Unable to create offline files in Windows 7

After clicking "Available offline" several times and enabling and disabling offline files I finally stumbled across a solution to make this work.

1. Disable offline files and reboot
2. Navigate to C:\Windows\ 
3. Take ownership of the CSC folder (you may need to also do this to any sub folders)
4. Delete the CSC folder
5. Enable offline files and reboot

Office 2010 Activation error 0x80070190

An unspecified error has occurred. Your request cannot be processed at this time. Please try again later. (0x80070190)

I’ve had the above error message a bunch of times while trying to activate Office 2010, I’ve been able to work around the problem by using the telephone activation option provided by Microsoft but it’s a pain and takes about 5 minutes. I honestly can’t believe I’ve put up with problem for so long when the solution to my problem was fairly obvious and straight forward.

If you are dealing with this error try running the activation as Administrator (right click Word or Excel and select Run as Administrator)

Worked first time for me.

SpaceSniffer - another useful application

 Stop the presses! I can’t believe in all the time that this blog has been going that I haven’t once mentioned or credited an application that I've used countless times.

SpaceSniffer (http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/) is freeware so what’s not to love? SpaceSniffer provides you with a visual representation of folders / file sizes on your hard drive. Today I ran out of disk space, I ran SpaceSniffer and managed to recover 30GB that was hiding in SQL Express (a database I had restored for testing and a transaction log file). It’s simple and intuitive to use.

GoDaddy PHPMailer Relay problems

This has been very frustrating, if you search for GoDaddy and PHPMailer you'll find loads of posts about how PHPMailer needs to be configured in order to work with GoDaddy's hosting.

I tried using some of the configuration information I found online but I wasn’t having any luck. I kept getting “Error: The following From address failed:” despite trying several different addresses (including valid addresses that I had setup on GoDaddy’s cPanel)

I finally came across Aravind is Online blog which nudged me in the right direction (http://aravindisonline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/phpmailer-with-godaddy-smtp-email.html)

For completeness.

You cannot use an external host to relay email messages. You must use the following host: relay-hosting.secureserver.net  

I setup a mail user specifically for PHPMailer (I am hosting a subdomain so all my email services are elsewhere)

Use PORT 25 (numerous guides suggest 465)

Set SMTP Auth to true, Aravind’s guide suggests to set this to false, however this didn’t work for me.

US / UK Date format reverse in Excel

This problem has been bugging me for 3 days now; I am retrieving a date time from SQL. I have verified that the date is in my required format dd-mm-yy, and I have tried a few different ways of selecting the date just to be sure DATEPART(day, fieldname) , DATEPART(month, fieldname), I have even tried dd-MMM-yy.

If I display the date on a form or in a messagebox it displays fine, the moment I put the date value into an Excel cell it flips the day and month around. Originally I was going to work around the issue by prefixing all my dates with a single quote ‘ so that Excel treats them as being strings, however the end user wants to sort on some of the date values and it won’t work quite right as a string.

After banging my head against the wall for 3 days I finally came across the DateValue(date) function! Figured I’d share the solution to this frustrating little problem.

Excel 2010 .xlsm File hangs when opening

I've been writing some VBA macros to improve an Excel workbooks functionality. I was modifying a Sub Routine and just in case I made a mistake and need to revert back to it I made a copy and appended _backup to its name. As it happens I decided I preferred the original way the sub routine worked so I restored it (deleted the original routine) and then renamed the _backup. Turns out I had accidentally copied the routine twice (VBA didn't warn me of this). Thinking everything was fine I saved and closed my workbook, when I came back to it a few hours later I was unable to open it, Excel 2010 just sat at 100% without allow me into the workbook.

I found a few suggestions online to fix this and none worked, so here's what I did to get mine working.

Change the extension of the file from .xlsm to .xls and then open the file. I got prompted that there was a file type mismatch (or something similar) and it also gave me a complication error, something along the lines of problem with sub routine. As soon as I saw the sub routine error I knew where my coding problem was, corrected it and then saved the file back as .xlsm.

I hope this helps someone out, had me in a panic for a few moments.

None of your e-mail accounts could send to this recipient

Ok I had a very strange email issue today. One of my clients tried sending to various email addresses and kept getting a bounce message with “None of your e-mail accounts could send to this recipient” error. 

After some investigation a number of contacts had been setup to use “MAILTO” rather than “SMTP” (you can check this by double clicking on the contacts name) to resolve the issue I deleted the contact and typed them in, then doubled clicked on them to verify that it had defaulted to SMTP.