All articles in 'technology' Category

Would you like to spend next 5 minutes learning how to create an mutual fund tracker excel sheet?

Make a live, updatable mutual fund portfolio tracker for Indian markets to keep track of your investments using this example.

This is pure fun! Few Googlers used the collaborative feature in Google Spreadsheets to create a holiday art template with snow flakes using 18 colors. Each of them added few colors on a blue canvas to create this massive template. The best part is they even made a time lapse video of the whole process […]

Did you checkout the new web based Mac vs. PC ads Apple is running on the CNN.com? They are totally cool. why? because, in that ad, the PC guy walks from one ad-block to another creating wow user experience for whoever seeing the ad. Here is a small animation I have created out of it […]

Over the weekend I had sometime to cleanup the CSS and improve page layouts of PHD. The changes are: Post bottoms are hot now! Beneath each post you can now see 2 sets of links. One set with the usual sharing links for you to save the article to delicious or stumble or email it […]

Yesterday Microsoft announced in PDC (professional developers conference) that it will be releasing a web based version office applications – Word, Excel, Power Point, One Note later this year. This is an exciting news since you can access the goodness of these powerful desktop apps inside a browser for free. No more hassles of upgrading […]

Google Docs – spreadsheet application has introduced some major upgrades to their editor today. Some of the key changes include: Introduction of menus to access all spreadsheet functions / features by category: Now the spreadsheet app menus look more like Excel 2003 menus. Looks like Google is trying hard to close gap between the two […]

I love google maps. No, wait, I really love google maps. I think it is a perfect example of passion, intelligence and wit coming together to create software. [trivia link: google maps tells you swim across the ocean], I have been using maps to find transit directions from my hotel to office and I have […]

Gmail Labs constantly introduces new features that make using Gmail much more productive. Recently they introduced 2 new features – Mark as Read button and Auto suggest for label search which I find extremely useful. Mark as read is really useful since I use it often to get to inbox zero. I am obsessed with […]

Often when you are working on 2 incompatible systems and try to import data from one to another, excel can be a handy tool. I have used excel plenty of times to generate SQL insert / update statements which I could later execute on the database console. Here is a tutorial if you ever have […]

My guest post on monitoring web page changes using google docs is posted in Digital Inspiration – one of the most popular technology blogs. Do read it to learn a little bit about using XPATH, RSS Feeds, Google Spreadsheet import() functions. Here is a summary of the technique: First go to the web page which […]

Google docs spreadsheet app is going mainstream with each passing day. Recently they have introduced split() formula to divide text in to multiple cells using a user specified delimiter. The syntax for this function is =split(text value, delimeter), for eg. =split(“pointy haired dilbert”, ” “) would result in 3 individual cells with “pointy”, “haired” and […]

Firefox 3 has a ton of extremely useful productivity features and as I keep using it, I discover more and more of them. Here is one I found extremely useful and simple: When you have lots of tabs open, in order to switch between the tabs, place mouse pointer on any of the tab titles […]

This is another wow feature in Google maps that I started seeing last week. You can search restaurants by cuisine, how simple yet how effective .. 🙂 Click here to see all the Pizza places near Empire State Building in New York. Earlier on Gmaps: Get directions by public transport, See 3D building outlines in […]

How can you ensure that your blog post, term report or business case is readable without spending a lot of time getting beta reviews from others? Thanks to google docs, you can do that with one click. Just upload your word document / txt file to google docs. Once inside, goto menu > tools > […]

I use new superstars gmail labs feature a lot, to mark reader mails that I need to followup, comments I should respond to, ideas that are interesting, bill mailers that should be paid. The default setting allows any of the 4 superstars to be added. while trying to change my mail signature, I have realized […]