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 :)