Have two separate instances of Excel!

My work revolves around Excel and with my dual monitor setup it makes it a hell of alot more productive if i can have one Excel instance open on one monitor and the next on the other monitor.

But Excel always opens your second document as a worksheet of the first one and you can thus not seperate them and drag one to the extended montitor.

I found a blog on online tech tips that explains how to make two seperate excel instances possible and it works like a bomb.

Simply download THIS file. Extract it on your PC and run the file "Add Open In New Excel Instance.bat"

After this registry file has been applied you will be able to right click on any Excel file and select "Open in New Excel Instance" and you will have two seperate Excel instances!

Enjoy

Self ISO(CD) Image Burner

When you have a CD that either autoruns when you put it into your PC or it allows you to boot boot up using it (Like a Windows OS CD) then you cant just copy the files on the one CD to another CD and hope for the autorun or boot to still work cause it wont. If you want to copy CDs like this you make an image of the CD. These image files will then keep the correct structures in place to allow an exact copy of the original CD!

There are two issues with burning these CD image files though, if you arent IT savy you wont know how to burn an image file and if you are IT savy you will want to find an easier way of accomplishing this task.

I found this sofware on Raymond.cc's blog and simply love the idea and how well it works.

CD Self Burner allows you to select a CD image, usually an .ISO file and then convert it into an .EXE file that self burns the image using a built in burning tool by simply double clicking on the created .EXE file!

How simple is it now to have backups of your CDs that only requires a double click to be on CD, makes the sharing of CD images to your friends seamless.

Enjoy.

Bandwidth monitor!

Something was using up all of my home internet bandwidth and it wasnt my own internet usage and all of my antivirus scans showed it wasnt a virus, what to do?

I have 4 pcs on my network and if not all of them then one of them has irregular usage, and i was determined to find it! I needed a tool i could install on each pc to check the wan (internet) activity over a period of time and maybe this way find the culprit!

I found Networx and it does just this and a lot more. I installed it on all 4 pcs on my network and by the next day i found the PC that has the high usage and backed it up and reinstalled it and problem solved!!

Another use: If you have a cap on your internet line and want a warning when the cap is getting close, then you can use this tool to specifty the warning level you want and the software will alarm you at this time.

Enjoy.

Everything Search Engine

There are so many ways to search for something on your PC, most of us use Windows search (Cause we're used to it), some of us use Google Desktop (Very good and includes content search functionality, meaning being able to look for a term inside a document somewhere on your pc) and many many more tools.

I was however looking for something faster, not needing to have content search functionality, but it needs to help me find files by their file names on my PC ASAP. Windows and Google Desktop are extremely thorough tools, but they take their time. First i thought this was going to be tricky to find this tool, but i found it quickly and man is it quick.... :-)

The tool is called 'Everything Search', it is a small file to download, a quick installation, an extremely quick indexing of the files on all of your drives and partions and your ready. Simply double click on the icon in your system tray and type what youre looking for, if you have it somewhere on your PC Everywhere will find it at lightning speed.

Enjoy :-)

Synergy, sharing your keyboard & mouse between screens

I have a laptop at work and convinced my boss that i needed a bigger monitor to connect to the laptop, as the bigger space will make me more productive :-) He bought it!

Extending my 15" laptop desktop to include the 19" monitor gave me a much bigger space to work on and ive become so used to it that i get frustrated when im limited to only the laptop screen when not in the office. Anyway, i have a second older laptop at work, my old one, which was just sitting there gathering dust, so i started using it as well.

It was only last week that i found this awesome software that i realised how much fun i can have if i can control all three screens (current 2 extended screens and one more pc accessible via a network connection) with ONE keyboard and ONE mouse.

Synergy allows you to setup a server and client PC on a network, one sharing the other using the shared mouse and keyboard. The the client will have the server's mouse and keyboard movements sent via the network and you wont even see or feel the difference, its like having the periferals plugged directly into this pc even if they arent :-)

I now have a desktop that spans 3 monitors, one dedicated as an internet browser, one dedicated as an email manager and the last my main monitor for my other tasks.

My original request for an additional screen to my boss was not really for increased productivity, but now that i have three i can assure you the setup is making me less distracted from the important things that are always in view on the other screens and not hidden behind other application screens.

Download Synergy from http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Enjoy :-)