Home of the Spider

Position:Relative

I have an confession to make. I don't use Firefox. I know, I know.

Thing is, I love Opera. It's by far and away the best of the browsers. And lets face it, most of the users of my site use Internet Explorer, so I use IE to make sure everything renders correctly. Firefox, like Safari for windows, sits mostly unused.

I did use it today, and I discovered something funny. Take a look at this magnetic soap dish, see that "free shipping" graphic? It is positioned absolutely, relative to the table cell that its in (mostly cause I'm lazy.) The table cell is positioned relatively.

For those who've forgotten, positioning an item relatively has no effect on how its displayed. What it does is, for child elements that are positioned absolutely, its relative to the relatively positioned element. Without a relatively positioned element, its relative to the top left of the page.

Of course, it renders fine in IE. In Firefox, it would put that graphic in the top left of the page. After playing around, turns out that wrapping the image in a div and positioning the div relatively renders correctly in all browsers.

I'm not sure why it wouldn't allow the cell to be positioned. I can understand not positioning it absolutely, but relatively should work. Unless I'm missing something...

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Item of the day: Master Gourmet 157-084-CR by Blanco America - Kitchen Faucet

Auto-stemming #NAME?

This is really a confluence of annoyances. For a variety of reasons, some of which make no sense, we need to have formatted descriptions for our products in the csv files imported into our new inventory management system. This system will only allow formatted descriptions of up to 35 characters per line. The system wraps unformatted descriptions automatically, but formatted descriptions would get truncated if you give it more than 35 characters.

Manually creating multiple cells of less than 35 characters each would take forever, so my first foray into VBA was automating this process. I'm not that familiar with Excel or VBA, so when I encountered my first error cell, I had no idea what it was. I was getting a type-mismatch error, and when I looked at the data in the cell, I saw this "#NAME?". I didn't even know that this indicated an error!

So I Google "#NAME?" and I get 2 billion results. Now, Excel is popular, but that couldn't be right. And I couldn't convince Google to search for the exact string I entered. They insisted on searching for what they, in their infinite genius, decided I wanted to search for.

Google, here's a free hint. If I typed in "#NAME?", I want to find web-pages with the exact term "#NAME?". Sounds kinda obvious, I know, but there it is. Had I wanted to search for "NAME", I would not have typed the "#" and the "?"!

When I finally realize that "#NAME?" indicates an error in the cell, I search for "excel error cell". The first result gives me exactly what I need, a table of error messages and what the error is. Included in this table is my "#NAME?" error, so why can't I find that directly with Google?

See Error Messages in Excel

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Item of the Day: Jacuzzi Morphosis BR70 - Jacuzzi Air Tubs