Unhide multiple sheets in Excel

Microsoft Excel has hundreds of functions and commands, but even so there are some things the Microsoft engineers failed to include. One of my recurrent annoyances is the lack of a command to unhide more than one sheet at a time. Hiding several sheets at once is very easy: you just select them by holding down the Ctrl key and then hide the group from the Format menu. The unhide option on the other hand presents you with a list of hidden sheets where you can only select one item to display it again.

When working with large files and lots of sheets, I prefer to hide the sheets where data is stored or where intermediary calculations are performed, and leave only the final results and charts visible to improve the readability of the file. But Excel makes it hard to bring back these sheets if you want to edit them again.

Enable silent updates for Firefox

Along with other innovations like the multi-process architecture, Google Chrome introduced a new update model that minimizes user interaction and delivers the newest, most stable and secure version to the users quickly and silently, in the background. In this regard, Chrome is almost like a web application, where users run the newest version from the server without seeing version numbers or update prompts. A very interesting study conducted last year showed it’s the most efficient system currently available and their conclusions are pretty straightforward:

Our measurements prove that silent updates and little dependency on the underlying operating system are most effective to get users of Web browsers to surf the Web with the latest browser version. [...] We recommend any software vendor to seriously consider deploying silent updates as this benefits both the vendor and the user, especially for widely used attack-exposed applications like Web browsers and browser plug-ins.

Remove buzz from your Gmail Sent folder

One of the annoyances Google Buzz introduced to our Gmail inbox are the dozens of unnecessary messages flooding the ‘Sent’ folder. Practically every Buzz we send out gets copied there, not only manual messages typed into the Buzz status box, but also from all the connected services. Going there to search for a recently sent email, you can find yourself looking at a long list of your tweets instead.

Of course, you can use search to filter out buzz with an expression like this: in:sent –is:buzz, but typing that over and over is time-consuming. Even if you use Quick Links to save the search, it’s annoying to change your habits, not to mention Gmail search won't let you change the number of results to something more useful than 20. And because ‘Sent’ is a system label, like ‘Buzz’, you cannot remove it from a message like you can with regular labels.

Or at least, you can’t in the web interface, but accessing Gmail through IMAP opens up that possibility. In an IMAP client, all Gmail labels are converted into folders and you can easily move messages around, even out of the Sent folder. The best part is the changes are synced back to the server, so the messages will be removed from web-based Gmail as well.

Likes and comments count in Google Buzz

Among the things people miss in the shiny new social network / aggregator from Google is some information about the number of comments and likes. FriendFeed puts that right on your profile for all visitors to see, while on Facebook nothing like this exists and on top of that, I have never heard anybody complain about it.

Google Buzz treats that information more privately, because it can’t be found on your public Google profile, but in the mostly ignored Google Dashboard, accessible only to the user. Like the starred items count for Google Reader, the “Buzz” section of the Dashboard offers some nice statistics about your Buzz activity that you won’t find anywhere else.

Unofficial browser speed tests

And by “unofficial” I mean tests made on my home computer. Now that Opera launched the first beta version of 10.50, I was curious to see if the advertised speed gains were real. My first impressions after installing the new beta were that it was indeed faster, but nowhere near Google Chrome.

For my tests I used two online benchmarking tools, SunSpider and V8, which were also featured in the official Opera tests. I tested the current browsers installed on my computer (well, except Internet Explorer): Chrome 4.0, Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.50 and an older, portable version of Safari 4.0. I opened each of them separately for the purpose of the test and closed the program after getting the results. There were no other major software running in the background, except for the antivirus.

Google Buzz: privacy, present and future

When I first heard the rumors about a new social service being integrated into Gmail, one of my first reactions was: “expect privacy problems”. Unfortunately for Google’s new service, I was right. Practically not a day got by without another article detailing some new way Buzz exposes your Gmail address, your other addresses shared with close friends or even your physical address through the mobile app. There were also some very heated reactions from the public; one of them has restricted access to the blog in the mean time and you can find pieces of it on other blogs covering the uproar.

Personally, I think this public reaction was completely blown out of proportions. Of course, the massive online coverage only served to amplify the “news”, but after all, what can you expect from journalists, if their main concern is traffic? I mean, nobody gets that worked up about security holes in Microsoft products these days and users aren't massively dumping Windows or Internet Explorer when a new flaw is discovered. I don’t deny Buzz had or still has privacy issues, every online service does, but Google was very quick to offer solutions to the “public” concern. I think the timely reaction proves the company takes the privacy of the users very seriously and that it intends to support the new service in every way that it can.

Hide Buzz from your Gmail inbox

Almost immediately after launch, articles appeared on the Internet showing how to hide the email notifications or turn Buzz off completely. The number of updates can be overwhelming, especially if you follow lots of people or very active ones. For example, my unread buzz count usually exceeds 10 times the amount of spam!

If you would like to keep Buzz around, but don’t like to be constantly reminded of new updates, Gmail has a feature that can help. Go to Settings ► Labels and hide the Buzz system label.