PhoneTag Types Your Voicemails!

Before starting MrExcel, I worked for 12 years in the corporate world. Over those 12 years, I had a number of administrative assistants. Once...for about 3 months...a young admin named Jennifer answered my phone. She would listen to my voicemails and type them.

Being able to read voicemails instead of listening to them was simply the most decadant service I've ever had. You can scan the written text and figure out which are important instead of listening to 10 minutes of voicemails.

Unfortunately, Jennifer moved on. On Vicki's first day, in her first 15 minutes, she announced... Look I know that Jennifer used to type your voicemails and I want you to know that I do NOT do that. Drat!

If you want to experience the decadence of having your voicemails transcribed, it is now 100% automated. Sign up for a free 30-day trial at PhoneTag.com. I just received my first text voicemail. Amazing. The best service ever. Do it. Now. You'll never go back. The service runs from $29.95 a month (unlimited) to 35 cents a message.

GoToMeeting outage Ruins MrExcel Webinar

I have to apologize to everyone. When we tried to sign in to the meeting at 11AM EDT today, there was a message that GoToMeeting.com was temporarily down. I sent out a note on Twitter (my userid is MrExcel) to keep trying and answered about 10 e-mails that I would keep trying.

Around 11:05 AM, we got in, and many of you were trying because the attendance count quickly shot up to 70, then over 100, finally about 130.

From there, the reports are varied. Some instantly had no audio. Some could watch for about five minutes. For me, everything locked up after 18 minutes.

I currently have 50+ messages in my inbox saying that you were kicked out of the event.

I am disappointed in Citrix's response. There was a new build that went live this morning that was unstable. The recording of the webinar was lost. They claimed that this has never happened in 2008, but a search of the web shows similar problems in August. Update from 10/31/08...after I pointed out to journalists a TWIT and InfoWeek the response, I received an excellent apology from Citrix, along with a credit for a half-a-year of GoToWebinar. They said that they were taking steps to ensure this never happens again.

Many ask if I will reschedule? I do want to test again before the 11/21/08 10th anniversary webinar. I might try it again, record it, and then post the recording. I would rather not waste the time of 100+ people again. Update, again from 10/31/2008: The recordings are now live at http://www.mrexcel.com/webinar.html

AC/DC Video in Excel

This workbook by Phil Clandillon is an amazing thing. It plays 45 seconds of an AC/DC rock video. The workbook advertises that you can watch the video in glorious ExcelVision, which is a very low-res video rendered in ascii text.

First, there are no viruses in the code. Phil left the code open for anyone to see. If you are a VBA fan, take a look at the code. Phil was able to extract the .WAV file embedded in the Excel workbook to your hard drive using a clever bit of code in the ExtractWAV procedure.

Download the workbook from http://www.acdcrocks.com/excel/

To discuss the code, visit http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1730018