The Holy Grail of Excel Macros

Okay, so, you just got handed a job for a 100+ page workbook. Your client wants you to fix some formatting or something of the like on every page (the 100 pages already exist… creating that many is a different story…). What do you do? You use macros and let the computer do all the work, silly! 😛 The best part is you can charge for all the hours it would have taken you to fix it all up without the snippet I’m about to give you! (Okay, this is probably a tad unethical…).

You’re interested? I thought so. We’re going to use the power of foreach loops to let the computer run through and do all this on every single page. The workflow I use looks something like this:

1. On the first page (or a “test” page), I hit Record Macro and name it something I can remember. Be sure that you remember what the exact name of it is. This is very important. 
2. Proceed to style/do whatever it is that you’re being paid to do. Ahem. 
3. Once you’re done, stop recording the macro. At this point, I usually like to test the macro before I use it on my entire workbook, just to make sure it isn’t going to destroy it all. 😛
4. If you have verified the integrity, now we need to write a bit of code. :O But I have never used the Visual Basic editor! Don’t worry–it’s incredibly simple and you can basically copy and paste this snippet I’m about to give you and just change one little bit for all your repeating macros. 

Let’s get on to the code now, shall we?

Using a LeapMotion for Qt inputs

This is awesome!

Two Features I’d Like to See in C and C++

I really like the ideas he has on the using statement! It would definitely improve code readability and conciseness in a lot of code bases.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

This week, let’s discuss two features I’d really like to see in C and
C++; one trivial, one not so trivial.

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Adobe Island

I’m not a fan of cloud software either… I can live with files, but cloud software just doesn’t appeal to me. Of course, it’s already rumored that Windows 10 will be a cloud-based OS. Ugh.

Dark Fusion Theme for Qt 5

My favorite new theme (for Windows applications, at least) is the Fusion theme that came with Qt 5. I was working on an application recently where the people I was making it for wanted to be able to switch between a lighter and darker theme. Luckily, the Fusion theme uses the applications color palette. I’m putting the code up on Github in a gist, but there won’t be the code to switch between the two themes. I’ll post that later as a quick tip/tutorial.

You can find the theme on Github here. Alternatively, I’m posting the code below in a collapsed code box. Feel free to make changes and submit them back on Github though! You can use this theme in all your applications, but be sure to tell me about them if you can. I’d love to see what people do with it. 🙂

qApp->setStyle(QStyleFactory::create("Fusion"));

QPalette darkPalette;
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::Window, QColor(53,53,53));
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::WindowText, Qt::white);
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::Base, QColor(25,25,25));
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::AlternateBase, QColor(53,53,53));
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::ToolTipBase, Qt::white);
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::ToolTipText, Qt::white);
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::Text, Qt::white);
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::Button, QColor(53,53,53));
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::ButtonText, Qt::white);
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::BrightText, Qt::red);
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::Link, QColor(42, 130, 218));

darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::Highlight, QColor(42, 130, 218));
darkPalette.setColor(QPalette::HighlightedText, Qt::black);
    
qApp->setPalette(darkPalette);

qApp->setStyleSheet("QToolTip { color: #ffffff; background-color: #2a82da; border: 1px solid white; }");

Quick Tip: Stay in Unity Play Mode while Coding

If you aren’t familiar with Unity, it’s a free game engine with a built-in game editor. I use Unity almost every day, and as you can imagine, I’m coding a lot. Now, when you are writing the majority of code for a game, you are testing things out. Perhaps you want to see how fast is fast enough, or how far is far enough. It can be a pain to enter and exit play mode constantly, but wait!

Unity has a nifty little feature that will recompile code and execute it, even while in play mode. You can easily switch over to Visual Studio (or MonoDevelop) and save your changes. Then you can “Alt + Tab” back over into Unity and quickly see your changes. The only downside to this is that, with large projects (10,000+ lines of C#), this can take a few seconds–even on a really fast machine. However, it’s invaluable when testing things, as you never have to leave your spot in play mode. 😉

Happy coding!

Quick Tip: Load Fonts from a Local File with QML

If you are familiar with CSS, you have probably loaded an external font before. With an Internet application, you usually wouldn’t load it from a file, but for a desktop application that doesn’t require an Internet connection, loading from a file is a must. Luckily, this is extremely easy and the TTF file can be embedded right in the executable using the Qt resource system (QRC protocol). In QML, there is a provided FontLoader element that makes quick work of loading fonts. Here’s quick example:

FontLoader { id: myCustomFont; source: "qrc:/fonts/myCustomFont.ttf" }

Note that if you want to do so, it is possible to directly link to a URL on the Internet. However, I wouldn’t recommend this unless you can ensure that your user will have an Internet connection at run-time. Otherwise, I would recommend downloading the TTF file instead and putting it in a local resource file. Be sure to read the license before doing this though!

When you want to use the font later in a font field, for example, you can simply do:

font.family: myCustomFont.name

And that’s it! You are all set to use custom Truetype Fonts in QML! I hope this helps you out with your QML application. Happy coding!

Quick Tip: QProgressBar as a Busy Indicator

This is a super simple tip that doesn’t really have much to it. A busy indicator is just a visual cue to show the user that something is happening. To use a progress bar in Qt as one, you just need to set the minimum and maximum values to 0. If you do this, you get an infinite progress indicator. This is a better alternative to a progress bar when you have a process in which you cannot calculate the percentage completed, or one that takes a really long, undetermined, amount of time. An example with the Fusion style (that I use for basically any QWidgets these days) yields an animated diagonal stitch pattern:

The Qt Fusion style progress bar.

On Windows 7, you get a nice animated effect as well, but with a smaller colored area moving from left to right infinitely.

The Windows 7 version of the busy progress bar indicator

I hope the tip helped you out! Happy coding!

Run As Admin Utility Application

Recently, I wrote a small, win32 native utility to launch executables with administrator rights by utilizing a UAC prompt when launching the other application. You can check out the full source on Github if you want to learn more. The application can also utilize configurable and dynamic command line arguments, if your application needs that.

The release binary is around 30KB in size, and produces no pop-up windows unless there is an error. Errors are handled pretty well and displayed using a discrete message box. Feel free to redistribute it with your application, and attribution would be nice (just leave the executable name intact 😉 ).

Also, if you could, comment or let me know if you are using it. I’d love to get any feedback you have on it, or you can use the Github issue system for bugs/feature requests. A friend of mine has already told me he will be using this for his Python application, since he cannot find a better way to launch his application with administrator rights by default.

Check back often to see if I add new builds that support more features! Happy coding!

You can find the latest releases on Github here

Quick Tip: Copy a QPixmap to the System Clipboard in Qt

A few days ago, we went over copying any amount of text to the system clipboard using the system clipboard. However, you can also leverage the full-power of this by copying images and pixmaps to the system clipboard. Let’s get started!

Our example UI for this. Simply set a pixmap on a label. along with a button.

Behold my stunning UI for this example. 😛 Now that you have your GUI setup, go to the push button’s slot (or wherever you want to put the code) and you are left with this:

    QClipboard *p_Clipboard = QApplication::clipboard();
    p_Clipboard->setPixmap(*(ui->label->pixmap()));

This is essentially what we did with text, however, with a different method. Note the dereference of the constant pointer we get to the label’s pixmap. This is essential, because the setPixmap() function wants a QPixmap object (taken by reference, not pointer). How can you not love C++? 🙂

Then you can paste it anywhere that lets you insert images through the paste!

Here’s the copied pixmap pasted into Word. You can also paste it elsewhere, as long as the form accepts images from the clipboard.

And that about wraps it up. I hope you can use this in one of your projects, and share it if it was useful. Happy coding!