Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 04:32 AM PDT

Spam is a problem. Even with the greatest of spam filters, our email addresses are still bombarded with requests for money from third-world royalty, promises of instant appendage enlargements, and various get-rich-quick business opportunities.

Instead of letting spam waste space in your inbox or spam folder, try recycling it. SpamRecycling.com can turn this daily annoyance into a work of art.

SpamRecycling.com affectionately refers to spam as data waste. To start recycling spam, forward one a spam message to Spam@SpamRecycling.com.

Within a few minutes, the site will send you an email with a link. Click the link to watch your spam be recycled. The email arrives in both German and English, so if you do not understand the first half of the email, just scroll down to the second half.

On the page that appears, click Enter.

The next page shows a list of all the spam emails you have forwarded to the service. Click one of them for the service to begin recycling it. Click Start when you are ready to watch the spam become art.

The words from your spam start swirling in tornado fashion.

Words are then broken into individual letters, and continue swirling until they are sucked into a whirlpool-like vortex, then spit out to travel the screen in random directions, making swirls and unique patterns.

As the letters make their patterns on the screen, use the color wheel on the left to alter the background and style of your artwork.

When your art is finished, click the red circle (the one that looks like a record button) to have your art sent to your inbox.

Our finished art would make a great desktop background. Here is our recycled spam:

We like the idea of recycling spam into something fairly useful. The generated artwork is lovely. Overall, SpamRecycling.com is a nice way to spend a few minutes on an otherwise boring afternoon.

Copyright © 2007
Online Tech Tips.
Aseem Kishore (digitalfingerprint: a59a56dce36427d83e23b501579944fcakmk1980 (74.125.94.82) )

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Recycle Spam into Works of Art

Link Cells Between Tabs and Workbooks and In Excel 2010

Posted: 22 Mar 2011 05:10 AM PDT

A common thing to do in Excel is to use one sheet for collecting raw data, such as sales totals, and then to use another tab, or even a workbook to create summations or reports; the thing is though, doing so requires you to have to link cells between them. Fortunately, this is a lot easier than it sounds.

To see how it works, first create or open a sheet that has some data in it; here, we'll use the data sheet shown below:

Highlight and copy the cells you want to link, in this case, the YTD totals for each of the prior ten years.

Next, start a new Tab, by clicking one of the tabs at the bottom of the workbook.

Then, move over to the place in your new tab where you want to place your link, and highlight the same number of cells that you started with on the first tab:

Then right click in the highlighted area, you should see this PopUp menu:

Look where it says Paste Options: there are six icons to choose from, they represent, from left to right: Paste, Values, Formulas, Transpose, Formatting, and Paste Link.

To paste the data from your other tab, choose Paste Link.

Note: Excel 2010 unlike prior versions of Excel lets you see what will be pasted into your sheet when you hover over the options.

To see what happened when you pasted your link, move to one of the cells that was copied over and note what it says in the cell display box:

In the example, "Raw Sales Numbers" refers to the name of the original tab, while the exclamation point is known as a pointer, in this case because it's pointing to the cell to follow (P7). Thus, in this sheet, the contents of cell E5 in the new tab is whatever is in cell P7 on the Tab called Raw Sales Numbers.

The process for linking between Workbooks, is virtually identical; the exception being, instead of pasting to a new Tab, you instead paste to cells in a whole different spreadsheet.

And the address in one of the pasted cells looks like this:

In this case, the cell contents shows first that it's an external Excel sheet, then the path address of the file, the sheet name, the tab name, and finally a range name that was created automatically for the range of cells that was specified.

Linking between tabs or workbooks is a useful thing to do when you want to have raw data in once place, and results in another; this is particularly true of large sheets where it can become difficult to see what is what; grouping results on a new tab helps to clarify your spreadsheets and makes them far easier to read and understand.

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Link Cells Between Tabs and Workbooks and In Excel 2010