I love finding little shortcuts to help me get things done. Sometimes it’s through automation of processes I do occasionally and sometimes its through speeding up something smaller that I need to do frequently. In this post I want to share something that definitely falls into the latter category. Duplicating files in Windows Explorer.
Like many who blog I keep a list of topic ideas which I plan to blog about at some point. When I get some time to write I pick a topic that I like the look of and get some words thrashed out. I was surprised when I saw something in last week’s MacStories members’ newsletter that directly related to something rather niche I had on my list. As I expect you’ve already guessed, this post is about that particular topic. It’s about getting text to and from the iOS app Drafts from Dropbox.
I spend quite a bit of time experimenting with the Workflow App by the folks over at DeskConnect. It’s an iOS application that brings Mac automator-style automation into the palm of your hand. As a result of my experimentations I’ve built up quite a library of workflows and whilst I wait for some sort of structure for the workflows I’ve come up with a few little tricks, notations and workflows to help me keep things organised. I’m going to share one of those with you today.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post I have quite a few Workflow app workflows on my iOS devices. Like many other long time Workflow users I’m looking forward to having a better way to keep track of and structure my collection of Workflows. However unlike everyone else I don’t want folders…
A month or two ago I had a bit of a problem with Windows Explorer and Google Drive that was rather painful. I lost a day of work to putting right an issue that simply shouldn’t have occurred and to be honest I’m quite glad it happened to me and not one of my colleagues as I imagine that for many of them things would have ended a lot worse. It was at this point that I began looking at alternatives to Windows Explorer.
As part of my day job I work with lots of files and one of the common activities I need to carry out is to compare the contents of those files to find omissions and inconsistencies. Fortunately most of the files I need to compare are pure text based files (e.g. XML, XSL, LOG, TXT, INI) and there are plenty of tools available to help work with those files. To work with files in general on Windows I make use of the XYplorer file manager and fortunately for me it is pretty easy to integrate my comparison tool of choice into it.
Another year ends and so it’s time to take my regular look back at what’s been particularly popular on thoughtasylum.com over this period and to also reflect on what I’ve been doing.
Working with data and configuration files is a part of my day job and this presents me with many opportunities to automate the things I need to do with them. Recently I had a need to check a large set of XML files to make sure there were no obvious errors in them and the approach I settled on was to integrate a command line tool into XYplorer - my Windows file manager of choice.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time helping out others on Twitter with their use of the Workflow app on iOS. In doing this I’ve fairly frequently come across people who are having notable issues that come down to it being a bug in the application. I’m often surprised that people seem to think that the best place to report a bug is via Twitter with a few vague sentences of description. To that end I figured I’d put together a quick overview of how I think I’d want the issues reported if I were one of the Workflow developers; which just to be clear, I’m not.
Around a year ago Smile released their new version of TextExpander. This new version created quite a bit of ‘heated debate’ in the Mac community and whilst many eschewed the update I chose not to. I’m glad I did and I thought others might find it interesting to get some idea of why that’s the case.
In my work I often find myself building spreadsheets to carry out calculations, manage sophisticated processes and capture information. These spreadsheets can often extend to covering many worksheets and as a result it can be awkwardly slow to navigate to particular worksheets just by paging back and forth with the navigation buttons. In this post I’m going to illustrate a couple of useful techniques to help you navigate around.
Every quarter SAP releases a set of updates for its SuccessFactors suite of products. With each release my colleagues and I examine the updates and analyse what is important and the impact it has for SuccessFactors customers. Be it change, enhancement or deprecation we’re on it. For the Q2 2017 release I picked up the analysis for the SuccessFactors service desk solution - Employee Central Service Centre
In my work, I write a lot of documents. A surprising amount in fact, probably equalled only by the number of spreadsheets. The majority of these (Microsoft Word) documents are produced for clients and I like to ensure as, best I can, that they are not only accurate but well presented. However, in order to simplify document production I make judicious use of templating and Word’s fields functionality. I use not only standard fields but also custom ones as well to update content in multiple places simultaneously on refresh.
The cloud-based cross-platform release of TextExpander has been around for over a year having launched in early April 2016. Whilst there has undoubtedly been a lot of progress on the apps (the Windows version in particular) the promise of the cloud platform I still don’t think has been realised and there’s still a lot of scope for improvement. In this post, I’m offering up a handful of ideas of where I’d like to see an improvement or offering from TextExpander. Most of these have already been shared with TextExpander, but the more consumer interest in a feature the more likely they’ll be to implement it and the sooner they’ll consider doing so.
Recently I was working on processing a file of data and in order to deduplicate and sort it, I decided to employ Windows’ PowerShell scripting functionality. It’s a very powerful tool-set and perfectly suited to what I needed to do, but I ran afoul of a small detail that caused me some confusion at first but that I resolved in the end. Just in case anyone else comes upon such an issue I thought it might be useful to write up the problem and the simple solution.
Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the Jam (collaboration) module and the platform’s mobile functionality.
I’ve been on Twitter a while now, but since starting in my current business role I’ve had a separate account for my work posts. I’ve been posting non-work things to @sylumer and work items to @SAP_Stephen. However last month I changed my work Twitter account and in this post I’m going to talk a little about the reason and approach.
Recently I was using an Excel spreadsheet to prepare some data and I had a constraint to work to in the number of lines of data the target system could display. Unfortunately rather than rows of data in Excel this was to match against rows of data in a single Excel cell. So the question is, how can you count the number of rows in an Excel cell?
Something I find I need to do quite regularly is take a snap shot of a folder. For the purposes of saving space (and often for passing on the folder to someone else) I like to compress the folder into a ZIP archive and prefix the current time stamp to the file name. This little activity was perfect for a bit of automation and so I created a little script in XYplorer (my Windows file manager of choice) to make this as easy as clicking a button.
2017 has passed into history and so I’m taking my annual look back at what’s been getting the page hits on thoughtasylum.com and a personal look at the past year.
Today I’m going to share an XYplorer script for combining files through concatenation - i.e. merging them together by appending the files to one another in order to create a new combined file. Whilst it isn’t the sort of script I use everyday it does speed up the occasions when I need to combine plain text based files into a single file; in my case often for post-test data loading.
Whilst I’m not a presenter on radio or podcast show, I do actually spend a fair amount of time speaking to people via my computers. I join conference calls, webinars and everything in between. For this I have my trusty Blue Yeti microphone. Not a top of the line microphone, but a notable improvement over the USB Jabra Speakerphone I used previously; though I still use this as my speaker and as my travel microphone.
Another quick but useful script for the Windows file manager XYplorer today when using it alongside my favourite screenshot application on Windows, Greenshot.
In my work, I work with PDFs on a daily basis. Typically I’m generating them as documentation, or reading documentation. But I also occasionally work with PDFs in different ways. Pulling out pages, replacing them with others, or building entirely new ones. When I’m doing that on my work laptop running windows, I fall back to using the PDF Toolkit utility. Whilst there are visual interfaces to use this tool I most often identify a need to do something with a PDF when I’m working with the file itself. For that reason I’ve created some XYplorer scripts that make accessing common PDF manipulations even easier.
Q1 2018 : SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Centre - Quarterly Review
Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) is an unusual SuccessFactors solution in that it isn’t really a single module. Rather it is a combination of modules that integrate with SuccessFactors to provide an HR service desk with self-service functionality as well as the usual incident* management functionality. * If ‘incidents’ seems an unfamiliar term, it may be that they are known simply as ‘tickets’ or ‘cases’ in your organisation. As a result, there are different stages at which updates are applied to different systems and in turn, ECSC can receive updated functionality in a staggered manner. However, by the time this post is released all of the details should be applicable to production ECSC systems. Whilst there are many integrations, hooks and instances of building on top of other systems involved in deploying and running ECSC I’ll be specifically covering the following areas in this review of the Q1 2018 releases. Ask HR – the employee’s interface to ECSC. C4C (SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, Service) – the HR service agent’s interface to ECSC. Languages – a brief not on updated language support. Product News - A new ECSC offering from SAP.
Everything you need to know about the SAP SuccessFactors Q1 2018 release
Do you use SAP SuccessFactors? Well if you do and you haven’t already read through the quarterly release review articles from Zalaris, then you really should. The team go in depth on a module by module basis picking out the key things that customers need to know about. Find out what the impact will be on you and your organisation. Get tips on what features and options to use and what you might want to steer clear of or simply ignore at this point.
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