Could this help?

I thought that the On Screen Keyboard would work, but I heard that the break key on the On Screen Keyboard didn’t work. I didn’t have time to research, so I left the no break key issue to those that actually didn’t have a break key.
Fast forward a few weeks, and I myself got a Dell XPS 15 which, as luck would have it, does not have a break key. So, here I am again, tackling the same issue. This time, the solution takes a bit of software.
At work, I use a program called AutohotKey to script things out, like my signature. So, RR expands to
Thanks,
Rudy Rodarte

AutoHotKey can also remap keys send commands. Here are a few links showing the different things AutoHotKey can do:
Hot Keys
Remaping Keys
HotStrings (auto expanding text, like my signature)
Now, knowing all this, we can use AutoHotKey to map Control-Alt-Break to some other key. I use Control-Alt-C as my Control-Alt-Break replacement. Here is the code:

^!c::send ^!{CtrlBreak}

You can download the Control-Alt-Break file here:
CtrlAltBreak.zip

All you have to do is save this to a file, load the file in AutoHotKey, and use Control-Alt-C whenever you need your Remote Desktop session back to full screen.

Rudy

Rudy Rodarte is a SQL Server Database professional based in Austin, TX. Over his career, Rudy has worked with SSRS, SSIS, performance tuning troubleshooting. When away from Keyboard, Rudy goes to Spurs and Baylor Bear sporting events.

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The problem was, each row was formatted differently. So I had several thousand rows that looked like this:

Client A (555)
Client B (789) Houston
Client Dallas (4444)

and so on.

I looked around on some Excel Guru sites and found the following formula.

=REPLACE(LEFT(A1,LOOKUP(10,MID(A1,ROW(INDIRECT("1:30")),1)+0,ROW(INDIRECT("1:30")))),1,MIN(FIND(0,SUBSTITUTE(A1&0,{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},0)))-1,"")+0


Caveat

Though not perfect, this was exactly what I needed. The one drawback to this code is any cell with non sequential numbers such as:
Client T1000 Loop 360
will not work.

Rudy

Rudy Rodarte is a SQL Server Database professional based in Austin, TX. Over his career, Rudy has worked with SSRS, SSIS, performance tuning troubleshooting. When away from Keyboard, Rudy goes to Spurs and Baylor Bear sporting events.

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I recently had to use back end data from SQL Server to deliver several reports in excel. All of my SQL code gave me results in seconds; however, the users had distinct formatting requests. I would have to use a few excel tricks to get things just right in each report.

Time in Seconds to HH:MM:SS

For the first request, I had to take the number of seconds and convert to HH:MM:SS. My script gave me results like 18000 seconds or so. To get the results in the desired format, I first divide the value by 86400. 86400 is the number of seconds in a day (60*60*24). Next, in custom formatting, choose [h]:mm:ss. It is important to choose [h]:mm:ss instead of HH:MM:SS because the h in brackets allows numbers greater than 23. So, our example of 18000 seconds becomes 5 hours.

Time to Decimal Hours

For the second request, I had to take the number of seconds and covert to decimal hours. Let’s look at 5 hours and 45 minutes or 20700 seconds. The first step is to divide the seconds by 86400 and convert the value to [h]:mm:ss. In our example, 20700 seconds appears as 5:45:00. Next, divide the value by 0.041666667. The number 0.041666667 = 1/24th of a day. Lastly, format the results as number with 2 decimal places. The result comes out nicely with number of hours before the decimal and fractional hours after the decimal. So, our example of 20700 seconds becomes 5.75 hours.

Rudy

Rudy Rodarte is a SQL Server Database professional based in Austin, TX. Over his career, Rudy has worked with SSRS, SSIS, performance tuning troubleshooting. When away from Keyboard, Rudy goes to Spurs and Baylor Bear sporting events.

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So, last month I finally got my new work system. It is a nice Dell Precision M4500 running an Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, tons of Hard Drive space, etc. I also made the move to Windows 7 X64 from Windows Vista. In reality, I don’t use many of the super advanced OS features. I wants the OS to “stay out of the way” of my day to day tasks. One of those tasks is remoting into servers and headless desktops. It is not that unusual for me to have several Remote Desktop(MSTSC.exe) windows open at the same time.

Now, I will usually fire up the remote desktop windows in fullscreen mode and take care of some tasks. Once complete, I will minimize the window, like any other window. The problem appears when I restore the Remote Desktop window. Instead of returning to true fullscreen, I find that the Windows 7 Taskbar, or Superbar, blocked the window from returning to full screen. Also, the remote desktop window now has scroll bars.

Luckily, the fix is pretty easy. We all know we can use Ctrl-Alt-End to send a Ctrl-Alt-Del  message to the remote desktop. Similarly, we can use Ctrl-Alt-Break to force the Remote Desktop window to a true full screen. Superbar or not, the Remote Desktop is now full screen again!

Rudy

Rudy Rodarte is a SQL Server Database professional based in Austin, TX. Over his career, Rudy has worked with SSRS, SSIS, performance tuning troubleshooting. When away from Keyboard, Rudy goes to Spurs and Baylor Bear sporting events.

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1. Open Windows Media Center on your secondary monitor
2. Maximize Windows Center
   1. The mouse is now stuck on the secondary monitor
3. Hit the Windows key on your keyboard
4. Move the mouse freely again!

Perhaps the next Windows 7 service pack will have something for this issue.

Rudy

Rudy Rodarte is a SQL Server Database professional based in Austin, TX. Over his career, Rudy has worked with SSRS, SSIS, performance tuning troubleshooting. When away from Keyboard, Rudy goes to Spurs and Baylor Bear sporting events.

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I’ve gotten that error more than once from Outlook 2007. The error will appear every time you try to open an eMail and the Calendar may not work at all. Not a good way to start the day. Luckily, there is a quick fix to resolve this error:

1. Exit outlook completely.
   1. Use Task Manager or Process Explorer to ensure that outlook is no longer running.
2. In Windows Explorer, navigate to %USERPROFILE%\local settings\application data\microsoft\forms\
3. Delete the file FRMCACHE.DAT
4. Restart outlook

Now, whenever you open up an item, the error should no longer appear.

Rudy

Rudy Rodarte is a SQL Server Database professional based in Austin, TX. Over his career, Rudy has worked with SSRS, SSIS, performance tuning troubleshooting. When away from Keyboard, Rudy goes to Spurs and Baylor Bear sporting events.

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