Playing with Joomla

I've been having trouble with access to my Home page and Blog page of my website for a while.  Every now and then it wouldn't open but my other pages were okay.  The common denominator was a twitter plugin I had installed into Joomla a while ago.  I've now removed this and added another, which seems better.  Fingers crossed it won't cause any problems.  Let me know if you have trouble opening up my website :)

Keeping busy...

The "advantage" of working away is that I have plenty of time to work on other projects while I'm stuck in my hotel room.  I've just done a few hours worth of work on the Astrak dashboard.  Now it's time to relax :)

Dashboard User Guide for Three

One of the most important things to remember when creating Dashboards, especially if you don't work directly for the company, is that you need solid documentation.  I try to ensure that my User Guides are as simple as possible to follow and contain all the information that an end user may need in order to get the most out of their Dashboard.  Where possible, I will also supply a video guide that shows me moving around the Dashboard, highlighting all the features.

Currently, I am working on a User Guide for the MBR Dashboard I've created for Three.  Here's some sample pictures, more can be found on my Facebook page, here:

Google Ads is working...

I just did a quick search on "KPI Dashboard" to check how my Google ranking was - close to the top of page 1 for UK searches :) - and noticed my Google Ad at the bottom of the adverts list.  So it's definitely working, it just needs to generate some orders now ;-)

Pushing my VBA skills

While working at Three I have continued to push my (limited) VBA skills.  Today I have successfully managed to setup some code to password protect an entire spreadsheet at the push of a button and unprotect it with another.

I've also managed to get a number of charts to automatically adjust the y-axis values based on a cell value.  The reason for this is that when charting something that has a constant range between 99 and 100% you'll barely notice the differences if the scale starts at 0, as it would if using the standard Excel settings.  If you set the minimum scale value to 98% then you'll be able to see the trend in more useful detail.  However, if you get a value less than 98%, then you'll not see it on the chart.  Unless you set up some code that will change the minimum axis value to equal the minimum chart value :)

Now the trouble with this in a password protected workbook is that the charts won't update, the axis will remain fixed.  So I had to add code to the sheet with the charts to unprotect the sheet before adjusting the scale, and then protect the sheet again at the end.  It's all quite easy once you get the hang of it.  Coding is very modular; you can copy chunks from one part to another and increase the functionality of the Dashboard immeasurably.

When I get chance I'll upload some videos of it in practice and show you the magician behind the curtain.  Until then, you'll have to take my word for it :D

That's a lot of minutes spent watching my videos!

Well I've just noticed a new chart on the analytics section of my Youtube channel and noticed that my videos have been viewed for over 27,000 minutes!  That seems like quite a lot :)

Updated social media bits and pieces

An emergency at home this week meant that I was housebound for a couple of days.  I caught up with some work for Astrak and Castledene, and also had a play with some of my PMi Ltd social media bits and pieces.  You may have noticed that this blog looks a bit different for starters.  Also take a look at my Facebook business page as I've added a Blog, Youtube and Twitter feed.  It's all exciting stuff!  Click here to see it.