Automate Excel

Just a quick note that this site is now publishing partial rss and atom feeds. So instead of seeing the entire contents in your feed reader, you will only see about the first paragraph. You will have to click through to read the full post here.

Why am I doing this? People are republishing my feed on their sites, and in it’s entirety because that’s what I publish in my rss.

Basically anybody with a free afternoon can figure out how to republish rss feeds. In the past I dealt with the couple people who did this individually, but it’s becoming harder to do and a much more frequent occurance.

For an example here’s a site I noticed doing this today (the second this week): http://headlinedepot.com/feedview.php?feedid=1850 (screenshot)

You’ll notice only partial feeds show up there now, however earlier today they were displaying the entire content of each of my posts, reading every word of my rss feed and republishing.

So after doing some research I found multiple opinions that the only way to truly protect your feed from getting hijacked is to not publish the full feed, and hence my partial feeds.

The Office Preview Site now has an RSS feed.

Why do I care? “Visit this site often for the latest news, and register to get the beta when it’s available.” Now I don’t have to visit to get the news, it will come to me Thanks Microsoft.

Indeed.com collects job postings from various news sources and websites then makes them available via search and RSS. They also have an API which exposes these results to developers.

The folks at Work Magazine created a job search spreadsheet with this data.

“You know how sometimes the only thing you want to do at work is search for another job, but you’re afraid you’ll get in trouble?”

The spreadsheet worked flawlessly for me and the API signup was painless.

Looks like the first result for an Excel Job search in central KY is for Production Control at Jim Beam:

I’m a podcast consumer, not producer, however if I ever switch to the other side I’ll be sure to check out ZxlXML - an Excel Podcast Generator (download halfway down center page)

“It will write iTunes compatible RSS, calculate your file sizes, and if you’re so inclined you can modify it to your heart’s content.”

I received some feedback on the Create an RSS Feed With Excel and wanted to make a quick note that its updated.

Some news-readers weren’t seeing the description from the feed, fixed.

Debra Dalgleish has an Excel site called Contextures.com, which in my opinion has some of the best Excel tutorials on the web.

If you look at the bottom of her homepage you’ll see she now has an RSS feed!

I’d recommend subscribing to keep up to date on when new tutorials become available.

The blogroll is updated (and getting a bit longer

(via the pdbook)

Research Buzz posted about a cool tool to mashup the Excel RSS feeds called RSSMix

I took their examples and created a mashed feed here.

Very nice, this could definitely be parsed as another interpretation of Dicks Excel Headlines idea. Just dump in all the Excel feeds and out pops the latest and greatest Excel posts.

And I’m now subscribed

Dick posted his Excel headlines idea over here and it looks like it’s starting to get some legs. Here’s an interpretation here, here, and even a french version over here.

From the pdbook I learned that John Peltier has added an RSS feed to his site and so did Andy Pope Over Here.

I also noticed two French Excel blogs here and here. Blogroll is updated!

Sidenote: It’s a shame there is still a language barrier in 2005 with all the technology out there. I’m sure this wasn’t the intented tagline for the XXL site, via the google translation of the page “Some Tricks to Smell Itself Well with Excel”

Update: Misange stopped by and pointed out the correct translation is “Some Tricks to feel more confortable with Excel“. That’s more like it! Thanks.

I was just browsing the article 15 things you can do with RSS and noticed that WunderGround provides an RSS feed for weather (the option is available after doing a search).

Knowing that RSS is consumable with Excel (XML versions), I whipped up a barebones* example of getting the current and daily forecasted weather into Excel.

You can download the Weather Spreadseet here.

Simply enter a City and State and hit the “Get Weather” button. If the inputs are valid, your spreadsheet will return data looking something like this:

Looks like possible rain for the running of the derby today

*This is a barebones example to demonstrate how to get weather into Excel. I included only an “On Error Resume Next” instead of detailed error handling, and the weather is returned as single string (ideally this string would be parsed).