171–180 of 288 posts
Generic company sysadmin. I have a rotating list of power user tips. I'll pick one to show someone during a trouble call (provided no one is in a huge hurry). It has to be something cool that I can demonstrate/teach in seconds. Examples: Snipping tool. Rather than writing down error codes. Windows key + start typing the program name. Rather than navigating the start menu. Piles of excel tricks. (everyone loves excel)…
I'd love to learn more excel tricks. Any resource you'd recommend?
One thing we did a few years ago when we found that a customer didn't use revision control was to bring in a server. A small PC with Linux, Subversion and Trac. We not only could explain the benefits of RCS, but the customer could see changes, att issues, get them resolved etc. When the job was done, the customer kept the machine. I occasionally bump into old customers and many still run the same server. All of them…
Do they have a backup of it? :-)
Generic company sysadmin. I have a rotating list of power user tips. I'll pick one to show someone during a trouble call (provided no one is in a huge hurry). It has to be something cool that I can demonstrate/teach in seconds. Examples: Snipping tool. Rather than writing down error codes. Windows key + start typing the program name. Rather than navigating the start menu. Piles of excel tricks. (everyone loves excel)…
I'd love to learn more excel tricks. Any resource you'd recommend?
Reply to their emails in an timely manner.
We're not setting the bar here very high are we?
When I did freelancing, I charged a bit more than I felt I should... but went above and beyond. My hourly rate may have been high, but I spent many "non-billable hours" making sure everything worked great and any changes (their fault or mine) were accounted for. I did a few jobs where someone else controlled the billing, and kept us on a tight schedule. Every hour was billed. We were "fired" (AKA contract not renewed…
Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…
I'm curious how you got your first few "gigs". What should the sales process actually look like? Did you cold call, or did you have enough established relationships first? How do you typically agree on a contract, has the customer come to you with needs, or did you ask them for problems first and propose some solutions, and they agreed to them?
Consistent updates(mostly daily) on email with screenshots and quick short screencasts. A lot of times a particular feature takes more than a day to complete and be pushed to some server for client to actually see what it looks like. But if I create in progress screenshots and videos from my dev machine it always impresses my clients.
Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…
How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?
/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to xlsx file.csv
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Another thing which I don't personally love, but I do because I understand industries have differences is just exporting whatever can be exported into .csv files or .xls files where applicable. Working on an in-house application, this has been one of the most common types of requests. "Can we add this field here to the CSV export?" It's a three-minute task for me, but a huge time-saver for the manager of the team u…
But then exporting the CSV into Excel and doing something becomes part of the workflow. That could possibly be better done in the application.
By the way, I've had lots of success with chart downloading by simply copying the svg element into a request to an svg to png converter.