The Cat II

Cats are the only animals though live with humans were never domesticated.

At the Restaurant - Rangoli

Today is Makar Sankranti, end of the harvesting season and also winter. People wear new cloths and eat well. So since my mom insisted a lot i went to buy some cloths for me and tried Rangoli, a Gujurati Restaurants part of the Sarvana Bhavan at Pondy Bazar, Chennai. I had Thali, because when I asked for the menu the guy brought me the menu for the Thali - contents of the Thali only. Any way based on my previous experience I figured out that it would be very expensive otherwise to have separate dishes.

I was served with Dhokla and some other Gujju snacks (are they snacks?), and Jaljeera. The Thali had around 8-10 types of dishes, and Rotis etc. Well I did not go thru the menu what I was being served, so no idea what were there. Any way, food was very typical, and ok sorts. A little too many sweet tasting dishes. As I don’t like sweet, did not have all. Further I was not feeling hungry as well. So 80% of my plate was still full when I was full as well (what a waste of money). But I have decided to go there once more, when I am little more hungry so that I can eat properly and decided how was the food.

Sarvana Bhavan have good reputation for service, and this place was no exception. Crowd was mostly Northies.

London Citi

The Golf Course

The Wimbledon and the Dreamer

The Wimbledon+ Renault



The Wimbledon+Renault + Dreamer

At the Restaurant - Sangri La

Today is Saturday, and it is my weekly filmy day with my friend Kaushik. We went to a place called Sangri-la, which is a Chinese Restaurant near Besant Nagar bus stand in Chennai. There were not many people at the time we went to dine, may be because it was late, but on a Saturday Night, how late it could be at 2230 hrs? Food was good, authentic Chinese, service was also pretty good. I like the Chinese Tea that they served complimentary. Price was a bit upper side, but as i have found out in Chennai, dining out here is expensive, so it was ok.




This is Kaushik, trying his hands at chopsticks.

What is Marriage?

Source: E-mail forward

1. Marriage is not a word. It’s a sentence (a life sentence).
2. Marriage is love. Love is blind. Therefore marriage is an institution for the blind.
3. Marriage is an institution in which a man loses his Bachelor’s Degree and the woman gets her masters.
4. Marriage is a three-ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring and suffering.
5. Married life is full of excitement and frustration: In the first year of marriage, the man speaks and the woman listens. In the second year, the woman speaks and the man listens. In the third year, they both speak and the NEIGHBOUR listens.
6. Getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want, and when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that instead.
7. There was this man who muttered a few words in the church and found himself married. A year later he muttered something in his sleep and found himself divorced.
8. A happy marriage is a matter of giving and taking; the husband gives and the wife takes.
9. Son: How much does it cost to get married, Dad? Father: I don’t know son, I’m still paying for it.
10. Son: Is it true Dad? I heard that in ancient China, a man doesn’t know his wife until he marries her. Father: That happens everywhere, son, EVERYWHERE!
11. Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.
12. They say that when a man holds a woman’s hand before marriage, it is love; after marriage it is self-defense.
13. When a newly married man looks happy, we know why. But when a 10-year married man looks happy, we wonder why.
14. There was this lover who said that he would go through hell for her. They got married, and now he is going through HELL.
15. When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.
16. Eighty percent of married men cheat in America, the rest cheat in Europe.

Pondy Bazar

This is the most happening market place in Chennai.


This is Sarvana Stores. All Chennai is Sarvana Bhavan, they are one of the largest shops in here. They have 3 buildings huge ones.



This place is called Pothy's. there is a bus-stand named after it.

Creating Simple Macros

This is the extracts of an presentation that I had prepared for an Training on Creation Simple MS Excel Macros.

Link to the file: Excel Macro Training.ppt

Introduction

• We do a lot of repetitive tasks like copy pasting, formatting etc.
• A macros help us to automate tedious or repetitive tasks with ease of a click of a button or shortcut key.
• A macro is a set of instructions that tells Excel to perform one or more actions for you. Macros are like computer programs, but they run completely within Excel.
• Macros can carry out sequence of actions much more quickly than you could do yourself.

Agenda

There are 2 ways to create a a macro: You can record it, or can build it by entering instructions in a module. Either way your instructions are encoded in the programming language MS VBA.

• You’ll learn how to rerecord and execute a simple macro.
• Then you will learn how to view the recorded macro and make it more useful by doing some simple editing.

Overview

The overall process for recording a macro consists of three steps.

• Start the macro recorder and supply a name for the macro.
• Perform the actions you want to record
• Stop the macro recorder.

Using the Macro Recorder

Rather than type macros character by character, you can have Excel create a macro by recording the menu commands, keystrokes, and other action needed to accomplish a task.

Lets see how to create a macro to draw a boarder around a selected area.

1. Select the small area in a blank work sheet
2. Choose Tools>Macro>Record New Macro. Excel displays the Record Macro dialogue box.
3. Assign Name to the macro.
4. Assign a key combination to the macro by entering a letter.
5. Store the macro in the currently active work book.
6. Enter a description for the macro in the description box.
7. To begin recording click OK. Excel displays the message Recording in the status bar and Stop Recording tool bar.
8. Press Ctrl+1 and draw borders in the borders tab.
9. Click the Stop Recording Macro button on the Stop Recording toolbar.

Running a Macro without Using a Keyboard Shortcut

• You don’t have to know a macro’s key combination to run the macro. Instead, you can use the Macro dialog box:

• Choose Tools>Macro, Macros to display the dialog box.

• Select the name of the macro, and click Run.

• You also can use the Macro dialog box to view and edit macros, as you’ll see in the next section.

Behind the Scenes: The VBA Environment

• Now that you’ve recorded your macro, let’s find out what Excel did. When you clicked OK in the Record Macro dialog box, Excel created something called a module in the active workbook. As you drawn a table in the worksheet, Excel recorded your actions and inserted the corresponding VBA code in the module.
• The new module doesn’t appear with the other sheets in the workbook; to view the module, choose Tools, Macro, Macros. Next, select the “Border” macro, and click the Edit button.
• The Visual Basic Editor (VBE) starts up, and the module that contains the “Border” macro appears.
• The first and last lines of the code act as the beginning and endpoints for the macro you’ve recorded; a Sub statement starts the macro and names it, and an End Sub statement ends the macro. You’ll notice that special VBA terms, called keywords, are displayed in dark blue.

Adding Code to an Existing Macro

• Suppose you’ve recorded a macro that enters a series of labels, sets their font, and then draws a border around them. Then you discover that you forgot a step or that you recorded a step incorrectly—you chose the wrong border format, for example. What do you do?
• To add code to an existing macro, you can record actions in a temporary macro and then transfer the code into the macro you want to change. For example, to the “Border” macro a step that sets font and border options for the table, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools, Macro, Record New Macro. Excel presents the Record Macro dialog box. In the Macro Name box, enter MacroTemp and click OK. Excel displays the Stop Recording toolbar.

2. Choose Format, Cells, and click the Font tab. Select Trebuchet MS, 10-point, and Bold Italic. Then click OK to apply the formats.

3. Click the Stop Recording button on the Stop Recording toolbar.

4. Choose Tools, Macro, Macros. In the Macro dialog box, select MacroTemp and click Edit.

5. A window appears that contains the original macro you recorded plus the MacroTemp macro.

6. Select all the code inside the macro—from the line beginning With through the line beginning End With—and then choose Edit, Copy.

7. Scroll up to display the “Border” macro

8. Click at the penultimate that contains this statement:

End Sub

9. Press Enter to create a blank line. Then position the insertion point at the beginning of the blank line.

10. Choose Edit, Paste.

11. Scroll back down and delete the entire MacroTemp macro, from the Sub statement to the End Sub statement.

To test the macro, return to Excel (press Alt+F11 or select the Excel button on the taskbar). Clear the company name and address that you entered earlier when you recorded the macro. Then press Ctrl+Shift+A.

Using the Personal Macro Workbook

• When you recorded the “Border” macro earlier, you placed the macro in a module that belongs to the active workbook. A macro that has been placed in a module is available only when the workbook containing the module is open.
• To make a macro available at all times, store it in the Personal Macro Workbook. This workbook is normally hidden. you can unhide it by choosing Window, Unhide and selecting Personal in the Unhide dialog box.
• If you don’t see the Personal file in the Unhide dialog box, or if the Unhide command is unavailable, you have not yet created a Personal Macro Workbook.
• To create one, begin recording a macro, as described earlier in this chapter, andselect the Personal Macro Workbook option in the Record New Macro dialog box. Excel creates the Personal Macro Workbook and places its file (Personal.xls) in the XLStart folder.
• Excel opens Personal.xls, as it does any other file in the XLStart folder, each time you start Excel.
• Because the Personal Macro Workbook is always available when you work in Excel, it’s a good place to record macros that you want to be able to use in any workbook.

Going On from Here

• You’ve learned how to create macros with the help of the macro recorder. As you learn more about the VBA programming language (a subject beyond the scope of this session), you’ll notice that the macro recorder often creates more code for a task than you really need. The recorder adds these lines because it didn’t (and couldn’t) know they weren’t necessary. You can edit them out without changing the functionality of the macro in any way.
• As you move toward expertise in VBA, you will probably find yourself creating most of your code directly in the VBE, bypassing the recorder altogether

Conclusion

• The best way to use the lessons learned today is to practice it. Use the macros in day to day office work.
• Try to innovate and experiment on the things you have learned.
• Share your acquired knowledge with others.

Spreadsheet Glossary

Source: J Walk.com

Audit: Annual event where CAs come in and officially point out mathematical errors in your spreadsheets.

Auto-Save: What your spreadsheet does immediately after you make a huge mistake and just before you press Undo. If you have a sound card, you may be able to hear your program laughing at you.

Backup: Many spreadsheet programs will automatically create a backup of your current file. This gives you two copies of the same non-balancing file.

Cell: This is where you spend the rest of your life when your boss has made you spend several nights at the office until a large project is finished. The cell will have bars if you are a type A personality, and will be padded if you are type B.

CIRC: See Circular Reference.

Circular Reference: See CIRC.

Cursor: What one becomes who sits in front of the same spreadsheet that won't balance for more than 2 hours.

Cut, Copy and Paste: What you do with your printouts to get something intelligible. See Table.

Format: Visual enhancements to spreadsheets to draw attention away from inaccuracies.

Formula: Mathematical equations that display as ERR, DIV/0 or N/A.

Frame: What you do with your first error free spreadsheet. (Contact MENSA if you did this in less than 1 month.)

Goal Seek: When you know the answer (because you did it on your calculator in 10 seconds) but can't get the spreadsheet to work right. Also known as Backsolve.

GPF: What happens when you finally get your spreadsheet working correctly. But before you've had a chance to save it.

Group Mode: The ability to populate a group of worksheets with the same error, saving yourself lots of time.

Import: Ability to get huge amounts of data from an outside source allowing you to create hundreds and thousands of rows of seemingly meaningful data.

Invalid File: Error you get once you have finally perfected your spreadsheet and attempt to load it the next day to print. Only occurs if you don't do regular backups.

Link: Ability to get erroneous information from a file without actually loading it into memory.

Macro: Automated mistakes, made at the speed of light.
Print Preview: Lets you know if your printout will be Portrait or Landscape. Information on the screen bears no resemblance to what actually prints out.

Solver: Spreadsheet tool usually used by geeks who want to bring their computer's processor to its knees. No valid data ever obtained, but it makes you feel good that you forced your computer to think for more than half a second.

Sort: Fast method to randomize a column of formula references.
Table: Furniture used to spread out all of your papers and arrange them so they look like what is on the screen. See Cut, Copy and Paste.

Titles, Horizontal: Headings printing on the left margin you wanted at the top of your document.

Titles, Vertical: Headings printing on the top margin you wanted down the left side of your document.

Undo: Feature that enables you to revert from the current spreadsheet with 47 error values to where you were before you made your mistake when you only had 13 errors.

What-If Analysis: The process of automatically generating detailed projections for hundreds of different scenarios - not one of which has a snowball's chance in hell of being even remotely possible.

Window: Ability to look at multiple pieces of multiple files simultaneously. While this may sound attractive, you must have at least three hands to navigate these windows to successfully build formulas - unless you have a mouse, then you need four hands.

Wizard: Interface enhancements that enable you to create complex and sophisticated errors at unprecedented speeds.

WYSIWYG: What You So Intensely Wish You'd Got