Export your Twitter archive – and practical ways to use it

As many feared previously, under Elon Musk’s management Twitter has been in a perpetual state of disarray, to the point of having its former identity erased when Musk decided to rebrand the site as X. Currently there doesn’t seem to be a clear alternative on the horizon, despite numerous attempts with different approaches. The constant erosion of the platform, and various rumors that Musk considers removing free accounts, have made me reflect on my options when this site – inevitably – goes dark. While I obviously can’t do anything to prevent it, like any other user I can at least backup my data. I gather links and various information in my Twitter likes, so this data is particularly important to keep for future reference.

The process is fairly straightforward: on the home page in the left-hand menu under ‘More’ go to ‘Settings and privacy’, then ‘Your account’ and finally ‘Download an archive of your data’. After confirming with your password and a verification code by email, Twitter will start generating the archive and will notify you with an in-app notification when it’s available for download. You receive a .zip file which can be quite large and contains a lot of files – mine is over 900MB and has more than 12,000 files.

Custom number formats in Excel (and their pitfalls)

One of the more powerful Excel features that is relatively underused by most people – at least in my experience – is custom number formatting. It allows end users to change how numeric values are shown in the cell without changing the underlying data. This in turn enables Excel to perform calculations and link formulas to these cells, while at the same time displaying different information that better conveys its purpose.

Basic number formats are front and center in the Excel interface on the ‘Home’ tab, as they power the various options to change numbers to ‘Currency’, ‘Accounting’, ‘Percentage’, even ‘Scientific’ and ‘Date’ and ‘Time’. Ironically, I think this is partially the reason why the feature is somewhat obscure: people are using the basic version so frequently, they never think there’s a more advanced and powerful incarnation waiting to be discovered.

Better AutoFit for Excel with VBA

After my annoyance that Excel couldn’t unhide multiple sheets finally got addressed last year, I discovered another area where Excel could use some improvement. This one concerns the AutoFit feature and can also be easily solved with a short VBA code. In my current job I started working with Excel files with considerable number of columns of various widths. This makes reading and navigating sheets cumbersome, as some columns are too narrow and hide important pieces of text in their cells, while others can be very wide so that users waste time scrolling horizontally to get from one place to the next. Theoretically, the Excel AutoFit feature should help, but this only fixes the first issue by making narrow columns wide enough to fit their entire contents, while at the same time exacerbating the second. What I would actually need is to run the AutoFit algorithm but restrict the maximum width to some value of my choosing, thus preventing columns from getting exceedingly wide.

Being more productive with the Excel Quick Access Toolbar

I have been meaning to share more tips and tricks for working with Microsoft Excel on my blog, since this constitutes a large portion of my daily activity, but there always seems to be something more pressing to write about. One of my favorite productivity features in more recent versions of Excel – if you can still call the Office Ribbon, introduced in Excel 2007, ‘recent’ – is the Quick Access Toolbar. Usually merged with the Title bar, the Quick Access Toolbar comes prepopulated with a small set of tools like Save, Undo and Redo, which you can customize to your needs.

Ars Technica: “Disable the Windows print spooler to prevent hacks, Microsoft tells customers”

An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when the Windows Print Spooler service improperly performs privileged file operations, Microsoft wrote in Thursday’s advisory. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.

Microsoft said that the attacker must first have the ability to execute code on a victim’s system. The advisory rates in-the-wild exploits as “more likely”. Microsoft continues to advise that customers install the previously issued security updates. A print spooler is software that manages the sending of jobs to the printer by temporarily storing data in a buffer and processing the jobs sequentially or by job priority.

The workaround for this vulnerability is stopping and disabling the Print Spooler service, Thursday’s advisory said. It provides several methods customers can use to do so.

Dan Goodin

I went ahead and disabled the print spooler on my personal laptop, thinking I would not need it on a regular basis, but in the process I stumbled upon one of the weirder and more unexpected dependencies in Microsoft software. Apparently, since Excel 2010, charts located on separate chart sheets somehow rely on printer drivers for their dimensions. With the print spooler stopped, the system behaves as if no printer is installed and because of this Excel chart areas default to a fixed size and cannot be resized! The result is a weird looking mini-chart, sometimes with distorted text.

Export Excel charts as SVG files

Speaking of Excel and its numerous use cases, there is a certain missing feature that I have wanted for years: the ability to export charts in SVG format. A vector-based file format, SVG is particularly well suited to render charts and scale them to almost any resolution, because it redraws chart components to match the new size instead of enlarging static pixels, as regular image formats do. There were complicated workarounds involving exporting to PDF first and then extracting charts with third-party software, but I always found them too cumbersome for regular use.

But during the last quarter of 2019, the process became a lot simpler after Office 365 added an option to convert PowerPoint slides to SVG files. To convert an Excel chart instead, all you need to do now is to copy that chart into a blank PowerPoint presentation and save that slide as SVG! I have used this method several times for my blog, both for the articles related to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as for other articles with charts and visualizations.

Not Boring: “Excel Never Dies”

Excel is the most popular programming language on earth, and most people who program in Excel don’t even realize they are, in fact, programming. There are an estimated 1.2 billion people who use Microsoft Office, and while it’s hard to know exactly how many people use Excel regularly, estimates put it at 750 million users. By comparison, as of 2018, there were only 10.7 million JavaScript developers and 7 million Python developers.

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By being naturally full stack, a single person can build a complex model in Excel without needing to rely on outside help. And for tasks that don’t lend themselves to easy division of a labor, this is an essential quality. Investment Bankers have long argued the reason that analysts and associates will spend 80 to 100 hours a week on financial models (in Excel, of course) is the lack of divisibility of their work; often only one person has all the needed information to build the model.

Excel combines the power of a programming language, the immediate usability of consumer software, and the skill progression of a video game with the flexibility to adapt to nearly infinite use cases. That’s a combination no other software offers, and it’s why Excel has been able to survive and thrive while millions of other applications have come and gone.

And it’s not going anywhere.

Packy McCormick

Excel may seem like an unlike software to love and praise in an era of smartphone apps and cheap entertainment, but its advantages are broad and hard to match by other, more purpose-built software. I have been using Excel for roughly 20 years and still I find new ways to use it, new shortcuts to speed up my work. Recently, I have been particularly impressed with the new Power Query tools enabling users to import and manipulate external data in ways that are both easier and more powerful than before. In fact, I have used this feature to track coronavirus case numbers since the pandemic began a year ago, comparing countries and graphing the results.