Celebrating Steve : Here’s To The Crazy Ones

A special event ‘Celebrating Steve’ @ Apple campus on 19th of October, 2011.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. - Apple Inc.

Watch the ‘Celebrate Steve’ event here.

Design Sense : ASP.NET New Website Design

A few days back I stumbled upon Scott Hanselman's blog post about the availability of new Beta ASP.NET website. I hated ASP.NET website for a long time and even complained a bit earlier. My biggest complaint was about the lack of RSS Feeds with Video files as enclosures. There is no easy way to get updates on new videos and watch and/or download from any RSS feed reader. (Hated it so much that during one of our training classes, I built a web crawler to create RSS Feeds with enclosures and in a later session, built a web application that will let anybody create a RSS feed from resources any where on the web).  And then, I haven't visited the site a for a long time. So, I was eager to check it out and did it at last.

 

On a related note, there were many properties, particularly around Microsoft, did not offer such RSS feeds with enclosures. I complained about MIX and PDC 2010 some time back. I think they offered RSS Feeds later on for some of those. I was particularly taken aback when I saw this note on MIX site.

If you’d like to download all of the keynote and session content, download a recent build of cURL (~250K), and extract it to your folder-of-choice. Then, download MIX10Downloader.zip (1.39KB) and extract the MIX10Downloader.bat file to the same folder. From a command prompt, start MIX10Downloader by passing it one of the following parameters: WMVHIGH, WMV, MP4, PPTX. Then wait. For files that aren’t available, cURL will download a file that is around 1,245 bytes in size (if you change the extension to .htm and open it, you’ll see that the file is simply an HTML "not found" error page).

To rename the files, first, download MIX10Renamer.zip (4.09KB). Then, extract the MIX10Renamer.bat file to the folder that contains your downloaded files, and from a command prompt, type MIX10Renamer WMV to rename all of the .WMV files to the full session title. By changing the parameter, you can also rename your PPTX and MP4 files.

Anyways, here is what I thought when I looked around the new (still beta) asp.net website. I am not a designer and currently learning about interaction design on web applications. So take my comments with a pinch of salt.

As highlighted in Scott's blog, information has been re-positioned quite wonderfully in the 'Learn' pages of the site. Oh, no, you will not find a link to 'Learn' on the front page. Click on any topic links on the top (say Web Forms). Nice and clean grouping of content organization into tabs, chapter menu and quite a clean list. Pluralsight videos have been featured as 'Essentials', rightly so.

Just one quirk though. I kept clicking on each of those tabs to view the content in each section. But once I hit 'Forum', suddenly I felt like totally lost the context.  No more header, no more tabs. It totally feels out of place. The only way, you can comeback to context was to use the back button. It should have been a link rather than a tab. Semantically, I expect the content to be opened within the tab, preserving the tab position in the tab group.

Community Page is also organized quite cleanly with variety of content from the community eco system. Floating navigation bar at the left deserves to be mentioned too.

Other than that, I did not find any thing impressive. But here are some more thoughts on how it could be done better.

Front page is Wasted

Copywriting is quite essential for any web application. If somebody new visits the page, there is not much to take away from the page. Leave alone, impress the user to explore further. The front page totally fails in this aspect. There is no conversation started and no conversation to continue. This is the least expected of a Web development community.

 

If somebody visits the front page, the first question that should have been answered is what is ASP.NET is all about and why it is worth exploring.

This is what ASP.NET site looks like. Visit the page and Try to answer the question, What is ASP.NET?

Compare it to RoR (Ruby on Rails). View the following snapshot or Visit the page and try to answer what is RoR?

Or Compare it to jQuery. View the snapshot or visit the page and then try to answer what is jQuery?

If you are not convinced, visit the front page of ASP.NET site, visit Ruby On Rails Front page and Visit the jQuery front page. Quite obvious. Isn't it?

I think the front page is totally wasted. I do expect a much seriously higher bounce rate from the top page than any other page.

Why Community Spotlight so important wide, front and loud on the front page? And two large banner ads to go with it? I don't understand why Microsoft has to resort to dumping so many ads on the community site.

A little test of Usability and Information

Have a friend of yours that doesn't know anything about ASP.NET and visit the site and see what he/she can say about ASP.NET. Try the same with jQuery, Ruby on Rails or any other site for that matter and see what they can gather. I did. I tried with two friends who have been working in a Telecom industry for about 10 years and haven't heard of any of these : ASP.NET, RoR and jQuery.  Now they are obsessed with RoR and jQuery in that order, but couldn't scratch the surface yet when it comes to ASP.NET.

And lastly, ASP.NET still doesn't seem to have RSS Feeds with enclosures. It seems, they have lot more interest in eye balls rather and still care so much about advertisers.

Shortage of .NET Developers

I have been telling all this year that we couldn't find good .NET Developers. It appears, its an industry wide trend across the US.

According to technology job board Dice’s October report, there’s one particular tech talent now in short supply across the U.S.: Microsoft’s .NET. Job postings requiring .NET are up more than 25% year-over-year, the company says – faster growth than the total job postings on all of Dice.com. -- Techcrunch 

Looking for a job, make your search faster here.

EnhanceJS : Progressive Enhancement For CSS and JS

Great toolkit for progressive enhancement for CSS and JavaScript.

EnhanceJS, a JavaScript framework designed specifically to deliver a usable experience to the widest possible audience, by testing the browser to determine whether it is capable of correctly supporting a range of essential CSS and JavaScript properties, and delivering features only to those that pass the test. -- EnhanceJS

Related :  Modernizr for HTML5 and CSS3.

Eric Sink : Version Control By Example

If you want to learn key concepts of a  Version Control system with an example or would like to have a nice and handy reference manual for Git, Subversion, Mercurial and Veracity, here is a book from Eric Sink, called “Version Control by Example”. 

This book uses practical examples to explain version control with both centralized and decentralized systems.  Topics covered include:

• Basic version control commands and concepts
• Introduction to Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS)
• Advanced branching workflows
• Strengths and weaknesses of DVCS vs. centralized tools
• Best practices
• How distributed version control works under the hood

The best part is that the book is absolutely FREE.  You can read it online or download the book in various formats. If you prefer a Printed copy, you can request for one, for FREE as well.

Read it online and request for a FREE printed copy if you like it.

Links : HTML5 Boiler Plate for Google AppEngine Projects

While searching for something on Github, I stumbled upon a pretty comprehensive HTML5 Boiler Plate for Google AppEngine Projects. Looks great to use as the default Google App Engine project template.

App Engine Boilerplate is a versatile yet minimalistic setup for new App Engine projects.

• html5-boilerplate 2.0
 (including it's automated build toolchain for minification and concatenation of js+css)

• Beautiful OpenID login with openid-selector

• Memcaching setup for requests and responses

• Flexible user-preferences model (with Gravatar link)

• Templates and template addons

• Tools such as is_testenv() and slugify(url)

• app.yaml
 configuration for admin areas, static files

• Released under the BSD license

The source is available on Github. Will be using it in an App Engine project that will be kicked off towards the middle of the week and will share more about it.

How To Start A Business In India

Information Technology, Knowledge Workers and Business Process Outsourcing are few keywords that may come to your mind whenever you hear about India. But that only tells a fraction of the evolving Vibrant India's story.

India has the largest 'younger' population in the world. India is the largest living democracy in the world. Indian Economy is growing at a phenomenal rate. The fact that Indian Economy could tolerate the worst global recession we have ever witnessed, tells the story of strong financial markets, its trade independence and a raising middle class with increasing purchasing power.

There are a variety of factors, many analysts believe, that will make India a Global Destination for Research & Development, Trade and Innovation in the years to come.

In this strictly informational session,

• Learn how to start your business in India.
• Learn about organization structures including the new LLP
• Learn about various policies and special economic zones.
• Learn about essentials of Tax structure and more.

Please note that we are not Legal experts. We would like to share the Vibrant side of India and why you can't miss out one of the best global trade destinations. This session is strictly informational. The session will be presented 

Online, in a Webinar Format
On 3rd of September, 2011 from 9.00 AM to 11 AM

Join the session to explore more. Please send an email to info@inspions.com with a note on "what you do, your interests and any specific aspects your would like to know in detail" to register. We will send the URL for the webinar 48 hours before the session.

Building Native iOS Apps With Titanium

Titanium from Appcelerator has been proving to be a really great framework to develop Native Mobile applications in Web's darling, Javascript. Started a few weeks back to check it out and we are now totally hooked. Comparing to developing an iOS application in Objective-C, its totally ridiculously simple. For us, it is definitely a 10x productivity boost. 

If you have an idea and if it takes weeks to develop the prototype, it is tough to keep up team's motivation. Titanium is quite magical when it comes to speed. As we can iterate our UI designs much faster with Titanium, we could refine our original idea and improve upon almost every day. And a working idea can make wonders when it comes to team's morale and confidence. 

If you haven't tried it, Give it a try. I am quite sure, you will love it.

Btw, Appcelerator guys recently opened up some of their training modules to all for Free. Check them out and they will definitely clarify a few things and gives a better head start. For instance, the videos recommend a slightly different approach of organizing code than what you see in their Kitchensink sample application.

Link to Training Videos : Build Native Mobile Apps With Titanium

I am quite sure, there is one big dilemma of approaching Titanium to build a native iOS application. Will Apple approve your apps built on Titanium ?  We haven't found any rejections by searching on the web and recently NBC released an iPad application and was approved by Apple. So, doesn't look like an issue. But we keep our fingers crossed until our application gets approved. 

Even with the possibility of a rejection, some where in the back of the mind, we are seriously considering to go ahead with Titanium and take our chances. With its almost magical productivity, we won't  be loosing much. More over, the application UI, design, use cases, application flow and most importantly the early feedback we can get is still be totally invaluable if we have to redo in Objective C later on.

Adobe Releases a HTML5 Design Tool, Edge

Adobe released a preview edition of Adobe Edge, a Motion and Interaction Design tool that generates output NOT in Flash but in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.

Adobe® Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.  -- Adobe Edge

Anybody already started reading between the lines ?

Web Page Test Results for INSPIONS.com

Curious with the announcement of Google’s page speed service, We ran the Web Page Test on http://www.inspions.com.  It appears, little surprisingly,  if we follow ‘thumb rules’ of optimization for web pages, the optimized site may actually run slower than the current version.

The page load time is actually worse on the optimized version of the site.  You may check full results of the test here. I will take a look at detailed analysis and post notes later on what is good and bad about the current site structure.

Techcrunch's Mobile First Crunch Up Streaming Live

Mobile First Crunchup will be live streaming tomorrow at 3PM (CST) on UStream here. Read more about the crunch up here.

Mobile First Crunch up

will focus on the increasingly popular strategy of creating a mobile product first, and a regular Web product second, if ever. Mobile is just a more interesting part of the Web right now for many reasons—iPhone/Android, tablets, location-aware apps, cell phone cameras, GPS.

Mobile First Crunch Up

Given the fact that there are more mobiles than PCs and engagement on Smart Phones is exploding these days, it is getting lot more important and strategic to put Mobile First.

WWDC 2011 Session Videos Are Now Available

WWDC 2011 Session Videos are now available for all, for Free.

Links : Profiling ASP.NET MVC3 Applications

MVC Mini-Profiler is an open source framework for profiling ASP.NET MVC3 applications. You can also give it a try online at http://data.stackexchange.com.

Sam Saffron : Profiling your website like a true ninja

Design Sense : Making Sense of Error Messages

No matter, how well we design our Software Systems, exceptions are bound to happen. Some times, due to our internal faults arising from bad or incomplete design like not handling errors or certain uncommon conditions. And some times, due to events that are totally out of our control. What makes our application exceptional is how we handle those exceptions and keep the conversations going. 

Here is an example of an Error Message on Microsoft Xbox that needs serious re-work from Microsoft.  If you are wondering it must be a mistake as it doesn’t even look like an error message allow me to explain.

Customers need XBOX Live Gold level subscription to access Netflix.  I did have a Gold Subscription and I have been happily watching movies streamed from Netflix for a long time. Now and then, XBOX stops the movie and comes to this particular screen after a couple of beeps asking me to “Upgrade to Gold or Sign in”  doesn’t make any sense at all.

After a couple of instances, I figured out that this screen pops up when connection to the internet is lost or down. I confirmed it by shutting down my wireless router a couple of times.

Error messages, particularly those that are displayed to end customers, must be sensible, contextual and make sense. If possible, prompt users to take alternate actions that may provide a temporary work around.  In this particular case, if internet connection is lost, it should just say that it can’t connect to internet rather than I don’t have the right subscription.  Can also make suggestions to end users on how they can make sure access to Internet is working properly.  If internet connectivity is just fine but Netflix servers are down (like it happened last month), it can nicely share the same that it can not contact Netflix servers, but connectivity is just fine. 

Take a look at how you are handling exceptions like this and review whether those error messages are making sense, keeping your customers informed and most importantly keep the conversations going. 

PDC Keynote : The Opportunity of Win32 (1992)

If  you have some time to kill this weekend, watch the PDC Keynote from 1991 by Bill Gates talking about the huge opportunity for Software Development community with Win32.

You can in fact watch all PDC Keynotes from the PDC archives at Channel 9. Its nice to walk down the memory lane and see how the current Microsoft stack evolved from early 90s to what we have today.

AppHarbor : Developing .NET Apps Could Be Fun Again

How much time it will take for you to type “git push appharbor master” on Git Bash console?  Let us say, 5 seconds. Great, that’s all it takes to bring your well baked code to your waiting customers, fully tested. Push your code to AppHarbor and the rest is magic (well, almost). The Application is built, tested, deployed and live in a few moments. Wow !

Git + CI +  Azure = App Harbor, an awesome, unbelievable .NET Platform on the cloud.

I wish AppHarbor is 10 years old. Just stumbled upon AppHarbor yesterday while on Twitter and within a few minutes (say 5 at the most), have the first Hello World kind of ASP.NET MVC app created and deployed with membership database fully configured.

More as we explore further.

Hire Smart As Not All Software Developers Are Equal

I stumbled upon an interesting article on Techcrunch titled “Why the new guy can’t code” and couldn’t resist but shout the hell out ‘yahooooo’, for this was exactly the view, experience and ideas we had that led to creating one of our most differentiating services a couple of years back.

About a couple of years ago, we created this banner to announce about a service we started called '’SmartHire”, a new and quite unique way to evaluate prospective Contractors, Consultants or Employees. 

Though, some of us would like to tout it as a new and unique way, for me it was just common sense all the way. What we have decided to do as part of this process is that we actually sit with prospective candidates about 3-4 hours and watch them actually implement a piece of functionality, in real time.

Once candidates arrive for what many assume an in-person or face to face Interview, Candidates will be given a piece of paper that describes an idea for a  new application or concept of a piece of functionality to be added to an existing application.  They will be given a computer with all necessary software pre-installed and candidates are even allowed to phone a friend or colleague to get ideas or just Google for solutions.  And they are allowed to ask questions any time during the session.

One of us will sit through the session and observe how the Candidate is approaching the problem and ask questions through out. We ask questions literally on every aspect.  On technology, choices they make, alternatives they pick, the flow they follow, the way they code, the whole nine yards of the exercise.  On everything they do and they don’t.

If a candidate searches on Google for an idea or a solution to the problem in hand, we are very much interested on what exactly he/she searches for, how do they refine the search, where will they start their search and once they find out an idea or completely working solution, what they will do.

Similarly, if they chooses to call a friend or colleague, how do they explain the problem, how do they listen, how do they pickup the guidelines or ideas the other person on the line throws at them and lot more interestingly what will be the first thing they do after the phone call.

This is quite remarkable in many ways. And the results are totally mind blowing in many cases.  It totally reveals the genuine skill set (both technical and non-technical aptitude) and definitely provide a more realistic, true and thorough feedback on a candidate’s capabilities than a 4 hour typical interview could provide. 

Some software developers sound so good on paper, but their aptitude in problem solving sucks. And some developers that may have been out rightly rejected if we had just followed traditional screening, proved to the right choices to be on board and beat the first group 9 out of 10 times.

Given how it works, it is the least preferred choice for most recruitment firms and agencies. First of all, it needs lot of effort,  it won’t scale that easily and most importantly it demands that their recruiters are actually practitioners of the very technology. Not just anybody.

For us, this is one of the BEST methods that really worked and so we introduced this service to our customers. It did limit our scope in terms of offerings (areas of expertise), but this is what we believe the BEST for our customers.

What do you think? How did you hire your last Consultant, contractor or an employee?  Do you think it is worth time and effort investing in a session like this ?

If you are looking for a Developer to work on Microsoft Technologies, we can definitely help to screen them through our ‘SmartHire’. Give us a call or send us a message for more details.

Launch of Agile Project Collaboration Application

We have been using a variety of 3rd Party Applications to collaborate and manage Agile Projects. While those applications are great, some of our customers have been requesting for a much simpler and elegant application.  Something that is as simple as Basecamp from 37signals but support Agile methodology at its core.

Well, here we are. Today we are launching ‘Agile @ INSPIONS’, the first version of the Agile Project Collaboration Platform that keeps things as simple as they can be, and support the Agile methodology. 

The application currently supports the complete Agile workflow with releases, sprints and tasks in a brutally simpler way.  And rather than producing flashy dashboards with charts and visualizations, the dashboard is totally humanely conversational.

We have migrated all your projects to the new application. An email is on its way with the announcement and few more details to get you started with the application. 

We sincerely hope, you will love this application.  Or, we kick start the next iteration in the next moment and go on until we get it right.  That’s just us.

Berkshire Hathaway To Sell Auto Insurance In India

1-800-1800-800 is the number to call if you want to buy Auto Insurance in India. Have you seen any easier toll-free number? 

That’s the number of Berkshire Insurance. That’s right. It’s the same Berkshire you are thinking of. Berkshire as in Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway is all set to start selling Auto Insurance in India as a corporate agent for Bajaj Allianz. Warren Buffet is going to Delhi, India for a special event on 25th of March, 2011.

One unique aspect of Berkshire Insurance is that it will sell auto policies Online and over phone only. And their toll-free number is the most easiest to remember : 1-800-1800-800.

Anybody is already reading between the lines of Warren Buffet’s entry into India?

Pluralsight On-Demand Training : Now Starts at $29/m

Pluralsight has slashed its prices and now a monthly subscription to their FULL library costs just $29 per month.  Compare it to earlier pricing of $99/month, it’s a drastic reduction.

More over if you are in India, the monthly subscription costs even lower, $14.99 per month.

If you are a .NET developer or aspiring to become one, this is really a great news. I personally loved their videos and definitely recommend to anybody.

Link : Pluralsight On-Demand Access Pricing Plans

Restoring the trust between agile and software craftsmanship

Andy Hunt (@PragmaticAndy) 2/7/11 4:36 PM Uncle Bob talks about the agile manifesto and craftsmanship movementshttp://bit.ly/g9jdHH

Microsoft MIX : Why can’t they offer RSS Feed instead?

I don’t know why? Majority of conferences organized by and around Microsoft Technologies, DO NOT offer RSS Feeds of their sessions and videos. For some mysterious reasons. Instead the sites offer a ridiculously tedious and stupid interface to subscribe/download session videos.

It is supposedly a conference of UX Experts.

“MIX is a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web.” - http://live.visitmix.com/

But when you want to watch or download session videos, there is NO RSS FEED. Instead here is what they want you to do:

If you’d like to download all of the keynote and session content, download a recent build of cURL (~250K), and extract it to your folder-of-choice. Then, download MIX10Downloader.zip (1.39KB) and extract the MIX10Downloader.bat file to the same folder. From a command prompt, start MIX10Downloader by passing it one of the following parameters: WMVHIGH, WMV, MP4, PPTX. Then wait. For files that aren’t available, cURL will download a file that is around 1,245 bytes in size (if you change the extension to .htm and open it, you’ll see that the file is simply an HTML "not found" error page).

To rename the files, first, download MIX10Renamer.zip (4.09KB). Then, extract the MIX10Renamer.bat file to the folder that contains your downloaded files, and from a command prompt, type MIX10Renamer WMV to rename all of the .WMV files to the full session title. By changing the parameter, you can also rename your PPTX and MP4 files.

Majority of people that are interested in these sessions, I believe, would have one or other RSS Feed Reader applications. If they provide an RSS FEED, everybody can easily and readily view all sessions and download if they want to.

What kind of an UX is this?

Two Microsoft .NET Developer Events in DFW, You Must Attend

If you are a budding .NET developer looking to kick start your career in 2011 or advance your career on Microsoft .NET technologies, here are two great events right here in DFW that you must attend.

Windows Azure 2 Day BootCamp : 16th and 17th February 2011

This is a 2-day deep dive program to prepare you to deliver solutions on the Windows Azure Platform. We have worked to bring the region’s best Azure experts together to teach you how to work in the cloud. Each day will be filled with training, discussion, reviewing real scenarios, and hands on labs.

More Details and Registration here.

Dallas Day of Dot Net : 4th and 5th of March 2011

With Phil Haack kicking off the 2 day event with ASP.NET MVC 3, it got 2 days of immersive .NET programs including but not limited to “Windows phone, Azure, C# 4.0, HTML 5, Asp.Net MVC 3, WPF, Silverlight”. The event is priced at $200, but all proceeds go towards helping a cancer patient.

More Details and Registration here.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Gandhi

MS Event : Windows Azure 2-Day Boot Camp

New Releases From Microsoft For Web Development

Microsoft released an array of new Products and releases mostly targeted for .NET Web developers. Read the full Announcement at Scott Gu's Blog.

Here is a summary of  release contents :

• ASP.NET MVC3 - The latest version of the MVC for ASP.NET, featuring a new view-engine "Razor".
• IIS Express 7.5 – A simplified developer focused version of IIS that does not require admin rights to run and debug code from Visual Studio.
• NuGet - An open source package manager designed to make it easier for .NET developers to find, install, and use open source libraries for projects. One of the best and is our favorite.
• Orchard 1.0 - The Orchard Project is Microsoft-sponsored project dedicated to creating open source applications and reusable components in .NET. Orchard 1.0, a .NET based CMS, is its first project.
• SQL Server Compact Edition 4 – SQL Compact edition gets much simpler to use and deploy. Best deal is that Zero installations required and can be used now in multi-threaded environments.
• WebMatrix – This is definitely a major product,  aiming to make developing .NET web applications fun and simple.  It comes packaged with IIS Express, ASP.NET and SQL Server Compact.  Develop your own or download and install a variety of community applications

That’s a really a huge basket of goodies.

Getting Started With Google App Engine on Windows

If you are planning to get started with Google App Engine on Windows, this note that I have written last year may help. 

I will be using Python for my development, so will be installing App Engine environment for Python.

Python

• Install Python 2.6.4 version from http://www.python.org/download/ I was little tempted to have the latest version 3.1.1 but read in the release notes that 3.1.1 by design is NOT backward compatible. So it may not work with Google App Engine. So just stick to 2.6.4
• Install PIL Module required for Image manipulation on Google App Engine.

Google App Engine SDK for Python

Install Google App Engine SDK from Google App Engine Downloads page. Latest version at this time is 1.3.0 released on 12/14/2009. 

Update:  Latest version of Python is 2.7.1 and App Engine SDK on Python as of 13 January 2011 is 1.4.1

This is all we need to start over working on Google App Engine. We can use Google App Engine Launcher to create a new app, run the app or even deploy the app to Google App Engine.  We can just use the IDLE editor that comes with Python installation to view and edit Python files.

It may just take about 10 minutes for both of these installations.

If you are really serious about developing apps on Google App Engine, then it may be helpful to use an IDE and some source code repository. So keep going : 

• Tortoise  is a nice Subversion client for Windows and you can download it from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.
• If you don’t have a SVN or other repository, try unfuddle. Its really great and Free.
• Of the available IDEs, I really liked Aptana Studio.  You can get it here: Aptana Studio . Once studio is installed, get PyDev plugin from Plugins tab on the studio.

It may take about another 10 more minutes to install Tortoise, Aptana and setup SVN repository. 

Hope that helps.

Wow! Microsoft Excel Turns 25

Wow! Microsoft Office Excel application is 25 years old. Excel is my favorite and one of the best software applications I have ever used. Its incredibly rich, powerful and yet brutally simple.

Congratulations and Thank you Excel Team and Microsoft.