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I've had the same background on my machine for almost a year now.  A south atlas (south up), pacific-centered, night image of our lovely planet that wonderfully confused those that hovered over my shoulder and was an appropriate homage to my cartography profession.  It was time for a change and it seemed simple enough.  Found a good image and right clicked, set as desktop background.  Suddenly my image wasn't stretched across two screens but instead duplicated on each screen.  Even switching back to my old image produced the same result.  No longer was South America inverted on the left screen and Africa in the right.  Now the image was small and duplicated.  What the heck? Way too many google searches later I finally learned that right-clicking on the image and then setting properties in Vista has different results than first opening desktop properties and then browsing to the image and setting the properties. 

Do a standard search in Windows Explorer.   In this case I want .mxd's modified after March 22, 2009 so in the search box enter “*.mxd date:>3/22/2009” When search is done highlight all results (CTRL-A) Hold down SHIFT, hover over results and right-click choosing “Copy as Path” Paste results in Notepad Source: http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/print-search-results-in-windows-vista/

In SQL Server views I've been using CASE statements to look for nulls for years. I've just nullified this practice. For the following Employees Table: EmployeeID LastName FirstName Nickname 39 Carter James Jimmy 40 Reagan Ronald 41 Bush George 42 Clinton William Bill Would be used to create the View: EmployeeID LastName Handle 39 Carter Jimmy 40 Reagan Ronald 41 Bush George 42 Clinton Bill This is the CASE: SELECT EmployeeID , LastName , CASE Nickname WHEN Null THEN FirstName ELSE Nickname END As Handle FROM Employees ISNULLified by: SELECT EmployeeID , LastName , ISNULL(Nickname, FirstName) AS Handle FROM Employees

This post is part of an ongoing series Design for Exceptions Spreading the Sheets and Letting Relations In Forming a New Reality There's more to come... we're starting simple and working up... this will slowly become more complex to include SQL Server, ASP.Net web apps and ArcGIS. Download the MS Access 2007 Project used in this post. Now that we have our relationships all set up creating usable edit forms in MS Access 2007 is ludicrously easy. Creating an Edit Form in MS Access in Four Satisfying Steps: Open Beer, Open Access Project Highlight the table for which you want to create a form (let's start with Cities) Click the Create Tab, Select Form Press Save, Sip Beer I'm not kidding. It is that easy. Here's my form (sips beer) Repeat four steps for ZipCodes: Wow! We are amazing. What else is there to do? (sips beer) And that's the problem here, we're just sitting around sipping beer. This isn't real data. Well, it is real data, but it's a t...

This post is part of an ongoing series Design for Exceptions Spreading the Sheets and Letting Relations In Forming a New Reality There's more to come... we're starting simple and working up... this will slowly become more complex to include SQL Server, ASP.Net web apps and ArcGIS. In my last post I went off on relational database design patterns. Now let's try implementing these patterns in MS Access. Download the MS Access 2007 Project used in this post. In the old days we made spreadsheets. And they got ugly really quick. Let's work with our city-zipcode analogy from last time . We started with what is basically a spreadsheet in MS Access: We outgrew this quickly when we added Meridian: I didn't mention this in my last post, but I see this all too often. Basic database design cue, if you're numbering your columns your design is wrong. Why? Boise has 29 zipcodes. New York has 161. Washington, DC has 278. Do you really want 278 columns for storing zipc...

This post is part of an ongoing series Design for Exceptions Spreading the Sheets and Letting Relations In Forming a New Reality There's more to come... we're starting simple and working up... this will slowly become more complex to include SQL Server, ASP.Net web apps and ArcGIS. One of the biggest mistakes I run into every day is databases and spreadsheets which weren't designed for the exceptions. I get it, most of your data fits in your model. But then you run into data that doesn't fit your world view and you call me. And that's when things get ugly. We need an example. Let's use ZipCodes. We all know how these work right? Each city has a zip code. Here's some examples from here in Southwest Idaho: City ZipCode Eagle 83616 Kuna 83634 Idaho City 83631 That wasn't so hard was it? Our spreadsheet is done! Not so fast cowboy. What do we do with Meridian? It has three Zips: 83642, 83646, 83680. You've seen this before though and you got it t...

I had to select a ton of records today for a project in ArcGIS. You know the normal method, hellish SQL repetition: ID = 1 OR ID = 5 OR ID = 6 OR ID = 12 OR ID = 14 OR ID = 27 OR ID = 41 OR ID = 43 The past few months I've been working a lot in SQL Server and this experience made this repetition seem like too much work. So I got lazy and I made an inquiry into IN query: ID IN (1,5,6,12,14,27,41,43) And it just worked. There's no documentation in the main help file that even mentions it. If you do open the ArcGIS Help and search on "SQL Reference" nearly half way down you find a section on Subqueries. Here they explain that IN queries are supported in geodatabases and EXISTS is supported as well! Who knew? How was I supposed to know this if I hadn't gotten lazy? Here's what you'll find in the ArcGIS Help File: Subqueries NOTE: Coverages, shapefiles, and other non-geodatabase file-based data sources do not support subqueries. Subqueries done on a v...