Finally we have a WTF statement from one of India’s finest comedians, Shri Lalu Prasad Yadav, former chief minister of Bihar, former husband of chief minister of Bihar ….oops..I’m sorry…husband of former chief minister of Bihar and former union railways minister. He has come up with this unique solution to avoid the impending food crisis due to a bad monsoon.
Prasad goes on further in the same article asking everyone to eat just one meal a day and that way the food stock can be made to last for 13 months. This statement has confirmed it at least for me that this guy could have no way been responsible for the supposed turnaround in Indian railways. As it is there are claims that he inflated the profits and many railway insiders claim that he reaped the benefits of his predecessors hard works (one Mr. Nitish Kumar in particular is counted by top Railway honchos as one of the best Ministers the railways has had in many years). If these are the kind of innovative ideas Mr. Prasad can think off, I can wonder what a tough time railways officials might have had in managing his whims and brainwaves during this tenure. I still remember the scheme to introduce matke ka cups in trains to promote local potters and remember exclaiming to myself WTF!
Blogging tips from Amit Verma
Now Amit is one of the preeminent Indian bloggers with a loyal readership. He recently had his first novel published as well. The tips are many and one would have read them somewhere, but I thought it was a nice compilation of points to keep in your mind while writing.
One of the things which came to my mind was when he says, “Writing should be for fun”, was how true it is like an new age proverb. Many people write as an extension of their selfish gene. The innate nature of humans is to propagate their presence, leave signs of their uniqueness, imprint their genome on the sands of time. Blogs by their ease of use have become a very convenient tool, but not necessarily the most effective. That’s where the ‘fun’ part comes. Unless writing is fun, one can’t produce good stuff, instead one will churn out banal and labored articles.
LINK
One of the things which came to my mind was when he says, “Writing should be for fun”, was how true it is like an new age proverb. Many people write as an extension of their selfish gene. The innate nature of humans is to propagate their presence, leave signs of their uniqueness, imprint their genome on the sands of time. Blogs by their ease of use have become a very convenient tool, but not necessarily the most effective. That’s where the ‘fun’ part comes. Unless writing is fun, one can’t produce good stuff, instead one will churn out banal and labored articles.
LINK
How To Split A Huge CSV Excel Workbook Into Separate Files
Linked from Makeuseof.com
I recently started working with a company that does HUGE mailing lists. I deal with a lot of records everyday but this really is a lot of data.They have an opt-in mailing list that they blast to once or twice a month. When I say huge I am talking about between 7 and 8 million email addresses.
Now if you have ever tried to open a file like this in excel you would see something that looks like this:
The reason you get this error is simple.
Excel can only handle 65,536 lines per sheet. It cannot display the rest of it and will truncate it. This is not good if you need to cut your list into smaller pieces. In my case I need to have less than 1 million records in my csv file to be able to import it into my mailing list program.
I tried using Base from Open Office with the same results. Now I could open this as a text file and chop it up manually or import it into an access database and try and manipulate it there as well. But hey let’s check out a free and EASY alternative to split an Excel workbook into seperate files. It is called FXFisherman’s CSV Splitter v1.1 by Sopheap LY.
We came across it here but I was able to trace it’s origins to the actual post on a forum it was created for and that is here. The original purpose of the app was to work with stock data in smaller chunks from a huge dump.
But hey I guess it will work on ANY csv file. Simply download the application and run it – no install required.
That will bring you to this screen:
Next browse for your file by hitting the Browse file button and then hit the Split Now! Button.
When the program is complete you should see something that looks like this:
Do you know of a better, easier and / or faster way to accomplish the same thing?
Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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Excel Tips
This is kind of a ready reckoner for myself and hopefully useful to anyone who visits this blog. There are so many tips and tricks to achieve some not so easy tasks in excel. Over a period of time one gains sufficient experience and learns how to get some stuff done.
I have been working on Excel since almost 8 years now and it still amazes me that there is so much more to the software. Every person will have his or her own little nugget about some hidden feature of Excel. Most of these stuff are available on the internet and you can find them pretty quickly with some intelligent searching. But often it takes up quite a while to find the exact solution and sometimes even stuff you have previously seen before is hard to find again. So I thought of coming up with a section on my blog to consolidate all these small stuff in a easy to find manner (hopefully).
To start with, this link contains stuff on how to crack an excel password and the same website also has stuff on how password protect an excel sheet. This is something I always keep needing whenever you find an excel sheet without a password sometimes created by ex-employees who have left the company but you need to access their stuff.
I have been working on Excel since almost 8 years now and it still amazes me that there is so much more to the software. Every person will have his or her own little nugget about some hidden feature of Excel. Most of these stuff are available on the internet and you can find them pretty quickly with some intelligent searching. But often it takes up quite a while to find the exact solution and sometimes even stuff you have previously seen before is hard to find again. So I thought of coming up with a section on my blog to consolidate all these small stuff in a easy to find manner (hopefully).
To start with, this link contains stuff on how to crack an excel password and the same website also has stuff on how password protect an excel sheet. This is something I always keep needing whenever you find an excel sheet without a password sometimes created by ex-employees who have left the company but you need to access their stuff.
