Have you ever looking for option to delete every odd or even rows in Excel? Looking through menu after menu, hoping there’s some option hidden somewhere?

Well, the bad news is that there’s no built-in function as of Excel 2007. You need to use some marco to do just that.

Here’s the procedure. This procedure applies to all Excel versions from 97 to 2007, however I’ll provide screenshot using Excel 2007.

• Open your Excel file.

• In Excel 2007, Go to Developer tab, click Visual Basic. (All other Excel versions, go to Tools menu -> Marco –> Visual Basic Editor)

• Then in Visual Basic window, Insert Menu –> Module

• After that copy and paste the following code into the module window.

Sub Delete_Every_Other_Row()

   ' Dimension variables.
   Y = False              ' Change this to True if you want to
                          ' delete rows 1, 3, 5, and so on.
   I = 1
   Set xRng = Selection

   ' Loop once for every row in the selection.
   For xCounter = 1 To xRng.Rows.Count

       ' If Y is True, then...
       If Y = True Then

           ' ...delete an entire row of cells.
           xRng.Cells(I).EntireRow.Delete

       ' Otherwise...
       Else

           ' ...increment I by one so we can cycle through range.
           I = I + 1

       End If

       ' If Y is True, make it False; if Y is False, make it True.
       Y = Not Y

   Next xCounter

End Sub

• Go back to your excel workbook,  Select the Cells that you want for alternative rows to delete. Note : It is important to select the cells, if you select the whole column, Excel will most likely hang when you run Macro.

• After that, click Marcos under Developer tab in Excel 2007. (All other excel versions, Tools menu –> Marcos ) You should see the dialog box as follow. Click on Run.

Bravo! That’s it! Hopefully Excel 2010 will have built-in function for this. 

Source : Microsoft

Many plugins available

There are many advantages of WordPress. The main obvious thing is that many varieties of plugins. I just imagine what I want to do with my blog and google it with wordpress plugin, BLAM! there’s always one available. In fact, the biggest headache for me is to choose the best suitable plugins.

Access to root directory

Another thing is that not really related to WordPress, but I can’t access my root directory. So that I can edit .htaccess file anyway I liked. Of course, I’ve total control over robots.txt too.

Themes and ads

There are many themes to choose from and most of them are premium quality. Easily blended with adsense. Most important of all, I can inject adsense ads between posts without having to use any parser.

Schedule posts

This is my favourite part. I can schedule post to any day and time I want. I don’t have to wait and post. I simply have to check in “Edit timestamp” and then choose the time and date I desire. This feature would really come in handy if I plan to take vacations. Many blogger users are longing for this feature too. I hope Blogger team would soon implement this.

If I have to write down, there’ll be many more. Let me stop here. I’ll follow up later with the post What I like about Blogger over WordPress.

1. Akismet
2. All in One SEO Pack
3. Google XML Sitemaps
4. Maintain Blogger Permalinks
5. Shylock Adsense
6. WP-ContactForm
7. WP-DBManager
8. FeedBurner FeedSmith
9. Similar Posts

Let me explain you one by one in details.

Akismet

This plugin comes with WordPress. This is a must have plugin for all WordPress users. What does this do?

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under Comments.

Yes, as it is mentioned above, you need to have WordPress.com API key for Akisment to operate. But it would take only a minute to create free WordPress.com account and get your API key.

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is very important to most bloggers. As the name says, this plugin fulfills almost every SEO needs. It can optimize your title, your post name, what you want to show or not, meta tags and many more. Highly recommend for organic traffic.

Google XML Sitemaps

The name says it all. It will create Google XML Sitemaps for you to submit at the Google Webmaster Center. If you don’t know what is Google Webmaster Center, well, you’re really a newbie. Start googling for it.

Maintain Blogger Permalinks

This plugin is for those who move to WordPress platform from Blogger.com like me. As WordPress.com have naming strategy different with Blogger.com, if we want to maintain our traffic and incoming links, we need to use it.

For example, a post title like: “Nobody give a damn about global warming yet” would make permalinks by blogger as:

nobody-give-a-damn-about

But for WordPress, it would produce permalinks as follow:

nobody-give-a-damn-about-global-warming-yet

This plugin will simply convert that long WordPress permalinks to make it look like Blogger permalinks. You only need to activate once. After that you can even delete this plugin if you want.

Well, whee, this post become too long now. So let me stop here and I will continue explanation about all other plugins later.

The first problem I face in the WordPress is that I can’t import Blogger posts using WordPress built-in import tools. So, I have to google around found that I should open wordpress.com account first. Import all my bloggers post to there and then export to the wordpress files. After that I have to import to my new installed wordpress blog.

Just like everyone else, even though I moved to WordPress, I don’t want to lose all my traffic and incoming links. Thanks to advice from Justinsomnia for Maintain permalinks moving from Blogger. I have followed all the advices from that article and it worked.

For those of you who wondered which plugins I am using now, here is the screenshot.

I’ll share my experience about each plugin later as I’m so new to this now. Hopefully, I’m matured now. I love WordPress.

Well, anyway, if you want to view the feedburner counts of the blogs that don’t display, you might be able to see it if you’re lucky. In fact, lucky here means those blog owners should have got change of mind and should be stupid too.

Here’s how to achieve this.

This is my feed address.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BridgeToNova

If you want to see my subscriber, you should type in the address bar as follow.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/BridgeToNova

What do you see now?

I’m not lying to you. You can’t see my counts because I know this trick and I’ve already prevented from it by deactivating in my feedburner dashboard. But hey, there are a lot of bloggers out there who don’t know this and you can check their feed counts.

I always change Outlook default setting by digging into Advanced Options via Tools –>> Options and then change the default folder. Hey but there’s an easier way to do this.

Just click on the Customize Outlook today button on the upper right corner of your Outlook as in the following pic.

After that you will see the following screen.

Be sure to uncheck, "When starting, go directly to Outlook Today" checkbox. The default for these would make Outlook to go directly to your inbox. If you prefer to go Outlook to any other folder than your inbox, you can choose any folder you want by click on Choose Folders button.

Hope this tip would help you make more productivity.

But for me, as a Office 2007 user, sometimes I forget to save the file in Word97-2003 compatible mode and save it in 2007 new format and then send to my friends and coworkers, who are still using Office 2003 or older. After a couple of times happened, I’ve got to find a way to change Office 2007 default save file format. After a dozen times of accidentally sending a Word 2007 document to co-workers still stuck on Office 2003, I’ve decided to make Word save in the Word 2003 format by default.

Here is the procedure:

1. First click on the Office button and then choose Word Options as in the following picture.

2. After that Choose the save on the left column. And then from Save files in this format drop-down menu, choose Word97-2003 Document (.doc) as in the following pic.

After that click save. From now on, Word 2007 will always save file in Word 97-2003 format. No more incompatible format saving any more. As you can guess, even though I told you only about Word 2007, you can apply this tip in Excel 2007, Powerpoint 2007 and any other Office 2007 applications.

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: The processing instruction target matching “[xX][mM][lL]” is not allowed.

This is because Blogger uses more strict and standardized XML. The above error simply mean the Adsense code is not standardized XML. To solve this, we need to replace all the html character such as ‘<’ with ‘>’ ‘”‘ with ‘”‘. Check the example below: This is original code.

This is XML standardized code:

You can use your text editor to replace all the HTML manually. Hey why don’t you check out Blogcrowds HTML parser. It is very easy and convenient. Be warned that changing the ads might violate the TOS of your specific ads company. So be sure to check with them to play safe.

Well, I have always just clicked NO, and moved on. I never even bother to click YES. I just wanted to get on with my work, so that I find a way to stop the computer to avoid showing that popup. Well, now I’ve got the tip to fix the problem. It is a simple fix.

• Just right click on the My Computer and click Properties.
• Once the System dialog box is open, click the Advanced tab
• And then click the Error Reporting tab at the bottom.
• Check the box that disables Error Reporting.

That’s it. I never have to look at that annoying popup again!

I’ll tell you the services which I think can be harmful for a system especially if your computer is over a network such as Internet/ University/ Office as bad boys can be anywhere.

To start the services management console, Go to Start Menu –>> Run and then type services.msc

After that disable any of the following services.

• 1. Stopping Windows Messenger Spam

Have you ever see a popup with a “Messenger Service” in the title bar while you’re surfing the net. If you did, that means someone is using the Messenger for sending adware to your system.

To stop it, disable the “Messenger” service from the Service Manager.

• 2. Disable NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing

It allows for someone to remotely access to your computer through NetMeeting. Unless, you’re regularly NetMeeting often, you should disable this.

Disable the “NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing” service from the Service Manager.

• 3. Disable Protected Storage

This service stores the passwords and the auto complete function with Internet Explorer. Unless, you want to use it, I recommend you disable it.

Disable “Protected Storage” service from the Service Manager.

• 4. Remote Desktop Help Session Manager

This service provides supports for Remote Assistance. If you use this service rarely or not at all, it is recommended to be disabled.

Disable “Remote Desktop Help Session Manager” service from the Service Manager.

• 5. Remote Registry Service

This service allows for your system registry to be accessible remotely. If you don’t require the assistance of someone to remotely have access to editing your registry settings, then disable this service.

Disable “Remote Registry” service from the Service Manager.

There you have it, 5 simple services which you can disable to improve not only security but also startup speed for your system.