Why Windows 8 is like the Water Bear: Criticisms of Windows 8

September 17, 2012 Alison

Behold, the mighty Water Bear!

If you don’t know what a Water Bear (or Tardigrade) is, you should. These water-dwelling creatures are 0.3-0.5mm long and can survive up to 10 years without water. It was also shown in 2007 that they could survive after being exposed to the vacuum of space for a number of days.

Now, what does the Water Bear have in common with Microsoft’s latest operating system? Let’s see…

It’s kind of fun to see them in action in a short YouTube video, but after 90 seconds you’ve already moved on to other things.

Water bears can survive in the most extreme environments…so can Windows 8 (?).

Water bears have 8 legs…Windows 8…well, you get the gist.

As you might have noticed, I am not ecstatic over the emergence of Windows 8. Granted, I’m going off of a collection of online reviews and the 60-second release preview video, but there were still some red flags that popped up on my radar and are worth mentioning.

You can’t minimize applications

John C. Dvorak from PCMag.com points this out in his post, Metro: That’s Not My Name. Minimizing applications is a very common need, especially in the enterprise arena. This spells trouble for me in Windows 8 because at my job I am constantly switching contexts depending on which hat I am wearing. Each of my roles demands an exclusive set of applications to accomplish what needs to be done, and I need to be ready at a moment’s notice to switch contexts.

Continue reading Why Windows 8 is like the Water Bear: Criticisms of Windows 8 →

Events

SoftArtisans on the Road: Fall Career Fairs

September 11, 2012 elisek

The dropping temperatures, reprieve from humidity, pumpkin-flavored everything, and scent of wood burning and crackling in fireplaces can only mean one thing – Fall is here! And with it, back-to-school. We’re breaking away from our desks, desktops, and office space to come to a college near you. See the calendar below to find out if we’re headed your way.

Where We’ll be

September 19th – WPI

September 21st – MIT

September 26th – RIT

October 1st – BU

October 10th – Olin

A little about us: We’re a software company partnered with Microsoft and built on brains not gimmicks. We take pride in the people we hire and as such we’re an eclectic group of developers, marketers, and technical engineers who play hard and work harder. Whether it’s collaborating around the Fooseball table, gathering in the kitchen for Friday lunch crew, or strategizing during monthly game night, we encourage employees to ask questions and constantly seek new ways of thinking and innovating. We’re looking for curious, whip-smart people with the same values to join our ever-growing team.

So bring your questions, check out our previous interns’ experiences, browse our team bios and open positions, and keep in touch via the interwebs. Looking forward to meeting you!

Meet the Team, Office Life

Meet the Team: Alison

September 10, 2012 elisek

Hello and welcome to our Meet the Team series, in which we aim to give you deeper insight into the minds and personalities of those who make up this eclectic, close-knit group. We are developers, marketers, and technical support engineers, and at work we craft everything from Microsoft reporting APIs to mobile email applications. And outside of work? Let’s just say racing against the machine during hackathons, building architecturally sound beer towers during retros, and paddling down the Charles during the warmer months are simply the beginning.

Say hello to Product Manager Alison – belovedly known as author of the Pitan the Pivot Mage series. When she’s not supplying delicious office treats, you can find her scrumming in Trello, pumping out Pitan posts, or answering your questions on the OfficeWriter Answers site.

1. What do you do?
That depends on which hat I’m wearing. On Monday, I write tutorials. On Tuesday, I shift to designing sales demo or web site content. By Wednesday I’m managing a product backlog. Thursday is all about answering technical support questions and writing sample code. I wrap it up on Friday with some PivotTable blog posts.

2. What are you listening to right now?
I’m oscillating between the action theme from Doctor Who and the opening to an anime, Aquarion Evol.

3. If you could build any app, what would it be and why?
I would definitely want to build a mobile app that could analyze a reference picture of a character and generate a list of color swatches from the images. On top of that, it would allow you to switch between ‘picture colors’ and ‘real life colors’. For example, a bright yellow in a cartoon image would correspond to a golden blonde in real life.

4. When you were 5 what did you want to be and why?
I wanted to be a marine biologist because that was the perquisite for training Orcas at Sea World.

5. If you were a beer what would you be and why?
Apple juice – because I don’t drink and no one would be able to tell the difference visually.

6. What is your favorite tech blog and why?
Contextures has all my answers when PivotTables stump me. Continue reading Meet the Team: Alison →

Office Life, Staff Picks

Staff Picks: Friday News You Ought to be Reading

September 7, 2012 elisek

Once a week I snoop around the office, bothering my coworkers with questions on what they’re reading, listening to, consuming, or any other random inquiries I’d like to subject them to. Sometimes they even respond.

The question:

1. What did you read today?

The answers:

David, CEO

Time U.S. – Iraq: How the CIA Says it Blew it on Sadaam’s WMD

Claire, Marketing & Development Manager

New York Times – What Restaurants Know (About You)

Seth, Software Engineer

Stevesouders.com – Keys to a Fast Web App

Steve, Director of Sales

Gizmodo – Kindle Fire HD Hands On: Pretty Impressive for the Price

NBC News – CEO Says ‘Stupid’ Consumers Deserve Hefty Fees

Dan, VP of Operations

First Things – Good Grammar is Credibility

Harvard Business Review – I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

Continue reading Staff Picks: Friday News You Ought to be Reading →

Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Susann Luperfoy

September 6, 2012 elisek

[This is the tenth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame, at the very least, statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. As Executive Director of UPOP, Susann Luperfoy (ln) equips MIT students for careers in STEM. With an impressive background in Artificial Intelligence and Akamai technologies, Luperfoy provides insight to how she got to where she is today and challenges she faced along the way. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please email me.]

I’m Susann Luperfoy, a former research scientist and engineer in artificial intelligence who also worked on several startup companies as well as startup ventures inside established companies. I now teach MIT undergraduates the skills they need to thrive and lead in STEM careers outside elite academia.

1. Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?

So many eureka moments: the first GUI (I was used to programing on ASCII terminals), the first demo of xMosaic and the worldwide web as an elegant replacement for FTP. But the relevant answer to your question would be the moment I watched a social science major get promoted over an MIT grad who was not only vastly more qualified technically, but also more creative, more generous with his ideas and his time, harder working, more productive, better able to manage a project team, etc., however not interested in anything that sounded like management. A string of such surprising experiences prepared me for teaching UPOP.

2. Growing up, did you have any preconceived perceptions of the tech world and the kinds of people who lived in it?

Growing up the plan was always to be a physician. (An engineer was someone who drove a steam train.) But I loved technology from the start, anything that involved tools; fixing things and building things—cars, bicycles and custom designed clothes as a 5’11” teenager. Tools and medicine: in some parallel universe I am now a happy surgeon.

3. As Executive Director of UPOP, what led you to this career path? When did you first start working with tech? Was it by choice?

UPOP was never remotely in the plan, but so many experiences in the world of work prepared me for this position. When UPOP was first conceived, I was still immersed in work as a research scientist and engineer in Artificial Intelligence. When UPOP launched in 2002 I was busy in the Cambridge startup world. It was such a great program that I was happy to support it from the outside and eventually took it on full time. Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Susann Luperfoy →

Meet the Team, Office Life

Meet the Team: Paula

September 4, 2012 elisek

Meet Paula – Our Talent Acquisition Manager (creator of Networking on PAR) with a knack for Twitter and crafting the tastiest pasta salad (among other delectable BBQ treats) you’ll ever eat.

1. What do you do?
As Senior Talent Acquisition Manager for SoftArtisans and Riparian Data, I am responsible for sourcing talent to match the needs of my team. You can find me on social media (ln|t), attending events and getting ready for our next board game night!

2. When you were 5 what did you want to be and why?
A vet because I thought you could have as many puppies as you wanted.

3. Fill in the blank. Contrary to popular belief I ____.
Am not Katara.

4. Describe your perfect Saturday afternoon in 10 words or less.
Cooking a big meal to share with family and friends.

5. Describe your personal style in one word.
Tall.

6. What is your worst nightmare?
Getting taller.

Continue reading Meet the Team: Paula →

Excel, OfficeWriter

Outlining Excel Reports with ExcelWriter

August 29, 2012 Alison

Outlines in Excel are a useful way to organize and present lots of data in workbooks. ExcelWriter offers several different ways to integrate outlines into Excel reports:

ExcelWriter’s Application object (available in Enterprise Edition), provides full control to modify Excel files programmatically. This includes adding or removing Excel outlines and more:

Group an area of rows or columns
- Area.GroupRows()
- Area.GroupColumns()
Read or set the level of outlining for any given row or column in a worksheet
- RowProperties.OutlineLevel
- ColumnProperties.OutlineLevel
Read or set whether the group that a given row or column belongs to is expanded or collapsed
- RowProperties.OutlineCollapsed
- ColumnProperties.OutlineCollapsed
Ungroup all the rows or columns in an area of a worksheet
- Worksheet.UngroupRows()
- Worksheet.UngroupColumns()
Detect where the summary rows or columns are located for all the groups in a worksheet
- Worksheet.SummaryRows, Worksheet.SummaryRowsLocation
- Worksheet.SummaryColumns, Worksheet.SummarycolumnsLocation

Continue reading Outlining Excel Reports with ExcelWriter →

Big Data, Featured, Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Abby Fichtner

August 24, 2012 elisek

[This is the ninth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame, at the very least, statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. This time around we chatted with Abby Fichtner (t|ln), better known as Hacker Chick for her devoted work with Boston startups. Recently named Founding Executive Director of hack/reduce, a non-profit big data hacker space, Abby is in constant search of shaking up conventional wisdom and finding out what lies beyond. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel free to email me.]

Hi! I’m Abby Fichtner – although more people probably know me as Hacker Chick. I write The Hacker Chick Blog on how we can push the edge on what’s possible, and I’m about to launch a non-profit hacker space for big data called hack/reduce.

Prior to this, I was Microsoft’s Evangelist for Startups where I had the most incredible experience of working with hundreds of startups. I’ve been alternately called the cheerleader and the guardian angel for Boston startups. I love this community and am super excited to launch hack/reduce to help Boston continue solving the really hard problems and keep our title as the most innovative city in the world.

Questions:

1. Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?

I like to joke that programming is in my blood. My Dad has been programming since the 1960’s and my brother followed him into Computer Science. So when we were kids, my parents told us that whoever made the honor roll first would get an Atari. This was 1980 and so Atari game machines were The Thing to have.

Sufficiently motivated, I made the honor roll and my Dad came through – with an Atari 800, the PC! Pretty much nobody had PCs in 1980, so this was pretty elite. For games, we got these Atari magazines that had pages and pages of source code in them and our father-daughter bonding experiences were typing in the machine language to build our own games. Talk about hard core, right?!

2. Growing up, did you have any preconceived perceptions of the tech world and the kinds of people who lived in it?

Growing up I did not want to be a programmer! I thought that was something my Dad and my brother did. I was an independent woman and going to follow my own path. I heard that if you’re really good, they make you a manager. So my goal was to be on the business side of things. Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Abby Fichtner →

Featured

FileUp Website Design: Before and After Photos

August 23, 2012 elisek

The SoftArtisans homepage wasn’t the only site to receive a recent makeover. FileUp, our file transfer product which assists both corporations and individual developers in transferring their files securely, was treated to a face lift as well. Consistent with the deeper tones of the SoftArtisans homepage, the FileUp homepage is now live and sitting pristinely on Drupal.

Don’t let first glance fool you. Aside from simply the more aesthetically appealing aspects of the redesign, there are several bonus features as well. Among them is the added email functionality, where you can enter your email address and receive information back about the products you own. This is especially handy if you’re having difficulty remembering items you’ve already purchased. In addition to the email option, we drop-kicked the panel menus and replaced them with a sleeker drop-down navigation system, making the user-experience a much more pleasurable one.

And if that wasn’t enough, Continue reading FileUp Website Design: Before and After Photos →

Business Intelligence, Excel, OfficeWriter

Creating a Sales Pipeline Report with ExcelWriter

August 20, 2012 Jonathan Briggs

One of the great features of ExcelWriter is Grouping and Nesting feature of ExcelTemplate. Grouping and Nesting allows you to easily format your data in order to make it more readable. This feature is especially handy when applied to a common report, such as a sales pipeline report. Internally at SoftArtisans, we use ExcelWriter with Grouping and Nesting when generating our own sales pipeline report! By taking advantage of this feature, you can get fancier looking reports with little additional effort – ExcelWriter does the formatting work for you!

Before we begin, let me say that I will not attempt to tell you how to query your data as I’m sure everyone will be using different CRM systems. However, no matter how you’re querying your data (be it SQL, or a web service like SOAP or REST) the process is generally the same.

To start, you need to decide how you want to group your data. In most cases you’ll want to group first by month or quarter; then you could group by salesperson. These can be whatever you want, but you must have a column in your result set that will represent each.

For example, we group our own sales report data by: Continue reading Creating a Sales Pipeline Report with ExcelWriter →

You can’t minimize applications

Where We’ll be

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