Spam. Crisis. Spam, spam, spam, spa.....

Beep! Hi!

Sorry for the delay in updating our blog. Too many events happen nowadays. First of all, this is the economical crisis. Since the advertising and marketing department of our company (in my face) is located in Russia, I myself see how this crisis impacts the advertising budgets. Many companies started to reduce them, they ask 40-50% discounts and postpone the approval of the budgets to Spring.

Second, our blog is exposed to spam attacks. :) We already hardly distinguish between men and robots! Therefore, if you are a man write "BEEP!" in your comment! ;) In this way we will deceive the foul robots! :D

All the best wishes from YellowRiver,
Alex

BOM (Bill Of Materials) in EXCEL

Hi,

today we would like to present our new project for small and medium enterprises - BOM or Bill Of Materials. This is a tool implemented in Excel that laves you all the flexibility of Excel itself and adds some additional funcionality to manage your bill of materials.

Each of your products can be split into its components and primary materials, out of which your product cost and production time derive.

Now that the solution is in Excel you can easily create your BOM hierarchies and calculate precisely the time and the cost for the production of your products. In addition, we also realized the function for fixed cost allocation based on the production time allocation driver.

Find below the demonstration video of the alfa version of the tool:


Feel free to send us your comments, ideas, proposals and suggestions. We are always happy to receive any feedback from you.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Currently busy with...

Hi guys,

these days we are a little bit inactive on our blog. It seems to me that the economical crisis impacted even on our activities. Now we have to do more to maintain the levels of income as a year before. :) So, we are a little bit busy with projects.

So, since I am the representative of the IT part I will tell you in brief what I do. Then maybe on week-end we will have the report from Alex who represents creative design part. :)

Today there will be just text, no videos, no images... We are in design and development process.

Well, there are several projects that I am currently busy with at my primary work place. The first one is the application to manage order and sales simulations. Before the company we do the project for extensively used "unmanaged" Excel spreadsheets. Why unmanaged? Because every single simulation was created manually on four sheets with huge amount of information. Now that we work with SAP BPC (ex Outlooksoft) we keep on working in Excel but now every single sheet is 100% managed! :) B-)
So now we automate at maximum the process of simulation! :) All the data are stored in a central database, Excel becomes as a user interface to access the data in a correct way. :) The user makes selections of products, product types, production sites etc., get automatically generated templates for data input, inputs data with all the necessary data validation controls, the data is then passed to SPSS for optimization and returned to the user for eventual modifications.

The other project is the application to manage the company's where I work internal budget. This is quite a standard project also done by means of SAP BPC. Here the particular feature is that we are trying to overcome some natural limits of SAP BPC to create flexible applications.

And the last small project (small compared to the previous two, but not less important) is the creation of web-services and components to use in Excel to make it programmatically easily communicate with them. Very often our clients ask us to provide some interface to manage some simple tasks on the server like database optimization, update, file launch, data report etc. So, we traditionally provide interfaces based on Excel and program it to easily communicate with the web-services.
Therefore, if you have some applications and you want to stay in touch with them even when you are away (not away from Internet though) we will be able to help you. :)

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Slide progress bar UPDATE

Hi,

today we would like to announce about the release of an updated version of the SlideProgressBar for PowerPoint. B-)

Here is the original link to the explanation of what this solution is about. :)
http://yriverit.blogspot.com/2008/02/power-point-slide-progress-bar.html

We also introduced some support for shape filling and line dashing. Actually, now you can build slide progress bar in many variations using gradient filling, dashed lines, various line weights etc.
What you have to do is to create any shape (let's say, a rectangle), change its properties (line weight, line style, color etc.), select the option DEFAULT FOR NEW OBJECTS and click OK.

Watch the example:


Here you see that the line became dashed, styled as double line and the fill effects were set to a vertical shading style of two colors (the colors themselves are not important since you are to define them).

Pay attention that the flag DEFAULT FOR NEW OBJECTS is checked.

All the modifications to the default shape will be reflected in the newly built progress bars. :)

When you rebuild the bars you will see the result of your modifications:

(the fill type is gradient, the lines are dashed and double) :)

We actually build slide progress bars even for Office 2003 styled as Office 2007 making them more robust and beautiful. :)

Enjoy! :)

As usual, you can download the add-in
from our web-site www.yriver.it
(PPT_SlideProgressBar.exee [you've to change the extension from .EXEE to .EXE since this is a self-extracting WinRAR archive])
in the category OUR PROJECTS.

Field exploration!!!

Check out a new view on the "space" exploration!!!



Alex

Hello, George Soros!

Good news everyone!

Today I’d like to tell you about a good means of communication with your potential clients. It should not be neglected. This means is just a simple direct contact with the customers. It allows analysing your offer and adjusting it to a certain person in the best way. This will obviously increase the probability to make a deal. Additionally, in contrast to working with mass media you will always be able to get the hottest client’s feedback and calculate the effectiveness of the potential contact. :)

Once I had an order to create an advertising campaign for promoting some country cottages on the market. Their distinctive feature was large plots sold together with the cottages. The circle of people able to buy such houses was very limited. I suggested to my client that we targeted exactly this small circle of people. Therefore, we sent to the preselected people who might become potential customers a courier with a parcel which contained a box with a piece of sod with some uncut grass on it. :) On this box we put small garden shears and a small card with a slogan saying something like: “You can create a park to your taste!!!”

Alex

Transfer Gantt charts to Power Point presentations III

Hi,

today, we have updated our "internal" tool for transferring Gantt charts from MS Project to MS Power Point to the version 1.5.5. The tool serves to map Gantt charts from MS Project on one slide of MS PowerPoint. Since we have to do it often, we did our best not to do this "work" manually! ;)

This is a video of the tool's general functionality:


There are several interesting improvements. First of all, we decided to add a table with task names to each slide. It gives you an access to the task names in the whole slide, not only in just one shape.

Then we decided to give you the possibility to choose how many symbols of the task name to display in the shapes of Power Point. Since task naming approaches vary from person to person it became quite difficult to provide automatic truncation of long task names that would satisfy everybody. Now you can decide whether you want to see the whole task name or just the first 10 symbols of it.

We also worked a little bit on the design of the resulting presentation. My personal recommendation, though, is that you use PowerPoint2007 which provides very good default "beauty" to the newly created shapes and tables. But since still a lot of people use PowerPoint2003 we tried to format its Gantt chart presentation in a similar way to PowerPoint2007. Hopefully, you will appreciate these design improvements.

There were also added some other minor improvements, but they were not so critical. :)

And finally, we would like to draw your attention to the speed of presentation building. Having to choose between simplicity and functionality we, as for the time being, choose simplicity. Therefore, the add-in is built purely in VBA which is a little bit limited in respect to the languages of .NET platform. Therefore, the construction of the presentation, especially if over 100 slides are to be created, is slow. To drastically improve the speed we recommend that before transferring your Gantt charts to a new presentation you close all open PowerPoint applications. When no PowerPoint application is open the tool creates a new instance of the application which remains hidded. Then, while building the presentation, PowerPoint does not have to display all the modifications in the slides. Or better, it does not have to redraw every single step. As a result, it works much faster!

We thank everybody for feedbacks, collaboration and interest in us and our solutions.

You can find this solution on our Web site YellowRiver (www.yriver.it)
(GanttCharts2PowerPoint.zip)
in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you can also find other projects, ideas and solutions.

Your internet, sir!

Hi,
We are again on the ether. Today we’d like to speak about one basic principal of successful business – loyal customers. This topic has already been written about in many intelligent books and articles, this topic is taught at courses at high educational establishments. And nevertheless, every time we face some low quality service we put a question: “Why do people not follow such very simple principals in working with clients as smiling to customers, listening carefully their requests and appreciating each single client?”

The client is a king! This should be clear to all service or product providers because operating in the world of overproduction the only thing that can save a company is the love of its clients! :) For, the Chinese will copy any product and immigrants from the third world countries will provide the same services at a much lower price! ;)

Let me show a typical example when a company loses the loyalty of its customers. My internet provider and I cooperated together for 4 years. I paid the most expensive tariff, technical services and other related services. Sometimes there were problems with the connection quality but they usually were quickly eliminated. And all of a sudden I find myself without internet for 1 day. Surely, I call to the technical service and the answering machine responds that there are problems on the line and provides no information about the terms of problem removal. Two days after, when I had already lost my patience, I called to the client support service and told them how long I had been the client of the company and how much important it was to retain customers (since we truly believe that it is much more beneficial to maintain contact with clients rather than to obatain attention of potential ones) and asked them to give me any information about when the problem with my internet access would be resolved. I was promised that my internet connection would come alive within one day.
A day after I call the client support service again and they communicated again the same message: technicians were working to fix all the breakages on the line; nobody knew when they would finish.

My patience has run out and consequently I am with internet now… and with a new provider! :)

How to find a client or why androids need electric sheep

Good news, everyone!

For already a long time did we have an idea to conduct our blog not only on the IT topic, but also to write about our work, problems we face, about our projects.

And of course being those who produce products and services we have this key question - how to find clients. And thus that we have worked for a long time in marketing and advertising field. ;) Our problem is that classical communication channels do not suit our needs, our resources are very limited and our capital consists only of our energy and will to conquer clients. :)

Therefore, JUST DO IT!!!

Surely, our primary channel to attract clients is Internet. It connects us to the whole word and the whole world is our potential market.
Firstly, we created our web-site, then - our blog. In future we plan to link these two resources to context advertisement (of course we will publish the results in the blog).

You might ask: "What is the result of the chosen strategy?" Well, in fact we had only a couple of clients come to us during the functioning of our web-site. There are a great number of people entering our web-site, downloading those demonstration versions of our tools that we uploaded and going away not becoming our clients and not offering any collaboration.

We would appreciate a lot your feedback in this blog about how to convert our site surfers into clients. :) What is there that is missing in our web-site and in our blog? What is it that our products need?

Thanks.

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Alex

NEW data export from Excel

Hi,

today we would like to present you our new small and handy solution in which we provided a functionality to export Excel data into a fixed column width file format. This means that all your data columns in the file will have a fixed length.

This is an Excel add-in which can become usefull for those who have to work with integrated legacy systems where the input data format should be (or was configured to be) in this fixed column width format. This was actually our case when we had to work with some legacy system which contained some dozens of transformation rules that worked with this data format. In order not to change the system that already worked we just created this handy tool to simplify data export. :)

So, how does it work?! As soon as you activate it in the Tools/Add-in menu, you will find YellowRiver menu item with Export to fixed width file submenu which in turn contains (by now) one button of data export. ;)
This add-in is also supplied by a custom function to be used in Excel cells. It is used to determine the maximal text length in the selected range of cells. The function is situated in the Export2File function category and has a name MaxWidth.

So, before the data export you have to prepare your spreadsheet. You need to have a region of data to export (the type of data is irrelevant) and you need a region of data indicating the desired column width in the output file. Note that the number of cells in the "column width" region should be exactly the same as the number of columns in the selected data region. The tool also allows you to export data by columns or by rows depending on the direction of the "column width" range: either by column, or by row.

Find below a video presentation demonstrating how the add-in actually works. :)



Don't forget that to activate the add-in you have to keep the Macro security level at Medium at least.

As usual, you can download the add-in
on our web-site www.yriver.it
(Export2FixedWidthFile.exee [you've to change the extension from .EXEE to .EXE since this is a self-extracting WinRAR archive])
in the category OUR PROJECTS.

Here you can also find our other interesting solutions. ;)
We would also be happy to receive any your feedbacks! :)

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Product support via Skype Prime

Hi,

we have activated a Skype Prime service which will allow us to provide cheap support services on YellowRiver products to our clients and other interested parties. :)

You can contact me, Valeriy Shylin, when I'm available. I'll try to do my best in being always on-line. ;)

Feel free to contact if you have questions regarding our solutions or if you have difficulties in solving simple problems in Excel or Word! If you need immediate help this service is for you! :)

In order to benefit from the service your Skype account should have some money on. I'm not sure if it is possible to do Skype Prime calls from Skype simply connected to a PayPal account but suppose it can be done.

Actual tariffs are the following:
- 25 eurocents per minute for our clients wanting to receive technical support about some our solutions;
- 75 eurocents per minute for other interested parties who want to receive support in fast solving relatively simple problems in Excel and Word.

This is my Skype status button:




Looking forward to hearing you soon and often!
Let's solve your problems immediately, fast and cheap!

Best wishes from YellowRiver,
Valera :)

Arrow charts update...

Hi,

today we updated the add-in for building Arrow Charts in Excel.
From now on it supports Excel 2007.

Here is the original presentation and description of how it works.
http://yriverit.blogspot.com/2008/08/arrow-charts-in-excel.html

Feel free to contact us in case you experience problems. In any case, that's still a beta version... ;)

Traditionally, you can find this solution on our web site www.yRiver.it
(ArrowCharts.exee [the file you download is a self-extracting archive; change its extension from .exee to .exe])
where in the category OUR PROJECTS
you can also find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Slide progress bar update

Hi,

Today we would like inform that we have updated the Slide progress bar Power Point add-in. Some add-in load problems were corrected and a possibility to indicate the progress bar width equal to the slide width was added.

The original blog post describing how the add-in works is located here:

http://yriverit.blogspot.com/2008/02/power-point-slide-progress-bar.html

Feel free to contact us with any questions, suggestions and ideas about this topic.

Traditionally, you can find this solution on our web site www.yRiver.it
(PPoint_SlideProgress.zip)
where in the category OUR PROJECTS
you can also find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Arrow charts in Excel

Hi,

Today we would like to present you another solution that we started to use in our company. This is a tool for automatically building ARROW CHARTS!
After spending some time searching for ideas or similar tools in the Internet we found nothing that would perfectly fit our needs, thus, we created our own solution. :)

To make the story short, this is how it works:


The tool works with a 4-column table of data where each row starts with a name of the series. An XY chart will be created (or you may use any already created XY chart). Only four columns after the title column are considered. The tool will use the first 2 data columns to put the point and the arrow from the second point will point to the first one. :) (I hope I made myself clear...)

The current version does not work correctly in Excel 2007. In fact, it works perfectly well in Excel 2003. So, make sure you updated your MS Office software. Since this is our tool for internal use, we did not test it on Office 2002 and Office 2000.
Soon we will introduce the support for Office 2007.

This tool can become very useful for the companies which conduct marketing research and need to build dozens of arrow charts. Since Excel does not provide tools for doing that automatically the work is typically done manually. From now on we make Excel do it for us!!! :)

Feel free to contact us with any questions, suggestions and ideas about this topic.

Traditionally, you can find this solution on our web site www.yRiver.it
(ArrowCharts.exee [the file you download is a self-extracting archive; change its extension from .exee to .exe])
where in the category OUR PROJECTS
you can also find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Trying to do the impossible

Hi,

today we are not presenting any new solution even though there are some (their traditional video presentation will be ready soon). Today I will talk simply about my last two day activity.

Actually, the day before yesterday I had a task to do two things at my principal job. They both regard creating applications in Outlooksoft (already BPC bought by SAP).
The first one was to create an input form to make the user select an intersection where he will then put data (well, we are in the context of OLAP - on-line analytical processing, so, we work not with relational databases but with OLAP ones).
So, I solved this problem somehow in this way (a beta version, tomorrow we check if it is what the client wants and restyle it):



On the left there is the Current View with dimension names and current members. In the centre there are input cells (in green) and there are two buttons: OK and SEND.
The user does all the necessary selections and inputs, clicks OK, a new record is added to the table below. As soon as the table is ready, SEND button is pressed to simulate Outlooksoft's SEND_AND_REFRESH function. Well, that was not difficult at all. :)

OK and SEND buttons are not real buttons, these are just cells that behave like buttons. :) So, I decided not to load the worksheet with OLE objects... The input form is naturally Excel. :)

The second thing to do was more diffucult. I called it DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE. :)

The idea was to change the value of member properties in Outlooksoft dynamically. Officially it is not possible to do at all!!! But I tried. :)

Actually, I found almost all the stages of how property values are saved in Outlooksoft, tried to change values in MS SQL Server, almost created a web-service to change Outlooksoft's cache file on the server from client...

Everything turned out to be useless - the property's value remains the same as created until it is not modified directly from the Outlooksoft management console...

So, the impossible proved to be quite impossible. :) Now I'm going to check if the problem can be solved without changing those properties. :)

This is all for today.

All the best from YellowRiver. :)

Transfer Gantt charts to Power Point presentations II

Hi,

today, 26.08.08, we have updated our "internal" tool for transferring Gantt charts from MS Project to MS Power Point to the version 1.5.0. The tool serves to map Gantt charts from MS Project on one slide of MS PowerPoint. Since we have to do it often, we did our best not to do this "work" manually.

This is a video of the tool's general functionality:


Initially, this tools was developed exclusively for internal use. Therefore, it contained a number of limitations like 50 tasks per project, 20 days per project and other. That fit well our needs.

But we have received a number of feedbacks from you and decided to take those limitations away. :)

From now on, the are no limitations on the number of tasks mapped. According to the project duration the tool will choose the best calendar table to fit in one slide. The minimal time unit for the task is DAY so the tool will skip tasks that last, for example, one hour and 30 minutes. The resulting PowerPoint presentation tends to be the map of the project expressed in Gantt charts. Being a map it will not display units that are less than one point width due to scale transformations. So, don't be surprised if you don't find all your charts in the resulting PowerPoint presentation. :)

We thank everybody for feedbacks, collaboration and interest in us and our solutions.

You can find this solution on our Web site YellowRiver (www.yriver.it)
(GanttCharts2PowerPoint.zip)
in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you can also find other projects, ideas and solutions.

MS Access and Web: making them understand each other

Hi,

This time we would like to make a presentation of a solution in MS Access. From the general point of view, the solution is very common. It provides interfaces and logics for a user to deal with data in a database. However, the trick here is that some data is taken by the application from a web catalogue supported by the user.

This is how it is done:


With this presentation, we wanted to underline the ease with which it becomes possible to implement the cooperation between your desktop applications and web. Think of the automation of many processes that you might experience: tracking site changes, retrieving web content, getting data from your web site and using it in your applications and many more.
Feel free to contact us with any questions, suggestions and ideas about this topic.

This time, unlike usually, we could not publish the solution. So, this video remains a pure demonstration.
However, you might still want to visit our web site http://www.yRiver.it
where in the category OUR PROJECTS
you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Techedge timesheet with Excel

Hi guys,

I finally want to publish the tool that I use to fill in my timesheet web report. Maybe it will be useful for someone else from Techedge or KPedge if there are people who dislike spending time doing repetitive click-wait-copy-paste-click activity in their browser. Things are much easier and faster if done in Excel. :)

Below you can see a brief video presentation of how it actually works.


It is already a tradition that you can freely download the application from our web-site http://www.yRiver.it
(TimeReport_Example.zip)
which is actually located in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Family balance in Excel

Hi,

we all have probably encountered problems of overspending or losing track of our expenses. We always want to confront our incomes to our expenses to see where to cut and where to increase.

We had these problems too, which has encouraged us to create our own solution. Obviously, in Excel. :)

It is a very simple, yet flexible and scalable, solution that we have created for ourselves for personal use.

Below you can see the presentation of our Family balance solution:


As always in our case, you can freely download the application from our web-site http://www.yRiver.it
(Multilanguage_balance.zip)
which is actually located in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Charts in Excel automatically

Hi,

today we will present you one more small solution to simplify your life in working with Excel. This is an Excel add-in that will enable you to build charts based on one selected.

Let me explain its use on an example. Assume that you have a huge table of data (say, some 50 000 rows). When you decide to build a chart based on this table of data you will probably want to build one chart per one row since it is the only feasible way of presenting data graphically in such a case. If you decide to do that manually (even if you totally need "only", say, 100 charts) it will take A LOT of time!

So, this add-in will help you create charts based on the selected range of rows. You have to define the template chart.
The current implementation allows you to build charts with only one series. Though, the number of series could be expanded on demand.

Below you can see the video demonstration of how it actually works:


You can freely download the add-in from our web-site www.yRiver.it
(AutomaticCharts.zip)
which is actually located in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Excel ARKANOID

Hi,

here we would like to present you the game Arkanoid. But this game is designed for playing in Excel, therefore, it is ExcelArkanoid. :)



It is a fully functional Excel game. The control of the bar can be done both by the mouse and the keyboard keys. The game counts your score and the remaining balls.

The game is quite simple. We designed it with a purely demonstrational purpose. Our main aim was to show once again the power and the flexibility of Excel that enabled us to create such games as Tetris and Arkanoid in it.

You can freely download the game from our web-site www.yRiver.it
(ExcelArkanoid.zip)
which is actually located in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Kraljic matrix and Kraljic diagram in Excel

Hi,

here we would like to present a solution in Excel that implements a Kraljic matrix and builds a Kraljic diagram. Profound information about Kraljic matrix can be found in wikipedia, but speaking generally it is a tool for the evaluation of strategic importance of some entities for the company. Usually, they are company's suppliers.

The system actually represents a questionnaire by means of which strategic importance of car components is evaluated. It is semi-automatized, provides intuitive interface and allows easy answering the questionnaire questions.

The developed system was a part of a university project for the evaluation of the strategic importance of Alfa Romeo suppliers by means of a questionnaire applied to the components of a chosen car model. Since it was a one-time project, it was created within one night in order not to spend much time on the development phase but to concentrate on the implementation one. That is why the system is semi-automatized: it does not allow you to "easily" create the questionnaire which is its only problem. Therefore, the usability can still be improved.

The file Excel consists of 3 sheets: one containing component names, another containing the questionnaire with questions, answers, answer weights, and the last one the actual Kraljic matrix and the Kraljic diagram.

From the managerial point of view the biggest difficulty of the system is a good balance of the questionnaire. It is highly recommended to think thoroughly every single question, its answers and (which is of key importance) their weights (numeric values). It is also required that highly competent persons or better groups of persons answer the questionnaire that can contain questions related to both specific technical and marketing areas.

Below you can see a video presentation of the Kraljic matix in Excel:



You can freely download the solution from our web-site www.yRiver.it
(Alfa_Romeo_Kraljic_matrix.zip)
which is actually located in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts.

Photos to Power Point presentations

Hi,

here we present an add-in for Power Point for copying a big set of photos to a Power Point presentation. It allows you to insert lots of pictures into a presentation according to the template that you defined.

This might be useful in the case when you are work as a designer and have to make a presentation of your concept to the client. The most probable solution is putting all the pictures into a presentation and then send it to the client rather than sharing the pictures on-line granting access rights only to your client's account (if it exists)...
Or in the other case you when you have hundreds of photos and you don't want to spend time uploading each photo to a server of photo hosting service you will probably want to put all the photos immediately in a Power Point presentation and add comments to some photos.
In any case there are a lot of situations when we need to quickly create a file to share with all our pictures or photos. From now on, you will be able to do that without minutes (designing a template) and within seconds (transferring photos).

Below you can see the video presentation of how this tool actually works.


You can freely download the add-in from our web-site www.yRiver.it
(Photos2PPoint.zip)
which is actually located in the category OUR PROJECTS
where you will find other projects, solutions, ideas and concepts. :)

Transfer Gantt charts to Power Point presentation

This is an MS Project file that contains the necessary macro to transfer the Gantt chart into a PowerPoint presentation.As for the time being it is not in the format of an add-in since I had no Visual Studio 2008 installed on my computer and Visual Studio 2005 does not support add-ins for MS Project yet. With VS2008 it will be possible and as soon as I get it I will convert the VBA code into a “normal” add-in.Now if you have a project designed in MS Project and you need to make a presentation of it (as I did) you can simply copy project tasks into the present file and click the CHOOSE LEVELS TO TRANSFER button on the Transfer2PPoint custom toolbar to choose the task levels to include. The topmost task is currently excluded from the visualization.
This is a video presentation of the work of the macro:

More solutions, information and contacts on http://www.yriver.it/ ( http://www.yriver.it/it/projects.php - a PROJECTS section).

Transfer Excel charts to Power Point presentations

So here is an add-in for MS Excel that enables automatic transfer of Excel charts into PowerPoint presentations based on the selected presentation template.

The main features of the add-in are:
- compatibility with Office 2003 and Office 2007 (in fact, there are 2 add-ins that function virtually in the same way);
- high flexibility in customization of PPoint presentation templates (you put rectangular shapes in the place where you want to see the respective chart from Excel and insert the number of the chart to be associated with);
- the ZOrder position of the rectangular shape will be assigned to the inserted chart shape;
- high general flexibility of the system (it allows transferring any charts from any Excel workbook to any presentation with rectangular shapes indicating the position of the charts to insert);
- charts on all the worksheets are transferred, not only on the active worksheet

Charts are inserted via a new blank workbook which means that only relevant data will be transferred to PowerPoint. This is especially necessary for Office 2003 since the inserted chart brings with it the whole Excel workbook which sometimes may be huge enough.

For Office 2007 this problem is irrelevant since Office 2007 does not allow embedding Excel charts with source data (it creates a link to the source data) into PowerPoint presentation.
This is a video demonstration of the work of the add-in:


The add-in was designed and rendered public by YellowRiver (http://www.yriver.it/). You can find more in OUR PROJECTS chapter of the YellowRiver web-site.

All the suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated.

Power Point slide progress bar

Power Point slide progress bar

Very often working with PowerPoint presentations we face the necessity to put a horizontal static line on each slide to separate the title from the slide content.

From now you will have the possibility to make this bar dynamic. The PowerPoint slide progress bar not only separates the slide title from the slide content, but also gives a graphical representation of the current slide’s position in the presentation. This function is especially useful for long presentations with small or no slide numbers. Despite that, the slide progress bar is quite a fancy feature that can be added to your presentations.

The slide progress bar is an add-in, which allows you to freely add the bar to any presentation you want.

In the attached archive you will find three files: a readme file with indications on how to install the add-in, a sample blank presentation with just a couple of slides with the bar on them, and the actual add-in.

For activating the add-in in PowerPoint 2007, you have to go to PowerPoint Options/Add-ins/. Down in the MANAGE combo-box you choose PowerPoint Add-ins and click GO button. In the opened window you ADD the SlideProgress.PPA and check the check-box next to it.

After having activated the Add-in, you will see something similar to the following picture:

There are 2 buttons. One is to build the bar on each slide. The other is to remove the bar from each slide.

The settings dialog box allows you to customize the bars by length, height, X and Y coordinates and the border and interior colors. Plus you may leave the first slide without the bar.

When keeping active the progress bar add-in you may freely change the structure of your presentations – the bar will dynamically react on the changes in the number of slides and will rebuild itself correctly.

One point to remember: the colors used in the border and the interior of the bar depend hardly on the default colors palette. This means that if you change the default black color to white and build the bar in BLACK you will actually see the white color bar. So, be attentive to this peculiar feature (it might, however, be very useful since it gives the possibility to add gradients to the bars making them even fancier!!!).

You may see the final result in the sample presentation contained in the attached archive.
The final result is something similar to:

where you see that the bar becomes longer on each slide and… in fact “communicates” to the audience the point at which the presentation is.

These and other interesting projects you can find on:

our web-site http://www.yriver.it/

in the projects chapter (www.yriver.it/it/projects.php)

or read on our blog at http://www.yriverit.blogspot.com/.

Power Point slide progress bar

Excel Tetris

If you are at work and feel tired, try to cheer up playing TETRIS in Excel!
Find it on our web-site www.yRiver.IT in Our projects chapter.
Watch a video presentation of how it actually works:

Enjoy and have fun!

Beginning: who we are and what we are!

Hello or simply hi!
We decided to start blogging just to tell you about us and about starting our business. Hopefully, this blog will help us find new friends and partners and will encourage interesting conversations and discussions.
We are Alexey Grigoryev and Valeriy Shylin. Although we live in different cities and even in different countries, we are united by an old friendship and a mutual aspiration for running our business.
Our company is called YellowRiver. What do we do?! Mainly ourselves! We build our knowledge, skills and experience.
Knowledge and experience for us are the collaboration with big brands on the level of advertising campaign design, Russia's mobile value added service (VAS) market research, web-site design, automation and many other!
Our main specialization is marketing communication and business process automation.
We see our mission in the contribution of our energy, positivity and new ideas to the welfare of our client!