How to merge or combine cells in Google Documents

Quick post:

Lets say you have two columns in a Google  Sheets

First Name | Last Name

And you want to combine them. 

if you use the merge cells tool, it's going to remove one of the columns.

Looking online, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to merge them,

so we must get a little creative!

First: Copy the two (or more) columns you want to merge, to their own google sheet, we'll call the temporary sheet.

Second: Save a copy of the temporary sheet to your computer (file, "download as").
 Ensure you're saving it as a Comma Seperated Value, or CSV

Third, Open the CSV in notepad. Notepad is built into windows and should open CSV by default.

You'll notice the top header is your first two columns, and then each row is on it's own line.

Fourth: Go to the "Edit" menu in notepad, and choose "Replace"

Fifth: in the "find" field, type a singular comma, and in the replace field, type a singular space, and hit, find replace all.

Sixth: rename the top row, in notepad, which in our example would say "first name last name" after completing these steps and simply change it to what you want it to be, for instance "full name" 

Seventh: Exit notepad, Saving

Eighth: Go back to google sheets, and create a new one, tell it to open from your computer, the CSV which you just saved

Nineth: That successful, Sheets should now show one column the way you want, copy it

Tenth: Go back to the original sheet and paste the data. This likely means you'll need to select the original columns which you merged, delete them, add an additional column, and then paste the data you made there.

Said otherwise: Delete the "first name" "last name" columns (hold control and click on the very top of them to highlight. Right click, "delete columns".)

Then, right click where the new column will go, "insert"

Then, paste the completed data from your temporary spreedsheet.

This sounds complicated but it could take less than a minute to do, and could likely be automated.

These steps though make me wonder if I'm missing something from google sheets. Regardless, using this method I was able to complete my task more quickly than had I researched a built-in method.

0xc0000017 Error When Installing a 2012 R2 VM on a 2012 R2 Hypervisor

I read up on this longer than I needed to.


Simply: Change the ram to 1024MB

The default value of 512 isn't enough to start the install process.

You may also want to change the dynamic starting ram to 1024MB.


Details:
My issue was that the 2012 r2 installer ISO would let me launch, but would throw up a 'windows could not start' error immediately.

It gave the error:

0xc0000017

Update hostname in Mint Linux

A simple one liner here to update the hostname (computer name of Mint Linux 18).

I had to find out the name of the text editor installed. I typed, "text" in the launch bar, opened the text editor, selected: help, about. This told me the name was 'xed'

So open a terminal window and type

Sudo xed /etc/hosts

Which will open an administrative text editor.

Simply replace the host name with what you want, save and reboot.

Another method is simply to type sudo hostname - but that only TEMPORARILY changes your host name!

The method I mentioned first will do it permanently!

Install All Panasonic Drivers

I have a Panasonic laptop. It came with a disk to install all the drivers, you can also download the most current drivers from their website for your model using this nifty utility HERE (Click on Download manager)

What that leaves you with is a giant list of files and folders. If you notice, in each folder is a pinstall.bat - because of this, we can write a line of script to go through each folder and run that bat instead of having to run the setup in each one.

0. Close all unnecessary programs to prevent installation conflicts.

1. Open the folder you've downloaded all your drivers to.
2. Copy the address from the top bar. mine looks like this C:\users\oliver\desktop\panasonicdrivers\
3. Click start, type "powershell" right click on the result and right click, run as administrator
4. Enter this text into powershell
Get-Childitem -path "path to drivers with quotes around it" -recurse -filter pinstall.bat | foreach-object { & $_.fullname }

Let er' rip! You'll likely need to monitor the install as the occasional 'next' window pops up.

One Synergy Client, two Synergy Servers

Synergy is a tool which allows you to use one mouse across multiple computers - it works for mac, windows and linux.

You need multiple independent machines connected over a network - but it's great if say you have one machine dedicated to text based stuff, one to rendering, or lab work -- whatever it may be.

Any situation where you have more than one computer and want to be able to control them all with one mouse and keyboard.

This setup is better than remote desktop because the computers are stand alone, and suffer less resource limitations.


In my shared office we recently installed an old all in one computer on the wall. We didn't want to put windows 8 on it so we used linux instead (ubuntu mint).

Setting up synergy we found it was not direct as to how to get multiple mice and keyboards to control one screen. We wanted to be able to pull up projects to show one another as simply as possible.

The easiest fix is to open TWO instances of synergy on the client machine

Change the port the client listens on,

Change the port the server communicates with (so that they're both unique) 

and supply the server's unique IP address for both.

We had to do a little fiddling to get the monitor setup right - I don't think we could all come in from the same side - so one employee is coming in from the right, another from the left and one from below. 

It works exactly as expected, super cool!

Remember to open the necessary ports on your workstation firewall!

Synergy can be purchased and downloaded here: http://symless.com/synergy/