I'm a Dad and a Geek. My blog is about teaching my kids to be producers, not just consumers of technology. My tinkering exists somewhere at the intersection between home automation, the internet of things, the maker movement and fitness. It's a nice place to be!

At the time of writing, the game Wordle is taking the world by storm. Quite rightly, it's genius and so is the guy who invented it. Here's one I did earlier: Two things to know about me: I'm rubbish with word games. I like to trick my children into thinking I'm cleverer than I am. So having struggled a bit with Wordle I wondered if I could write some code to more efficiently (for that read cheat)…
Ever noticed the tiny little square on the bottom right of the rectangle that goes around the cell you have selected? This is called Autofill and it's super useful ! It's circled in the image below: So what does it do? Hover over it and a little black plus appears. Click and drag it down (or across) and it acts like copy and paste. Here's a simple example. I typed 100 in cell A1, clicked and…
Excel is best for numbers but sometimes you find yourself entering lots of text in a cell. To format the text it's helpful to be able to put in a newline character (aka do a carriage return). So here's how a bunch of text can look without doing this: Put in newline characters and hey presto, all a lot easier to read: So how to do this? The answer is: Position the cursor where you want the newline,…
In Excel you can prefix values in cells with an apostrophe to force Excel to interpret them as text. Why do this you may ask? To explain, let's say I want to enter James Bond's telephone number into a spreadsheet. All I have to do is type 01234007007 (which everyone knows is his number) into a cell, right? Wrong! Let's see it in action. First I type his number (numbers in the UK always start with…
Sometimes in Excel you have values (generally text) in different cells that you want to piece together into a single cell. In the example below I have a set of fruits and tasty things I want to join together into a single cell: Lovely old Excel gives us two ways to do this. The first way, and the one I always remember, is the "&" operator. In the example below I've already put the formula in cell…
Sometimes in Excel you have values lined up in a single column and you want to get all the values in a single row. Maybe you want to create a matrix where rows and columns are compared with each other. Here's an image with made up data to illustrate this: Let's say I want all the values in column B to actual be across row 1. So for example "Turnover" goes in cell B1, "Juice" goes in cell C1,…
A wise person once said "To err is human". Well Excel sometimes creates errors as well. Luckily there's a built-in way to check for errors and deal with them. A common error in computing is dividing by zero. Here's an example: Cell C2 shows the formula that's been used. The "/" part of the formula is how you do divide in Excel and so "=A2/B2" means "take the value in cell A2 and divide it by the…
Occasionally when using Excel you want to analyse the value in a cell and either calculate something differently as a result of the analysis or write something to a cell. To do this, your friend is the "IF formula". Here's an example where I want to analyse the values in column A and write "TRUE" or "FALSE" to column B depending on whether the column A number is positive or negative. In the image…
The set of menus menu items across the top of the screen in Excel (and other Office Applications) is called the "Ribbon". It's the area at the top of the screen that has a set of easy to access menu items for you to use. Here's a snapshot of the ribbon with key parts picked out: Here you can see: A set of Tabs (Home, Insert, Data etc) which is top level grouping for the ribbon. A set of Groups…
I've made many a PowerPoint presentation in my time and one feature that always seems to have a wow factor is the Morph Transition. Here's a super-simple example in action: People say "Wow, you got objects to fly around the screen, that must be super complex to do". Not so; I shall explain how. So how do you do this? Super, super easy. First prepare your "base" slide, the slide that other slides…
Here's an Excel hack that I use all the time: lookup tables. In this previous post I showed how to use Data Validation to create a dropdown list in a cell on a worksheet where I log my fruit consumption. Imagine I've been logging for a few weeks and have a spreadsheet with dates on it and what fruit I ate on that date. I now want to log the number of calories each fruit has. So my Fruit Worksheet…
Sometimes in Excel, you're working on one worksheet and want to refer to a value in a cell on a different worksheet. By way of example, in this post I described using a spreadsheet with an exchange rate on it to convert from home currency to local currency when I am abroad. Here's a quick image to remind you: Let's say I'm abroad but on business, not on holiday and I want to keep track of personal…
When using Excel, you often write a formula in a cell that refers to another cell. Here's a simple example: It's pretty easy to understand: There is a value in column A, row 1 and that is cell A1 There is a value in column B, row 1 and that is cell B1 There is a formula in column C, row 1 (cell C1) which is "=A1+B1" which means "add the value in cell A1 to the value in cell B1". When I click away…
Ever seen people use spreadsheets where they click on a cell and there's a drop down menu shown for them to select a value? It's a useful technique to make sure data is entered accurately into a spreadsheet. Want to know how to do it? Read on! Here's how it looks when it's done: As an example to show how it's done, I'm going to create a spreadsheet to log my fruit consumption. I create a new…
This blog post used Excel from Office 365, version 2021. This is general stuff so won't change from version to version. The purpose of this blog post is to tell you about workbooks and worksheets. A workbook is basically an Excel file. So a book where you do work. Get it! When you start Excel you're presented with a screen like that shown below: Select "Blank workbook" and you're presented with a…
Here's a quick Excel hack for you. If you frequently have to type dates in cells on a spreadsheet, simply hold down the ctrl (control) key and press the semi-colon key. On the image below the Ctrl key is highlighted in white: ...and here's the semi-colon key: (Note: This is a UK QWERTY keyboard). So here I could get a load of dates in column A, simply by holding ctrl pressing and releasing the…
Here’s my guide to creating a super simple Excel spreadsheet to help you keep track of your bank account. For this I used Excel from Office 365 which, at the time of writing, was on Version 2102 First get a new Excel spreadsheet file and save it as something meaningful. I called mine “bank_account_logger.xlsx”. Also double click on the worksheet tab and call it something meaningful too (mine is…
This time last year I blogged about a half-marathon I had run where I paced it badly and slowed down massively at the end. I did the same race this year and ran a faster time but more importantly paced it more consistently and so enjoyed the experience more. The run was over the same course and the weather was similar so this provides a good opportunity to compare and contrast both years. At a…
Amazon Alexa is just awesome so I thought it would be fun to let her "see". Here's a video of this in action: ...and here's a diagram of the "architecture" for this solution: The clever bit is the Microsoft Cognitive API so let's look at that first! You can get a description of the APIs here and sign up for a free account. To give Alexa "vision" I decided to use the Computer Vision API which takes…
I kept seeing adverts for IBM Bluemix popping up on my social media feeds and online adverts so I thought I'd take a look and see what it was all about. You can sign up an account and get 30 days access for free so that was all good for a home hobbyist like me! So what is Bluemix? Here's a snippet from the IBM Bluemix website: The IBM Bluemix cloud platform helps you solve real problems and drive…
In a previous blog post I wrote about using the Alexa Skills Kit "slot" concept to send information to the function that processes Alexa requests. This used a built in slot type of "AMAZON.Movie"; effectively pre-defined to expert the user to utter movie names. The other slot type is "custom slots" where you as the developer specify all the phrases that can constitute a slot. My kids love to hear…
This blog was supposed to be about getting my kids to code and explore electronics. Recently it's focused on other things so it was great recently when my eldest daughter brought her BBC micro:bit home from school. Read all about the initiative here but effectively it's a free mini-computer given out by the British Broadcasting Corporation to all year 7 secondary school children in the UK. It's a…
More on my series of blog posts on using the Amazon Echo Dot and creating Alexa skills. After creating my last Alexa skill that used Python and an API, I wanted to extend this by creating a skill that could massively vary it's response based upon what the user asked it. i.e. Didn't just do one thing or respond with one of a limited set of pre-defined responses. The result is my Amazon Movie Expert…
In my last post I described how I'd followed a step-by-step guide to create a Amazon Alexa Skill for my Amazon Echo Dot . This used Node.js and was basically an easy "join-the-dots" guide to creating your first skill and getting it certified. Building on this I wanted to build a skill that: Uses Python - my language of choice. Calls an API (rather than just responding with pre-canned data).…
Recently I bought an Amazon Echo Dot as my colleagues had been raving about them. Oh, my, what an excellent piece of kit it is. As long as you speak clearly and think about the clarity of the words you use then the Alexa voice recognition system rarely fails. There's plenty of reviews about Alexa and the Echo Dot on the interweb so I won't go into general usage here. (Although the Easter Eggs are…