- How-To: Copy SQL table with identity to other database
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 commentsIf you ever wanted to copy a database table with contents to a different database, including the identity columns used for primary and foreign key relations, you might encounter an error message similar to this:
Msg 8101, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
An explicit value for the identity column in table 'D:\Db\Target.MDF.dbo.Languages' can only be specified when a column list is used and IDENTITY_INSERT is ON.
Here is the working SQL Query code to solve this problem:
SET IDENTITY_INSERT [D:\Db\Target.MDF].dbo.Languages ON
GO
INSERT INTO [D:\Db\Target.MDF].dbo.Languages (LanguageID, LanguageCodeID, CountryID, NameType, Name)
SELECT LanguageID, LanguageCodeID, CountryID, NameType, [Name]
FROM [D:\Db\Source.MDF].dbo.Languages AS SourceTable
GO
SET IDENTITY_INSERT [D:\Db\Target.MDF].dbo.Languages OFF
GO
Note the use of IDENTITY_INSERT and the list of columns before the SELECT statement.
- TIP: Improve weekly planning in your Outlook Calendar
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Posted by oVan on Monday, March 31, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Here are some quick tips to improve your productivity with the Outlook calendar:
Create a second calendar for planning your week. Choose File | New | Calendar... and name it Planning.
In the planning calendar, make a general weekly planning by creating recurring appointments. Set their status like this: free status for home stuff, tentative status for work stuff, and busy status for must-do weekly items (backup, etc).
Assign meaningful categories to these appointments (work, phone, email, errands, home, garden, etc.) and make extensive use of Outlook's color categories. If you only need a few categories, give every one of them a distinct color.
If you plan on using lots of categories, assign the colors based on billable status (green = home stuff, blue = work stuff that brings in money, purple for unbilled work stuff, etc).Every Monday morning, switch to the calendar view (Ctrl+2), enable Week View (Alt + "-"). Now you can do your weekly review (using David Allen's GTD-style or Franklin Covey's Big Rocks) with your planning calendar as a guide. Note that you can set the planning calendar to overlay your regular calendar, or you can display them side by side - whatever works best for you. Now it's easy to fill those days and keep a healthy balance between work and family life: a quick glance at the colors of the week will tell you if you schedule enough time for both parties.
Still in the calendar view, with the To-Do Bar at the right side open, arrange your todo's by Category. Based on the color or category, you can now quickly drag a task or follow-up item to your regular calendar:
- If you drop a task onto the Daily Task List, it will set the due date of your task and update the follow-up flag.
- Dropping it on a time slot of a day will create a new appointment and past the task text into the appointment.
- You can also drop your task on the calendar button in the navigation pane. That will create a new appointment with the task text, and open it for editing.
Note: Dragging/dropping with the right-mouse button will give you a popup menu with choices (create or copy a new appointment - with the tasks linked as a shortcut or attachment).
Some handy and lesser known Outlook keyboard shortcuts to further improve your productivity:
General:
- Control + 1: Email
- Control + 2: Calendar
- Control + 3: Contacts
- Control + 4: Tasks
- Control + 5: Notes
- Control + 6: All folders
- Control + 7: Your shortcuts
- Control + 8: Journal
- Control + Y: Jump to any folder
- Control + Shift + I: Jump to Inbox
- Alt + F1: toggle Navigation Pane (full, minimized, off)
- Alt + F2: toggle To-Do Bar (full, minimized, off)
Calendar views (regular shortcuts):
- Control + Alt + 1: Day view (1 day)
- Control + Alt + 2: Work week view (5 days)
- Control + Alt + 3: Full week view (7 days)
- Control + Alt + 4: Month view (31 days)
Calendar views (alternative shortcuts):
- Alt + 1: Day view (1 day)
- Alt + 2: Day view (2 days)
- Alt + 3: Day view (3 days)
- Alt + 4: Day view (4 days)
- Alt + 5: Day view (5 days)
- Alt + 6: Day view (6 days)
- Alt + 7: Day view (7 days)
- Alt + 8: Day view (8 days, no kidding)
- Alt + 9: Day view (9 days - yes really)
- Alt + 0: Day view (10 days - this rocks!)
- Alt + -: Week view
- Alt + =: Month view
For email:
- Control + Shift + V: Move an item to a folder
Creating stuff:
- Control + Shift + M: New message
- Control + Shift + A: New appointment
- Control + Shift + C: New contact
- Control + Shift + K: New task
Has this helped you - or do you have some tips of your own? Drop a line in the comments...
Labels: 2007, key, keyboard, management, Microsoft, MSO2007, Office, Office 2007, OL2007, Outlook, Outlook 2007, productivity, project, shortcut, tip, trick, usability, Windows
- Tip: Looking for a Microsoft Hotfix?
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, June 06, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsIf you're looking for Microsoft hotfixes, you sometimes need to call Microsoft to get it. However, there's a better/faster way:
The Hotfix Share only contains those hotfixes that are not publicly available on the Microsoft website. Bookmark it, it comes in handy when you're stuck again :-)
- Vista Productivity Tip: Quick Access to Windows Mobility Center
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Posted by oVan on Sunday, June 03, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsNotebook users are often avid keyboard users, using a mouse is not always practical on the road or in the garden and you can do many tasks so much quicker with a few quickstrokes.
Windows Vista has a number of keyboard shortcuts that make life a little easier. One of them is Win+X: on notebooks, laptops and tablet pc's this launches the Windows Mobility Center. (Win+X is the Windows Logo Key together with the letter X)
The Windows Mobility Center gives you quick access to typical notebook-related activities. These are presented as small tiles: volume settings, battery status, wireless network, external display, sync settings and presentation settings.
Apparently it is also possible for third parties to create extra tiles, but so far I haven't seen them. One thing I'm missing here on my Dell Latitude D810 notebook is a tile for Bluetooth. Have you seen it, or do you know if it exists? What about other usefull tiles? Let us know, post a comment!Labels: keyboard, Microsoft, mobility, productivity, tip, Vista, Windows, Windows Vista
- How reliable is your Vista?
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsOne of the best features in Windows Vista is still unknown to a lot of people: the Reliability and Performance Monitor is a very handy program based on the Microsoft Management Console interface that shows you a lot of information on the current performance and the historical stability of your computer. To start this tool, type "reliability" in the Start Menu and you'll see the shortcut to the "Reliability and Performance Monitor".
Upon launch, it shows you the actual performance status in 4 horizontal bars: CPU, Disk, Network and Memory. When you click on Resource Overview, you get those nifty graphs that show you the latest trends.
When you select the Reliability Monitor from the left column, you'll get a historical chart showing you how reliable your computer was until yesterday. This is based on a lot of factors: software installs and uninstalls, application failures, hardware failures, Windows failures and miscellaneous failures.
When you installed Vista (or bought a new computer with Vista pre-installed), your computer started with reliability index 10. Every day that ended with some problem will lower the index. Similarly, every day without any problem will raise the index a bit. Selecting a day in the chart will immediately give you a list of all problems that occured. This feature comes in very handy when you need to troubleshoot a computer of someone else. Without having to rely on their story, you just open the reliability chart and immediately see what causes the problem.
ps: As you can see in the screenshot above, the reliability index for my Dell notebook is at a very low index of 3.80. This is caused by the HP Sleep Service (HPSLPSVC) that crashes every time returning from sleep (what's in a name?), despite numerous chats with the friendly HP Live Support and disabling DEP for all HP software.Labels: monitor, reliability, reliable, tip, trick, Windows, Windows Vista
- Vista Productivity Tip: Save To Desktop
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Posted by oVan on Thursday, May 17, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsWhen you download a file with Internet Explorer, and your external storage drives or network drives are offline, a lot of people quickly choose the Desktop as destination.
In Windows XP this has a limitation: when you click the Open Folder button when the download has finished, you get the rather silly message that you cannot open that folder because the file is located on the desktop. I say silly, because when you use the Windows Explorer the Desktop is an existing (virtual) folder.
Luckily Microsoft had some spare time to change this behavior: you can now click the Open Folder button and you're then greeted with a Windows Explorer view of the desktop.
Did you find other small tips & tricks? Let us know!Labels: productivity, timesaver, tip, trick, Windows, Windows Vista