If you write macros that other people in your organization use, you should be aware of the Macro Security settings in Excel (and in all Office applications). These settings control the messages you receive when you open a workbook that contains macros; they ask if it’s okay to enable them. In the good old days, developers didn’t have to worry about such things. But with the advent of macro viruses, you now need to take such user-level security settings into account....

Most news media (newspapers, television and radio stations, and magazines) are owned by corporations that rely on other companies to place advertisements and help the media pay their bills. So what are the odds that a newspaper will run a story criticizing a major advertiser, or run a story exposing the media’s corporate owner? More importantly, what news company is going to risk raising the ire of its own government, when doing so could jeopardize that company from atte....

The key to finding anything on the Internet is to use a search engine, but if you ask different search engines to find the same information, each one will find a number of websites not found by the others. Rather than limiting yourself to the tunnel vision of a single search engine, experiment with some of the different search engines listed below, and you may uncover information that your favorite search engine missed. Even better, you may find that one sea....

A Web server is the server software behind the World Wide Web. It listens for requests from a client, such as a browser like Netscape or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. When it gets one, it processes that request and returns some data. This data usually takes the form of a formatted page with text and graphics. The browser then renders this data to the best of its ability and presents it to the user. Web servers are in concept very simple programs. They await for requests....

The ability to create objects from other Office applications is one of the great things about using VBA. For example, you can write a macro that will create an Outlook message object and attach a shortcut to the currently open workbook. A button on the toolbar will perform this same action, which is fine if that’s all you want to do. But using the sample macro below, you can add other text to the message, pre-address it, or perform other actions. You can also tie the cre....