Simple data validation or enum fields in Excel

Excel is still often used for simple time tracking or roadmap planning in small IT projects. It is good to know that with a simple steps you can create a basic data validation for certain fields in your sheets.

Kind of validation, as discussed here, focuses on forcing user to select or enter only values that are found in some reference list (dictionary). A classing enum / enumerator field well known in databases. If user provided an incorrect (out of scope) value then an error is displayed:

Unfortunately, due to nature of Microsoft Excel, this fails completely when data is pasted.

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Silently delete a folder in Windows and… yourself

Here’s a quick batch file for DOS / Windows that deletes selected folder and then deletes itself:

@echo off
:try
rmdir "C:\Trash\Temp" /S /Q
if exist "C:\Trash\Temp" goto try
del %0

Creating an endless loop for deleting a folder stinks like a hell, but I haven’t figured out anything better so far.

Get rid of “Pick up where you left off” from Word — three methods

Microsoft loves to “enrich” our lives with a wonderful (in their opinion) yet totally useless and pissing off (in our opinions) features. The “Pick up where you left off” is one of them.

This tiny little thing wouldn’t be so irritating and could be easily ignored, if it wouldn’t be for a single fact. It blocks keyboard shortcuts completely, until it hides itself (so for approx. 3-5 seconds)! Preventing you from pressing Ctrl+F to do an ultra-fast-searching-millisecond-after-opening-a-document (my beloved feature).

There’s a fairly easy solution to this problem (my own article) that requires you to do some dirty tricks in the Windows Registry. One and a half month after writing that article it turned out that a method described there simply isn’t working at all on one of my computers. So I came out with the following post.

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