Author: admin

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

by admin, posted in film reviews

Much attention has been lavished on Melissa McCarthy’s performance as the celebrity biographer (and notorious forger) Lee Israel. It has been widely seen as a dramatic and serious role, and hence a radical departure from the customary broad comic persona which first propelled her to prominence in mainstream fare such as Bridesmaids. But the departure, it appears to me, is not so great as it might initially appear. Israel, in McCarthy’s hands, is still essentially a comic creation, as profane and as caustically and savagely witty as any of her previous out-and-out comic roles. But it would seem that the discipline imposed by the portrayal of a real-life character and a nuanced and subtle screenplay drawn from Israel’s own memoir, serves to curb McCarthy’s trademark excesses and allows her the time and freedom to explore her character’s more complex inner depths and motivation.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is that most rare cinematic beast: a film which has at its heart a portrait of a friendship between two lonely, middle-aged outsiders. We first meet McCarthy’s Israel as a down-on-her-luck celebrity biographer, attempting to eke out a diminishing living as a fringe-dweller in New York’s 1980s literary set, living in a ramshackle apartment, unable to enthuse her long-suffering publisher (Jane Curtin) about the marketing prospects for her latest subject, Fanny Brice, and so impecunious that she cannot afford medication for her elderly ailing cat, seemingly the only relationship in her life that she has any genuine investment in. When she happens accidentally across, and impulsively purloins, a letter from the aforementioned Brice, she discovers a pathway not only out of her desperate circumstances but a means of avenging herself on the literary world that had snubbed and ignored her. The key to both her short-term success, and hence her ultimate downfall, lies in her realization that she can make these literary artifacts more marketable by “juicing” them up with her own fabricated additions. It is a small step from this happenstance to her to creating and selling outright forgeries of supposed correspondence from such luminaries as Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward.

In this enterprise Israel is aided, firstly as confidante and then as accomplice, by Jack Hock, another disreputable, somewhat dissolute reprobate played with a winning self-assurance by Richard E Grant. They seem to be drawn to each other by a mutual misanthropic world-weariness, but where Israel is by nature solitary and withdrawn, Hock is sociable and voluble, perhaps dangerously so for the sake of their joint criminal endeavour.

It does great credit to the skill of both McCarthy and Grant that they manage to invest their essentially unlikable, morally dubious characters with considerable pathos and a certain rumpled dignity. This achievement is all the more noteworthy given the fact, as made clear by Israel’s statement to the court near the end, that she feels no regret in a moral sense for her deception, but her regret lies mainly in the fact that she was caught. The film does hint at one other source of regret for her, however; one of the victims of Israel’s deception is an impressionable bookseller, Anna, played by Dolly Wells, with whom Israel had made halting and diffident attempts at forming a relationship prior to the exposure of her scheme. This provides one of the true moments of pathos, when Israel appears to realise that Anna could have potentially provided an alternative path to redemption, a pathway she had squandered, like so much else, through her own mendacity.

All told, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, despite being one of the more unlikely subjects for a mainstream biopic, is an original and assured one, distinguished by a keen directorial evocation of time and place by Marielle Heller, a witty and nuanced screenplay by Nicole Hofcener and Jeff Whitty based on Israel’s own memoir, and note-perfect performances from its principals.

“Warp Speed” Charts in Excel

by admin, posted in MS Office

One of the more impressive and dynamic feature presentation features in MS Excel is charting.  However, in successive versions, the folks at Microsoft have been unable to stop themselves from expanding and complicating Excel’s charting feature to the point where it has become possibly the best exemplar of ‘program bloat’ in the Office family.

For the average Excel user, henceforth, chart creation and modification can be, at best, a time-consuming diversion and, at worst, a confusing and confused labyrinth of excessive choice.  There is, happily, good news for user who is time-poor and seeking to adhere to the sacred principles of KISS.

It is possible to generate a useful chart in Excel via just one keystroke.  You need only select the range of cells in your spreadsheet containing the labels and values that you wish to portray on your chart.  Then, just press the F11 function key on your keyboard and stand back to be amazed!

Excel will instantaneously create a brand new sheet in your workbook, containing a chart based on your selected range of data

A default chart sheet generated in mere seconds with the F11 key

You will immediately have a default 2 dimensional column chart.  Of course, this chart might not be be of a type or format that meets your needs; if so, you can then modify your chart by employing the vast and diverse range of tools to be found on the Chart Tools tab that will appear at the top of the screen whenever your chart window is active.

But if the default chart is enough to meet your needs, very possibly the F11 key is all that you will need. A knowledge of this little-known simple Excel maneuver is also likely to impress your colleagues and workmates, who will likely view you with a new respect and, dare one hope, awe.

For more on charting and other Excel presentation strategies, look for upcoming posts…

Unlock the Power of MS Word with Styles

by admin, posted in MS Office

One crucial but rather underused feature in MS Word is styles.  Styles can provide you a powerful and streamlined method of creating and managing the formatting and presentation of your Word documents.  And the longer and more elaborate your documents become, the more beneficial and powerful styles can become for you.s

A style is simply a saved set of formatting attributes that you can assign with one click to a variety of different elements within your documents such as paragraphs, individual characters, graphics, tables and bulleted lists.  You will find yourself using styles in Word whether you want to or not; the default template that Word employs for each new blank document already has a default style called “Normal”. {Don’t they just love the word ‘Normal’ at Microsoft?)  This style dictates the initial appearance of the text you type in a new document- what font, size, colour, alignment et al it has right from the start. 

The Normal template also already has a number of different styles readily available to the user.  All you need to do is position the cursor in the paragraph you wish to format, and then click on one of the styles that are attached to the panels in the Quick Styles gallery found on the right of the Home tab.  The default styles you will see include Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2, Title and many more besides.  For a bigger choice, you can use the pull-down menu on the right of the Quick Style gallery to access a more comprehensive gallery of default styles.

You will see that using styles as your chief formatting method gives you two crucial benefits:

  1. Speed: it will give you a rapid, one-click solution to achieve repetitive formatting, particularly in your longer documents.
  2. Standardisation:  elements  in your document such as headings, paragraphs, tables and lists that employ the same style are guaranteed to look exactly the same.  In this way you can effectively create and maintain a professional uniformity throughout your documents, regardless of the ‘whims’ or erroneous formatting choices of other users.

And, furthermore, if you use styles as a foundational concept in your document design, it opens up many other automation features in Word.  For example. styles lend themselves to the simple creation of Tables of Contents, the easy enhancement and layout of graphic elements such as diagrams or pictures, and the clever creation of “phone book headers”, to mention but a few.  (More on these features in upcoming posts…)

In summary, the use of styles in Word to their full potential is perhaps the best way to differentiate the true “power” Word user from the wanna-be.

Creating a Growth Series in MS Excel

by admin, posted in MS Office

The little, green ‘Fill Handle’ in the lower right hand corner of a selected cell in an Excel spreadsheet is a very versatile asset. It provides an easy way of copying the contents of cells, especially formulas, into adjacent cells. It can also automate the creation of common labels such as the names of months and weekdays.  One need only enter the initial label (e.g January, Monday), position the mouse over the fill handle in the lower right, and then drag over the required range in the adjacent row or column, and…Voila!

With a simple but clever variation on this technique, you can also easily produce a ‘growth’ series,  Just enter the first two values of your intended series, in order to define the increment that you want between the values:

i.e. 20,24…28,32,36,40

Then select both the first two cells, and use the fill handle to create your series with the required growth factor between the successive values.

This method is also ideal for a series of dates. Again, simply enter the first two dates in your intended series, to define the pattern you seek:

i.e. 16/11/18, 23/11/18…30/11/18,7/12/18, 14/12/18

This can be  a great way to eliminate much of the tedium of creating rosters, time sheets and the like in your Excel spreadsheets.

Creating a Personal AutoFill Series in MS Excel

by admin, posted in MS Office

Most relatively experienced Excel users are familiar with the use of the Fill Handle, the little green square in the lower right corner of the selected cell, to automate and streamline many routine spreadsheet functions.  For example, it provides the user with a simple way to copy formulas into adjacent cells.  It is also a great way to “Autofill” a common series of labels, such as weekdays or months.  You can just enter the initial label in the first cell (e.g. January, Monday…) position the mouse over the Fill Handle and then drag to the right or down to complete the series as required.

The good news here is that you can “tame” the AutoFill feature to create your own personalised series, and automate its creation in any spreadsheet in the future. Simply create a version of your intended series in consecutive cells in any spreadsheet,and then select (highlight) this range.  Go to the File tab and select Options, the last choice on the lower left hand side. Then select the “Advanced” category on the left, and scroll down the right hand screen until you encounter a button bearing the label: “Edit Custom Lists…”

This is the ‘brains’ of the ‘Autofill’ feature.  In this dialogue box, you will see your selected range already visible in the “Import list from cells” box on the lower right. If you simply click on the Import button, your list will join the master “list of lists” in the window on the left.  You can then create this list via the same AutoFill handle maneuver, and thus significantly accelerate your routine typing process, and earn the undying respect and awe of your workmates and colleagues.

Printing a List of Keyboard Shortcuts in MS Word

by admin, posted in MS Office

The most recent incarnations of Microsoft’s Office desktop software boast a large and ever-expanding array of commands and features.  The enduring problem is: how to find and activate all of these fantabulous features?  With enough patience and perseverance you can track them down, hidden away in Microsoft’s typically labyrinthine nest of tabs and ribbons, but all too often this can be a frustrating hit-and-miss endeavour, for it seems the choice of location for many commands doesn’t seem to conform to any recognisable system of logic known to homo sapiens.

Happily, there can be another way for Office users to circumvent Microsoft’s intimidating tabs and ribbons, especially for “old-school” PC users and veterans of the ‘pre-mouse’ era. Most of the commands in your mainstream MS Office program (e.g. Word, Excel, Outlook et al) can be activated via an equivalent keyboard shortcut; many of these are familiar and can be used to the same effect in most MS programs. (for example Ctrl+ C for copy, Ctrl + X for cut, Ctrl + Z for undo).  The problem is: how is the average new user supposed to know what keyboard combinations do what?

Fortunately there exists, at least in Microsoft Word, a clever, “hidden” way of easily and instantly generating an exhaustive listing of keyboard shortcuts.

The >Macro> dialogue box in Microsoft Word

Word offers its users a means of automating and standardising routine procedures, via macros that the user can record and then play back as a single action. However, there are also pre-designed macros that are built into Word by default in a library called Word commands.  You can locate this library by selecting Macros from the right of the ribbon attached to the View tab. (Why is it found on the View tab? See my earlier observation regarding Microsoft logic.)  If you select Word commands from ‘Macros in..’ menu half-way down this dialogue box, you will find one of the macros therein is called “ListCommands”.  If you select this macro, and then click on the Run button on the upper right,you will be prompted to create a document that lists all the keyboard settings in Word.  This macro will actually a produce a brand new document containing a large table with a comprehensive listing of all of Word’s keyboard settings.  You can then readily print out the resulting document, and by so doing, create a resource that might mean that you never need go near a Word tab or ribbon again.

Fahrenheit 11/9

by admin, posted in film reviews

Anyone remotely familiar with American film-maker Michael Moore’s filmography would not be surprised by the undisguised, unambiguous slant of his latest venture. Fahrenheit 11/9, his cinematic polemic directed at the Donald Trump era in American politics.  Indeed, Moore nails his colours to the mast in the film’s title: the deliberate juxtaposition of the numbers 9 and 11 is a nod to Moore’s renowned 2004 film, Fahrenheit 9/11, his inquisition of the then Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. 11/9 is intended to refer to the date November 9 2016, the day after Trump’s surprise election victory; the inference is far from subtle, in Moore’s customary style, and unmistakable: Trump’s unexpected elevation to the White House is a disaster equivalent to the events of September 11, 2001.

However, the film’s devotes little running time to a familiar excoriation of Trump’s various outrages and misdemeanours; Trump himself is almost an incidental character in Moore’s version of events.  For him, the true villains of the piece are his enablers, those who by their complacency or malfeasance made the unlikely Trump presidency possible.  The culprits are numerous: Hilary Clinton and her inept, tone-deaf campaign, Clinton’s sponsors in the Democratic Party who allegedly rigged the primary process to bestow the nomination on her rather than Bernie Sanders (clearly Moore’s preferred candidate), and the generation of Democrat politicians, up to and certainly including Barack Obama,  who had, through their compromise and lack of conviction, betrayed and disenfranchised their progressive, working-class constituency.  And, preeminently, much of the blame for the Trump ascendancy is laid at the feet of the mainstream media who, dazzled by Trump’s ‘celebrity’ status and the colour and shade he brought to an otherwise insipid election year, gave him  an enormous amount of non-critical coverage in the early stages of what was widely assumed to be an unserious ‘vanity’ candidacy. And Moore, to his credit, does not exempt himself from the (dis)honour roll of Trump’s inadvertent media enablers.

Unfortunately, the central message of Moore’s film is somewhat undercut by his trademark scatter-gun approach.  The laundry list of grievance is long and runs the gamut from Democratic political corruption, the water lead poisoning scandal in Michigan, family separation in immigrant families, gun violence in schools, exploitation of low-paid workers in Virginia, and much more besides. At the end of the day, Moore’s attempt to cover so much ground only dissipates and dilutes the passion and urgency of his message.   In particular, Moore can’t seem to help himself from indulging in his familiar stunts; spraying the garden belonging to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder with tainted water, and attempting to place the self-same Snyder under citizen’s arrest in person. The comedic impact of these episodes is minimal at best; they feel forced and contrived and could have been left on the cutting room floor without detracting in any way from the finished product. On the contrary, these sequences seem more than a little obligatory and under-graduate, and give the impression of Moore straining to satisfy the expectations of his loyal audience. The overall effect, it seems to me, is to undercut and trivialise the gravity of the very serious allegations that Moore is making: in Snyder’s case, no less than willful manslaughter.

The same could be said about one of the film’s final sequences, where historical footage of Nazi rallies and Hitler’s oratory is spliced and overlaid on audio from Trump’s speeches.  This, too, seems obvious, heavy-handed and arbitrary. and rather sells the audience short.  History (and one might dare hope, the US electorate) may well deliver a very negative judgment on the Trump presidency, but the US has had plenty of venal, corrupt and incompetent presidents in its history.  You don’t need to draw a false, somewhat overblown equivalency with Hitler to prosecute this case against Trump, and to do so verges on an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.

Moore’s lapse into over-inflated hyperbole is a shame, because Fahrenheit 11/9, at its best, makes many telling and salient points about the existential crisis of American democracy in the age of Trump.  Perhaps most salient is Moore’s insistence, counter to at least one prevalent view, that Trump is no mere aberration who fell out of a clear blue sky, but instead the most recent culmination of an anti-democratic trend whose origins predate Trump, and seems likely to outlast him.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that Moore’s earlier film, evoked in the title of this one, Fahrenheit 9/11, was clearly intended to contribute  to the defeat of George W Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Instead, history tells us that, in 2004, the Republicans secured a majority of the popular vote for the only time in the last seven presidential elections.  It would be unfair to blame Moore for this outcome, but his film obviously did little in the end to prevent it. He does his best to find a hopeful note in the apparent, reinvigorated progressive activism of a younger generation, and, like him, one can but hope.  But the lasting impression left by Moore’s film is still most likely to be a distinct chill running down the spine.

First Man

by admin, posted in film reviews

Our first meeting with the main subject of “First Man”, Damian Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic is revelatory; Armstrong, played in a taciturn, restrained, understated key by Ryan Gosling, is flirting with disaster after a potentially disastrous test flight of the X-15 aircraft leaves him skipping along the upper edge of the earth’s atmosphere without navigation control.  As with much of the film, our experience of manned flight in both the atmosphere and above is very much the perspective of the pilot.  Chazelle’s film eschews many of the usual space travel or sci-fi “blockbuster” norms. There are no Kubrickesque big-screen panoramas of the earth (or moon) from space accompanied by swelling, symphonic chords on the soundtrack.
(In fact, the film’s climactic sequence, the first moon landing, plays out in total silence.) Also, there are no obvious, elaborate CGI sequences design to elicit awestruck wonder and no exhaustive exposition of the technical wizardry that made manned spaceflight possible.

On the contrary, the Gemini and Apollo missions, for all their mythology and veneer of well-nigh superhuman sophistication, are often portrayed in the film as somewhat makeshift, seat-of-the-pants, Jerry-built endeavours.  The astronauts really are loaded, sardine-like, into cramped canisters atop vast, volatile solid fuel boosters. Karen Armstrong, Neil’s wife(Claire Foy), a model of stoic, at times barely-repressed anger, gives voice to this anxiety when she confronts her husband’s NASA colleagues:

“You’re just a bunch of boys. You don’t have anything under control!”

It is tempting to interpret Armstrong’s/Gosling’s closed-mouth reticence, and his immersion in engineering minutia, as a coping mechanism deployed in response to the various existential crises that he confronted, from his various near-death encounters as a test pilot and astronaut to his bereavement following the death of his infant daughter.  But it should be remembered that Armstrong and his fellow space pioneers were products of a wartime generation that came of age with the expectation that they, like their fathers, might be called upon to offer up their lives in military service, and this expectation must have informed his perception of his possible role in history.  The film is tightly focused on the lifespan of  the Apollo mission, and we are only afforded brief glimpses of the wider, roiling turbulence of 1960’s American society.  But Armstrong was a Naval aviator during the Korean War, and the film’s time frame incorporates the Vietnam War, JFK’s assassination and the Cuban missile crisis. Mortality, and the fear of mortality, is an ever-present character in the film, dealt with most poignantly with the death of three of Armstrong’s Apollo colleagues, including his close friend and neighbour Ed White,  in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire in February 1967.

Chazelle defies the expectations that one might have of a contemporary Hollywood crowd-pleasing spaceflight blockbuster, and his film instead delivers an intimate, interior, domestic portrayal of the this epic landmark moment in scientific and human history. And his film is so much the richer, and more compelling, for it.

MS Word: “An Enemy of the People”?

by admin, posted in MS Office

The Guardian’s Jason Wilson has joined has joined the large chorus of critics and commentators who have condemned Microsoft Word as a tool used by students, journalists and writers of all types. Rather grandiloquently, not to say prematurely, he has declared that “we” are winning the war on Word.

He makes some entirely reasonable points.  The success of Microsoft Word owes more to its ubiquity as a key element of the dominant MS Windows platform during the PC explosion of the late 80’s and 90’s than demonstrable advantages in design or end-user responsiveness. As a long-term Word user, I’m well-acquainted with the frustrations of “feature bloat” wherein the newer versions contain features that replicate or supersede existing features (i.e Quick Parts vs AutoText), and yet the superseded features are still retained to keep faith with existing users.  The result is that Word can seem at times an unwieldy beast that has far outgrown the needs of most writers, stacked with metadata, invisible code and largely redundant features that can distract and antagonise the average user.But the bile and invective in Wilson’s piece seems hyperbolic at best. True, Word’s intuitive features such as the (in)famous AutoCorrect and autoformat, that attempt to second-guess and interfere with the “pure” writing process, can be maddening. But they can readily be inactivated with a few moments’ attention. If this need is irksome. the Windows environment contains scaled-down, stripped back apps such as NotePad and WordPad, that surely satisfy the need for a more pure, text-based environment.  Wilson’s protestation that the inclination to search for solutions on Google, inevitably leads the writer to the myriad distractions of the internet, seems to me more of a comment firstly on of the user’s inadequate training, and secondly, frustration with their own writing process.  Word itself is a convenient, inanimate target for writers, tormented by the tyranny of the blank page, who, in a former age might have shattered their tablets on the ground, snapped their quills or consigned their parchment to the flames.

Thus, Wilson would do well to be wary of declaring “victory” in this way. Such a victory is likely to be Pyrrhic at best.

Making an Excel Page “Really” Hidden

by admin, posted in MS Office

A common gripe from many Excel users is the harm, inadvertent or otherwise, caused by workplace colleagues with whom they share their carefully constructed and designed spreadsheets.

In particular, you might well go to great lengths to set up the (confidential?) source data used by the functions and formulas in one spreadsheet. and to keep it secure, store them separately in another sheet in the same workbook. You can, of course, simply hide this sheet via a simple right-click on the sheet tab and choosing the “Hide” command.  This can be an effective strategy with many users who don’t know Excel to any great degree of sophistication, and are hence unlikely to invest much time looking for sheets that they can’t see anyway and of whose very existence they are unaware.

Problem is, any mildly curious or relatively “savvy” colleague can easily “unhide” the sheet via the same simple pathway used to hide it i.e right-mouse click. Thus, this is not by any means a secure means of hiding a sheet and hence might mayhem, and in extreme cases, fisticuffs ensue.

However, despair ye not, Excel brethren.  For the truly savvy, there exists a more impregnable way to make a sheet “really” hidden; a method far less likely to be rumbled by inquisitive workmates.  It involves going “backstage” In Excel and visiting the Code window, again by right-clicking the intended sheet tab and selecting the “View Code” command.  You might imagine that this environment might necessitate a knowledge of the arcane world of VisualBasic programming, but happily, no such knowledge is required.  The Code window should display two window panes on its right-hand side – the Project Explorer and the Properties pane. (If it does not,these panes are easily available via the View menu.)

In the Properties pane, you will find a comprehensive, alphabetic list of the current sheet’s properties, the last of which is  “Visible”. The menu on its immediate right contains three choices, the last of which rejoices in the name “VeryHidden”,  (By the way, the second option”Hidden” is equivalent to the “Hide” command on the right-click menu.)  If you choose “VeryHidden” in this menu, the sheet tab will disappear from normal view, and the “Unhide” command on the usual right-click menu will also be greyed out and hence unavailable.  Therefore, this particular stratagem is far more secure than the aforementioned default “Hide”command.

Of course, the obvious loophole is that another suitably savvy Excel user could also reverse-engineer this method. But you might consider that while another user could randomly discover the default “Unhide” command, the average user is far less likely to know about the Code window and the “VeryHidden” property.  By this means might you better safeguard your crucial spreadsheets from your colleagues’ sabotage, be it inadvertent or deliberate.