Das wahre Office

Microsoft Academic Programm plans as a part of its activity to support the "Das wahre Office" ("The authentic office", search for "Ultimate Steal" in Internet for a similar campaign in Ireland; just in a nutshell -- undergraduate students can obtain the MS Office 2007 Ultimate for the price of barely €50) campaign to arrange several lectures and workshops throughout Germany under the tagline "Office Themen-Tagen" ("Thematical Days of Office"). As a big and longlife fan of MS Office (starting from as early as its version for DOS!) I am going to deliver several lectures on applied office topics. It is planned that I mostly concentrate on MS Word, MS Excel and MS Access whereas other Microsoft Student Partners will cover the rest of the Office 2007 Ultimate Edition except for the products with dubious end-user value (like InfoPath, for example).

Office Palmistry, Taming the Word

This campaign just prodded me to produce several video tutorials for these MS products and probably to devote some more time to Office. So, just to contradict the Shakespeare's "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" I came up with a provocative and edgy title for the whole series of videos -- "Office Palmistry" -- and for its first part, officially known as "Scientific Writing with Word 2007", but published under its running title "Taming the Word". Here you can read the script of the first video.

I haven't decided yet where I would like to host these videos and so far I am just learning how to produce videos under Vista. Meanwhile the script of the very first tutorial is ready and meanwhile I publish it here in my blog. I will probably move it somewhere else in the future (do you have any suggestions), especially as I have the screencast for it ready.

SELECT DISTINCT with several columns

As regards the pivotal topic of this blog -- I am currently working on a rather big tutorial on preudo-SQL SELECT DISTINCT (col1, col2, col3), col4, col5 FROM Table1 command and how to write querries which would do that is meant by such a crippled SQL query. I will try to publish it this week (since this is the only week I have off in the University).