May, 2009

How to Add the Ability to Administer an IIS 6 Server From a XP Machine.

In re-doing my laptop after a hard drive failure recently I’ve had to setup a bunch of stuff I had previously installed, one thing that several people have asked about (or didn’t know about) is the IIS6 MMC snap in. It allows you to Administer IIS6 from your desktop. It will give you the Internet Information Services (IIS6) Manager icon in Administrative tools and allow you to create custom MMC snap-ins for the web servers. It’s a huge time saver and allows you to do everything in IIS from your local machine (except administer SSL keys, so far as I can recall) that you can do while logged into the server—without logging onto the server!

First you’ll need IIS installed on your machine, via add/remove windows components in the add/remove programs control panel applet. After that run IIS 6 Mgr setup.exe from Microsoft’s Site here.

Excel Shortcuts: More useful Excel shortcuts to quickly format Excel like a pro

Like I mentioned in an earlier post I’ve been working quite a bit in Microsoft Office recently, in this post (and the next one) I’ll bring you a series of quick short cut keys to help you format your Microsoft Excel documents quickly and easily.

The following shortcuts come in quite handy when you are formatting numbers or need to place a border on a particular cell.

Enjoy!

Excel Shortcuts: Quickly format your excel documents like a pro without using the mouse

Like I mentioned in an earlier post I’ve been working quite a bit in Microsoft Office recently, in this post (and the next one) I’ll bring you a series of quick short cut keys to help you format your Microsoft Excel documents quickly and easily.

The following shortcuts come in quite handy when you are formatting a document and need to do some pretty standard things like research why a cell looks a particular way, place the time or date in a cell or change formatting in a cell.

Enjoy!

Word Tip: Keyboard shortcuts you may have never knew existed

Recently, I’ve been doing more documentation than coding in VBScript (I’ve been coding, just in VB.Net recently) and have found some useful keyboard short cuts in Office that I thought I’d share with you all in a few blog posts, becasue while I know a lot about a lot of stuff… when it comes to Office I’m still just another “user”.

These Shortcuts are for Microsoft word and help in formatting the page more quickly.

Enjoy!

Shortcut Tip: Quickly Navigate to a commonly used folder

I recently found a useful tip for those of you that always have tons of windows open, like me, and minimizing them all to get to an item on your desktop is just a pain. Create a shortcut with a hot key combination to open an item on your desktop! It works with all your windows open in their current location and is a HUGE time saver. here are the instructions

1. Select the folder in Windows Explorer.
2. Create a shortcut, and place it on the desktop. (You create a shortcut by opening the folder, pointing to New on the File menu, then clicking Shortcut. Drag the shortcut to your desktop.)
3. Right–click the new shortcut, and then click Properties.
4. In the Properties dialog box, click the Shortcut tab, and in the Shortcut key box, enter a key combination (for example, CTRL+ALT+D or CTRL+SHIFT+D when D is for Documentation), and then click OK.

The trick here is that the item MUST be on your desktop in order for the hot key to work… but then again, what’s one more thing on your desktop.

Enjoy!

Essential tools: Treesize another disk free space utility with a powerful punch– and a low low price tag

This essential tool came to me as a comment submission some time back on another essential tool post I made, for SpaceMonger. The two tools display the same type data a litte differently, but depending on how you look at it you may prefer one over te other.

A big thanks to Eva007 for commenting on my previous post and sharing a truely great tool, Treesize with all of us! It offers some great features, including a no frill interface that lets you find which folders on a disk are using the most space. A truely essential tool when you administer a server and need to free up space on a drive.

Enjoy!

VBScript Statements: Explanation of the Execute Statement

The VBScript Execute statement allows you to execute a series of VBScript statements as a block from within a VBScript Script. By itself it doesn’t sound terribly appealing… after all, Executing a series of VBScript statements is what you do inside a VBScript file.

However, if you consider that you can load the statements from another file, it becomes somewhat interesting because it could allow you to share code between scripts or add funtionality like some applications that allow scripting inside the application.

The syntax of the Execute Statement is simply as follows:

Execute statement

Statement can be a series of commands enclosed in quotes, with each command separated with a colon (:) or a variable that contains a string that is the commands you wish to execute.

For More information on this statement, check out Microsoft’s documentation here.

Using the VBScript datediff function to determine the age of a file by the last modified and the last accessed time

I recently needed a way to tell if a file had been accessed or modified recently, something that has always been a question when you’re out of space on a server and can’t just add more space to it. What do you delete??? The Old files are the obvious answer… except if people are using them.

Here is teh script I wrote to tell if a file had been accessed or modified in the last X days. In the example I use 5 days, but you can use a different number of days when you call the function.

Enjoy!

Option Explicit

Dim fName
Const DateLastModified = 1, DateLastAccessed = 2

fName=”c:\temp2.txt”

if FileAge(fname,5,DateLastAccessed) = True Then
WScript.Echo (”The file was accessed recently enough!”)
Else
WScript.Echo (”The file was not accessed recently enough!”)
End If

if FileAge(fname,5,DateLastModified) = True Then
WScript.Echo (”The file was modified recently!”)
Else
WScript.Echo (”The file was not modified recently!”)
End If

Function FileAge(fName,fAge, CompareType)
‘function returns True if the file is older than the fAge (File Age) specified and false if it isn’t
Dim LastModified, LastAccessed, FSO, DateDifference

Set FSO = CreateObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
LastModified = FSO.GetFile(fname).DateLastModified
LastAccessed = FSO.GetFile(fname).DateLastAccessed

OneNote Tip: Take better notes during meetings the easy way!

Microsoft has a product called one note that i really didn’t know a lot about. They really haven’t pushed it a lot and it just comes bundled with Office so I’d never really tried to use it, however, I found an article over at Microsoft’s site that gives an excellent set of tips for how to use it to take better notes in meetings.

If you’re like me, you scribble notes (and doodle) on a notepad, open up word on your PDA, or if in a conference call full blown word on your laptop. You take notes as the meeting progresses and then later look back at your notes and wonder… “what was that I wrote about? That note doesn’t make any sense.”

Well Microsoft has a couple good tips at the one note site to make your life easier taking notes.

Check them out!