreadsheet. While converting "stressed" to "desserts" is fun, Excel power users have more complicated project needs. Those needs are addressed in the comprehensive How-To that accompanies the flipText macro.

The How-To clearly explains, step-by-step, how to copy an Excel macro from one spreadsheet into another.

Most Excel users have never really worked with custom macros before, so the idea of copying a macro is beyond many people's comfort zone. The flipText macro is fun enough to get your attention, and from there we hope you'll find using macros less intimidating!

To help distribute this tutorial, we released flipText as open source software under a Creative Commons license.The flipText macro and its invaluable how-to can be downloaded from our website here: www.azalea.com/excel-macros/

Creative UPCs

There's no real reason to get creative with UPC barcodes on retail packaging.

Which makes it that much more delightful to see manufacturers doing silly, whimsical or just plain goofy stuff to their UPCs.

It's fun for the sake of fun!

Endangered Zebras' Barcodes May Help Save Them

Vicki Croke at The Animalist has an interesting piece up about the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust using zebras' individual 'barcodes' to identify and track Grevy's zebra populations in Kenya.

Photo: Vicki Croke

According to The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, technology may soon make identification even easier: “software is being developed that will allow the stripes of a Grevy’s in a photograph to be read like a barcode and automatically identified.”

Technology is amazing.

We Don't Have An Office But If We Did..

While this one is my favorite color, it's a touch on the broody side. And it's in St. Petersburg, Russia, which has 123 days of snow cover per year. No thank you.

This one's a little better, though it's somehow office parky.

This one now, this one I like. Sure it's tiny. But it's ADORABLE.

A few ferns out front, some wisteria climbing the wall, I'm so there.