Excel spreadsheet functions - Funzioni foglio di calcolo

When working with Microsoft Excel, you will find the need to use spreadsheet functions sooner or later. Those functions can be put directly into a cell and do not require any knowledge of Basic.

However, their names are translated into the application language so non English copies will have localized function names; this means you will need to translate them into your locale before being able to use them otherwise you will get the error #NAME?

Remember that this operation is not necessary in order to view Excel files as upon opening they will automatically be converted to work with the application locale.

Here is a descriptive list of Excel 2003 functions.

Here you can translate function names between different languages.

Note: the same applies to OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice Calc

[SQL] Oracle LIMIT clause

To limit the number of rows returned by a query, in standard SQL you would:

SELECT *

FROM table

WHERE [conditions]

LIMIT number

In Oracle you just add ROWNUM to the WHERE clause like:

SELECT *

FROM table

WHERE [conditions] AND ROWNUM=1

To have the equivalent of SQL "LIMIT 1"

[PL/SQL] Test a string for a numeric value

In PL/SQL, you can easily check whether a string contains numeric values with:

LENGTH(TRIM(TRANSLATE(string, '0123456789', ' ')))

This will return null if the string contains only numeric characters otherwise it will return the number of non-numeric characters in it.

[How to] Run multiple Firefox instances

If you'd like to run multiple Firefox instances on Windows without having to fiddle with the profile settings and maybe run different versions too, you can always install both Firefox and Firefox portable (no need to have the same version).

Simply browse to the Firefox portable installation directory and edit the FirefoxPortable.ini file changing AllowMultipleInstances=false to AllowMultipleInstances=true

That's it, you can now run the two browsers side by side.

Grog application development

So, you decided to give Grog, the PaaS based on OSGi for Public Administrations and private networks a try and downloaded, installed and configured it. Now you'd like to test it with some applications of yours, but how?

In this post  I will describe how to develop and package an OSGi application so that it is Grog-ready.

Grog setup and configuration

In this tutorial we are going to install and configure the prototype for Grog, a PaaS based on OSGi for Public Administrations and private networks.

Grog, a PaaS based on OSGi for Public Administrations and private networks

As a result of my 9-months thesis work, I now present Grog, a PaaS based on OSGi for Public Administrations and private networks.