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06 Apr 2018
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.
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24 Mar 2018
Another quick but useful script for the Windows file manager XYplorer today when using it alongside my favourite screenshot application on Windows, Greenshot.
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04 Feb 2018
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.
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20 Jan 2018
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.
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04 Jan 2018
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.
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22 Dec 2017
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.
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30 Nov 2017
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?
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10 Oct 2017
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.
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24 Sep 2017
TextExpander is a fantastic tool that fundamentally allows you to enter a string of characters and trigger a response that can replace the text with different content (e.g. plain text, formatted text, an image). On some platforms it can do even more, triggering scripts; though generally the intent is to then return and output some content.
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08 Sep 2017
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.
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