J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

A Break From Excel

After finishing up the last round of Excel 2010 books, I took a much-needed break from Excel. That explains the lack of recent blog posts.

For some reason, I got all excited about Windows desktop gadgets. That's kept me out of trouble for the past few weeks. I made two gadgets:

Office Recent Files - This gadget isplays a handy list of recent files for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Requires Office 2007 or Office 2010. I couldn't figure out how to read the Windows registry using Javascript, so I ended up using VBScript almost exclusively. I was surprised to see how nicely these two scripting languages work together.

SLAG - Simple Little Audio Gadget - I found a few music-playing gadgets, but I don't like any of them. So I made my own. It uses the Windows Media Player database, and the code is written in Javascript.

If you're running Vista or Windows 7, give them a try and let me know how they work. Gadgets aren't compiled, so you can see exactly how they are written.