Cookie Wars Participant: Alison

On the heels of the successful pumpkin pie extravaganza, 12 brave volunteers will present their finest at a banquet in one week. Before the banquet, we’re holding the Cookie War Challenge: where all of the participants will use technology (bonus points and automatic win if they incorporate the technologies used to power OfficeWriter) to represent their cookie, recipe, or baking process. For example, code your recipe in Chef.

As the cookie contest organizer, I decided to kick it off and use Excel VBA and conditional formatting to represent my entry (Peanut Butter Cookies).

How I did it: I made a macro that updates the timer; then layered conditional formats Continue reading Cookie Wars Participant: Alison

Cookie Wars: What do OfficeWriter, Baked Goods, & Technology Have in Common?

In case you haven’t noticed just yet, along with playing around in .NET and working with Microsoft Office reports, we enjoy food here. This year we’re incorporating both of these passions into a new company-wide challenge to ring in the new year. And this time it involves cookies! Both the kind on your computer and the edible ones that are ever so plentiful this time of year.

The Challenge: Break out and dust off your to-die-for cookie recipes with those secret ingredients handed down from Meemaw to her kids to you, the kind you pull out at parties to impress your friends, the kind people will be talking about at company holiday parties for years to come. Represent your cookie, secret recipe, or baking process using technology (bonus points and automatic win for incorporating technologies that power OfficeWriter.) Example: Create a report in Excel outlining your recipe, code your recipe in Chef (see what we did there), tweet out a line of your recipe every hour on the hour, etc. You can play along at home as well. Post a link to your project in the comments section below and perhaps there will be a little swag in it for you.

The gauntlet has been thrown. Who will win?

Participants:

Dan: CEO. Pub trivia master.

Alison: Product Owner. Pivot Table extraordinaire.

Kate: Technical Services. SharePoint guru.

Nick: IT. Breaks things. Fixes things. And repeat. Continue reading Cookie Wars: What do OfficeWriter, Baked Goods, & Technology Have in Common?

OfficeWriter and the Microsoft Application Platform

Curious to know more about how OfficeWriter fits in with the Microsoft Application Platform? We’ve partnered with Andrew Brust from Blue Badge Insights to bring you an overview of the additive value OfficeWriter provides to the Microsoft stack.

In this powerpoint:

  • You’ll learn about OfficeWriter’s object and template models
  • Scenerios in which to use OfficeWriter
  • How OfficeWriter plays into Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint, and Azure









Automate Your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter

With the holidays just around the corner, schedules are becoming increasingly packed. Maybe you’re on the hunt for the perfect gift, or entertaining the slightly overbearing but well-meaning in-laws, or maybe, just maybe, you need to make those last minute travel plans. With all the hustle and bustle, it’s easy to overlook those seemingly insignificant but entirely necessary holiday cards.

As a developer I’m always looking to save time and automate just about everything…even my holiday cards. (Don’t tell my mother she still thinks I spend hours every year making them.) So in the spirit of the giving season, I wanted to share my sample code with you, to get you on your way to automating your holiday cards and back to searching for the perfect stocking stuffers.

Step 1 – Download OfficeWriter:

To get started, you will need to have OfficeWriter installed in order to be able to use the sample code below. In my solution, I used OfficeWriter and its built-in WordTemplate functionality to do a server-side mail merge. If you do not have OfficeWriter, you can download a free evaluation here.

Step 2 – Download Sample Code:

Next, you will need the sample code. Download the sample solution here. This solution comes bundled with:

  • Sample code
  • Easily modifiable templates for both holiday cards and mailing labels
  • Dummy data

Open the solution and run the generator to see sample holiday cards and mailing labels like:

Holiday Card Generator

Sample Output:

Sample Code:

Looking at the sample code you will see that with just about 10 lines of OfficeWriter code I can generate both holiday cards and mailing labels. Continue reading Automate Your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter

Holiday Heroes with Youth Villages

Holiday HeroesBuzz Lightyear, Legos, and pink scooters lined the office as SoftArtisans and Riparian Data partnered with Youth Villages to bring gifts and the joy of the holidays to local Boston youth.

Youth Villages is a private nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting low-income children and their families overcome barriers of emotional or behavioral struggles and achieve long-term success. As their motto propones, they are a “force for families,” using Evidentiary Family Restoration approaches to work with troubled children. Each year, they help over 18,000 children and families from more than 20 states.  Holiday Heroes is Youth Villages’ largest initiative of the year and provides gifts and winter essentials to the children and families in their programs, who are often unable to afford even the basic necessities, let alone gifts, during the holiday season.

This year, SoftArtisans and Riparian Data employees came together to support this cause through
a company shopping trip, sponsoring a dozen children with art supplies, toy cars, books, and even a Spiderman mask or two. As an employee of SoftArtisans, I am truly inspired by the kind and giving hearts of my fellow employees, and the eagerness in which they participated. It warmed my holiday and I hope it inspires you to volunteer this season and throughout the new year.

To find out more about Youth Villages and learn how you can help not only during the holiday season but throughout the year, please visit www.youthvillages.org. They are truly an inspiring organization staffed with selfless and passionate people, aiming to make a difference among Boston youth and their families.

May your holidays be filled with joy and maybe a Lego or two!

Continue reading Holiday Heroes with Youth Villages

Q&A with Product Owner Alison on What’s New in OfficeWriter 8.3

What’s New in OfficeWriter 8.3

We sat down with our Product Owner Alison to give you a more detailed overview of the features released in OfficeWriter 8.3. Covering topics of CopySheet to Azure to Pivot Tables, she lays out what went on behind-the-scenes in this latest release.

Bonus: A sneak preview of what is on the horizon for OfficeWriter 8.4. Watch below:

For more information on how to become a reviewer for our Power Pivot API please contact us at contact@softartisans.com or throw a tweet our way @officewriter.

To leave user feedback, check out our latest site, OfficeWriter Asks, where we ask you what you’d like to see in future product releasesOfficeWriter Asks

Staff Picks: Snowy Day Coding Playlist

A wintery mix is settling in to Boston today. However, to steal a line from the the 1964 musical Funny Girlthere will be no raining on our parade. With our Technical Services team supplying us with a blind taste-test pumpkin pie bake-off and our heaters humming beneath our desks, we’re cozying up with our code and playlists to get us through the work day. While we can’t ‘port pumpkin pie to your desktop, we can share what’s playing between our ears.

All Kinds of Things You Can Do With SPUser Objects

The SPUser object is a really useful tool, but sadly not very intuitive. Here are some of my favorite SPUser snippets.

People picker list columns don’t return a user object, which is frustrating, but not foreign to those of us with picker experience. An ID is generally returned by a lookup field. Not so for people pickers, which return a domain\user string that is frequently pre-pended by nonsense.

This is how you get a user directly from the list item:

protected SPUser GetUserfromItem(SPListItem userItem)

{

SPFieldUser userField = (SPFieldUser)userItem.Fields.GetField(“User”);

SPFieldUserValue fieldValue = (SPFieldUserValue)userField.GetFieldValue(userItem[userField.Id].ToString());

return fieldValue.User;

}

Now let’s look at a neat little method that grabs some properties by current user! As a side note, there are a lot of issues that are purportedly resolved by setting the context to null – I have never found this helpful. Never. In my lifetime.

//User Properties by user

private bool GetProperty(string userName)

{

//Your return value is a bool

bool found = false;

//Create a profile manager

UserProfileManager profMan;

//Get your site in a “using” so there’s no disposing

using (SPSite site = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Site.ID))

{

//Make everything unsafe. Just kidding. This is so that you have permissions to edit the profile property.

//If you don’t plan on making changes, you can access the property without this.

Web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

//Okay. Get your web on!

using (SPWeb newWeb = site.OpenWeb())

{

//Get the context and set the profile manager

SPServiceContext context = SPServiceContext.GetContext(site);

profMan = new UserProfileManager(context);

//Get your user profile object

UserProfile prof = profMan.GetUserProfile(userName);

//This is important. Remember to check the Property.Value. Otherwise you are checking to see

//if the property itself is null. And since you know it exists – guess what? It isn’t null. Continue reading All Kinds of Things You Can Do With SPUser Objects

Apps We’re Thankful For

[cross-posted from the Riparian Data blog]

All in the Family

[All in the Family by Jeremy Miller]

Tomorrow, just before you nosedive into Great Aunt Muriel’s famously belt-busting pecan pie, take a moment to think some warm and fuzzy thoughts about those special, non-needy, non-inquisitive, non-forever asking you when you’re going to settle down and get married apps in your life.

Just kidding! That’s what today is for. Below, the apps that make Riparian Data’s team of Gander handlers and the SoftArtisans team of Office doc wranglers happy. Feel free to add yours in the comments!

David Wihl, CEO of Riparian Data: 

  • Evernote
  • iOS Maps. Gwen, a random chimpanzee in Botswana, and I are the only two living creatures who actually prefer Apple’s iOS maps to Google Maps. [True–Ed]
  • The Trello app has grown up and is now better than using Trello via a browser.
  • The SephardiJews app, because it was written by a friend’s son who is only 13 years old.
  • The Loro Piana app so I can both drool and scoff at $18,000 men’s coats, in an app that often crashes.

Dan Medeiros, CEO of SoftArtisans

  • Open Table

Paula Marciante, Senior Talent Acquisition Manager: 

  • Evernote

Nicholas Martin, Software Engineer: 

  • Evernote
  • Mog
  • (I don’t really use many apps.)

Scott Dugas, Software Engineer:

  • Mog

Michael Fargnoli, QA Engineer:

  • Definitely Spotify. It’s made me a complete human being.

Jim Stallings, Egg Chef:

3 ways to have a very agile Thanksgiving

As we head rapidly into the holiday season, taking vacation to celebrate with family and friends is bound to occur. For most, it is a time to relax and reflect on what to be thankful for, accompanied by turkey (or tofurkey for the meat-conscious) and cranberry sauce. For others, it can be a hectic time of delegating responsibility and tying up loose ends. Not so for this product owner! The following are 3 golden rules I follow before vacationing to keep the holidays happy and the hectic at bay.

#1 – Give someone the executive power!

Since the product owner makes the decisions, it is important to appoint someone else to make all of these choices. I usually pick someone who has a similar mindset when it comes to the product and prioritizing customer issues. That way, even if I don’t make the decisions, the outcomes are usually the way I would have wanted them.

#2 – Plan ahead, but don’t plan too much.

One of the luxuries of being a Scrum product owner, is that Scrum is a system that adapts well to change. If the unexpected happens (as it frequently does), having well-defined stories, a prioritized backlog, and someone with the decision-making power, goes a long way. Rather than plan for every possibility (because we all know that polar bear is going to destroy the server room), Continue reading 3 ways to have a very agile Thanksgiving

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