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Dynamically Import Data From Other Workbooks - Google Spreadsheet

I made a google spreadsheet which pulls data from two other workbooks using "importRange" and QUERY function. You can use either one if you just want to pull a few columns from another spreadsheet. QUERY provides more flexibility by allowing you to use a SQL statement. Here is an example of a query which pulls 2 columns from another workbook and filters out the blank rows in column 41:

=QUERY(importRange("yourSpreadsheetKeyHere", "Donations!A3:BB200000"), "select Col41, Col2 WHERE Col41!='' ", 1)

One of the biggest pains during the entire process was google spreadsheet's vlookup. I learned the vlookup function only searches for a value in the first column in the Array. It's also helpful if you format the results of your vlookup as "Plain Text" under the numbers format drop-down. Of course, something formatted as a number won't match something formatted as plain text.

You could use this technique if you have a list of customer id's with names, and a separate spreadsheet with more customer information. With this, you could combine that information.

Green Mountain Energy's B2B Site

Green Mountain Energy has the worst B2B portal I’ve seen in my life. The worst parts:

  • It only works in IE (barely, and switching between browser versions in the F12 menu doesn’t help)
  • The page only takes up ~30% of the browser window (see the picture)
  • Nothing is functional, I can’t change my automated billing agreement because there’s no submit button.
  • If you have more than one address on your account, just give up.

Picture: http://i.imgur.com/cP4CLTl.png

Update: They sent a letter saying they made a new business portal site. www.businessportal.greenmountain.com My first visit gives me an “Our site is currently down as we upgrade our systems.” error message.

Don't Use == null - Python

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3289601/null-object-in-python

It says not to use == to check for "none-ness". It's better to use:

if variable is none:
    <your code>

Why? "And the reason for choosing egg is None over egg == None: The latter can be overloaded, and is likely to break when comparing valid object with None (depends on how it's implemented, but you don't expect everyone to take comparisions with None into account, do you?), while is always works the same."

Prezi Video With No Audio

I converted a wmv video to a few different formats (mp4 and flv) and still couldn’t get the audio to play in Prezi. However, videos with the following codec settings will work:

codec info

Solution: Open your video with Handbrake and convert it to H264 with AAC as the selected audio codec and it will play just fine.

Useful Bootstrap Links

http://bootstraphero.com/the-big-badass-list-of-twitter-bootstrap-resources

Also, an user named Billy Cravens on Meetup.com left a ton of good bootstrap links (bootsnip looks especially awesome) in this post: http://www.meetup.com/HoustonCFUG/events/79862792/

Twitter Bootstrap:
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

Bootswatch: (free Bootstrap themes)
http://www.bootswatch.com

Wrap Bootstrap (premium Bootstrap themes)
http://www.wrapbootstrap.com

Common Bootstrap Snippets
http://www.bootsnipp.com

Some nice date plugins for Bootstrap
http://www.eyecon.ro/bootstrap-datepicker/ https://github.com/dangrossman/bootstrap-daterangepicker

Bootstrap WYSIWYG editor plugin
http://jhollingworth.github.com/bootstrap-wysihtml5/

Integrating Bootstrap with jQueryValidate
http://alittlecode.com/jquery-form-validation-with-styles-from-twitter-bootstrap/

Nice data grids:
http://www.datatables.net

Integrate Bootstrap with Data Tables:
http://datatables.net/blog/Twitter_Bootstrap_2