The Poorhouse's discovery of the day: DocTranslate - A heavenly, and free, treat for those of us poor info-workers who deal with several countries, not all of which are polite enough to speak English as their first language.

Using the mighty power of Google Translate, this downloadable program takes as input a Microsoft Word or Powerpoint document and translates it to/from any combination of languages that Google knows. It comes out with some oddities due to the limitations of computer translation at the best of times (although if you’re good at languages you can apparently improve it further), but even so it rather beats one’s random guesses at what any of a particularly dull looking document might mean. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Joys! Another post on the intricate un-wonders of Microsoft Excel. As all those who are unlucky enough to be Excel fiends know, there is enough about it that is a right royal pain in the ass. Anything that can make working with it a little easier has surely got to be welcome. Especially if it's free, given it's not always easy to get employers to actually give you anything involving £, and it feels morally wrong to make a personal investment into the mysterious lands of numbers in squares.

With that in mind, here's the Poorhouse's current top 3 free downloadable addons for others who spend double-digit hours a day inside this most gridular of programs. All guaranteed working for at least Excel 2003, and probably other versions too.

...and here's another geeky one. Targeted at a even more niche audience, the Poorhouse imagines.

Anyone who has already experienced the "joy" of controlling Microsoft Publisher from another application via Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) may have noticed quite a bit of trial and error seems to be needed, unless that's just the way the Poorhouse codes. Which it is. Anyway, moving on...after an application was upgraded from Publisher XP to 2003 it suddenly stopped working.

Whenever the calling application (an Access database as it happens) tried to "autofit" - that is enlarge or reduce the size of text so it perfectly fits into a surrounding text-box using the "best fit" method - the following useful-as-ever Microsoft error message flashed up and crashed the program.

Method "autofittext" of object textframe failed
Run-time error -2147467259

Update frequency around here is not impressive, the Poorhouse knows. He's mainly been trapped behind a sea of Excel for a few millenia so it feels. In which case, let's liven things up, by discussing...Excel.

Whoop. Yep, here's a handy tip of something used in recent days. Not original or mindblowing but handy if you don't already know it.

No spreadsheet is complete without a few formulae to manipulate those magic numbers. A formula usually looks like "=A1 + A2" to add the contents of cells A1 and A2. But what if you don't know, at the point of writing your spreadsheet, exactly what cell you want to use? Rather, you want the cell used to vary depending on what has been input in another cell. There are a few different ways, but a quick, easy and perhaps dirty - albeit VBA free - one is utilising the wonders of INDIRECT.

The Poorhouse spends a lot of time looking at dull grey grids of numbers. It's not a hobby per se, but it happens. As per pretty much any other normal business, these numbers appear a lot in Microsoft Excel where hours upon hours of top fun can be had moving them around a bit until they sort of hint at some sort of conclusion that makes you look good. But between staring at these dire digits comes time to prepare for staring at dire digits, which leads to magical shortcuts being discovered.

For months, edging on years, now there's been speculation, comment and complaint about how the otherwise beauteous Nintendo Wii can't play (film) DVDs even though quite clearly it has a DVD drive. It's hardly the biggest issue ever, DVD drives are 10 a penny now, but it would have been nice for those broken DVD-player emergencies. Plus Nintendo themselves, so it was said, claimed it was coming in a version 2 Wii which was later shelved/massively delayed.

No need to wait for mythical version 2 mind! Clever Wii-hackers have worked out how to get the lovely white beast that you already own - if you have any sort of good console taste - to play DVDs . Whoo!

Recently, a strange and magical event (slip of the finger, some would allege) mean that the Poorhouse had cause to attempt to download all of the inane pictures that constitute his Flickr account.

The (or rather 'a') great beauty of Flickr, as opposed to the evils of Facebook et al, is that it does preserve your original photos - but it is a mission and a half if you want to download them all back to your computer en masse. It is significantly less hard however if you use FlickrEdit.

What could be more interesting on a weekend than an article about Microsoft Office? I know...a story about the most common aspects of it that everyone knows about anyway.

Those of you with recentish incarnations such as Office 2003 may be aware that unless you tell it not to, Office monitors (parts of) what you're doing and reports back to big bad Microsoft which collates this information, hopefully to inform their designers and developers rather than another step towards world domination. So guessy guess time: what were the most used commands in Word based on this data (circa 2006 anyway)?

Now we're all tied to our computers 24/7 downloading megabuckets of online, advert-free audio visual entertainment it sometimes seems like the simple pleasures of life, such as watching a bit of TV from the comfort of your sofa are long gone. However, it doesn't have to be like this, as it is easy enough to convert many types of video playable on a computer - for instance .avi or .wmv files that you may have downloaded from who knows where - to a format suitable for putting on a real life physical DVD no less.

If you remember your last 20th / early 21st century technology well you may recall you can then put this silver disk into the machine under your TV and off you go, custom TV and films from the comfort of ones' living room setup.

Comboboxes, aka dropdown boxes, are useful tools for constructing e-forms, restricting idiot-user responses to limited-choice fields and soon. Microsoft Excel has many a way of allowing you to create these, whether this be via the Forms toolbar, Control Toolbox toolbar or the Data -> Validation menu option.

One especially useful feature of such choice-enabling controls is that of making the choices in one box dependent on what the user chose in another. For instance, if a user chose "animals" in box 1, the other could allow "fox", "badger" and "pig" as options, but if they chose "vegetables" in box 1, the other box could only allow "carrots", "cauliflowers" and "cabbages" as choices.