You may recall - if you have the memory of an elephant and actually read anything around here - the Poorhouse's distaste for the idea of the Bacon Bar, a chocolate bar with ingrained bacon. The thought at the time was to take 2 of the sublimest tastes known to humanity, inappropriately combine them into one product, and then have a cheek to sell it at £2 per ounce, was an outrageous waste. Cognitively, it still seems that way.

However, since then, the Poorhouse has great reason to thank Stu of Crazy4Flavour, the UK distributors of "Bacon Salt" who has inclined the Poorhouse to confront his prejudices and give it - or rather a bargainous equivalent - a go.

The Poorhouse spends increasing amounts of his time with his head buried in the pile of small grey rectanges that is Microsoft Excel. This mind-boggling time is sometimes more than it really needs to be due to strangely lacking features in this program of a billion obscure functions. Take for example the variable width column chart (aka as the a start towards a matrix or Marimekko chart).

One use of such a beast is to represent 2 dimensions of data within a simple bar format - the height of the bars is the classic key dimension, and the width is another. Below is an example of this in practice. This made-up chart shows the amount of income generated by sales of cars by the paint colour of the car on the Y-axis, and the quantity of cars sold itself is reflected in the width of the bar. The wider the bar, the more cars were sold. Blue cars clearly generated the most income - and the wide width of the bar shows that this could be because the largest proportion of cars sold were blue (in the real world of course the chart would be appropriately captioned...).

Now, this isn't a built-in Excel chart type sadly and it's a faff to do, so below is a macro to 1-click do it for you.

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!

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.

If, like the Poorhouse, you are blessed with a nice slightly old-skool Daewoo DVD9000 S5 DVD player or similar you can easily enough get around the "region" restrictions on it. Yay. DVDs are coded to certain regions; perhaps the most relevant here being Region 1 = America, Region 2 = UK. A DVD player will only play the specific region's DVDs it is set to, presumably to stop UK importing cheap / early release US DVDs and the like. Boo.

However, if you have this specific DVD player you can remove this silliness as below.

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.

Well, for a while, the lovely email solution that is Gmail> (aka Googlemail), and the custom-domain Google Apps variant, didn’t seem to be getting much in the way of new features, despite big upgrades by its main competitors. Recently though, things have changed. We can look forward to a faster interface, a better contacts management solution, more storage space and, perhaps most excitingly in the eyes of the Poorhouse, IMAP.

IMAP, the Internet Message Access Protocol, is a technology allowing offline mail programs such as Outlook, Thunderbird et al. to read and manipulate their mail. Yes, Gmail has had an alternative technology, POP3, for a long, long while, albeit a rather dodgy implementation in some ways, but IMAP has the bonus of being able to keep in sync with the web-based Gmail proper. For instance, unlike POP3, if you read a message through an IMAP client then it will appear as read when you access Gmail or Google Apps over the web. You can move the messages between labels (usually termed folders under IMAP), delete them, star them and so on.

Update: Google have now released a version of the Gmail Mobile App for Google Apps accounts on devices other than Blackberries, so the information in this article is largely out of date. Visit http://m.google.com/a from your phone to download it.

Google Apps is a lovely way to get your email, combining the loveliness of the normal Gmail interface with the ability to use your own domain names properly, without any of this Outlook "poorhouse@company.com on behalf of poorhouse123@gmail.com" nonsense. And it's free! They also recently upgraded the email storage you get for free to that of a normal Gmail account, currently 3805 MB.

But there is one super-useful feature missing from the Google Apps product that you do get with standard Gmail - support for the Gmail Mobile App, a much nicer way to interact with your email from your (Java-enabled) phone or PDA than the standard web interface. Sadly it doesn't support Google Apps mail - but with a little trickery, it can.