Category: support

Technical support

Technical support. Not quite “Vanilla Sky” level stuff but still thought provoking.

I provide some limited technical support on Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice forums.

Why not Microsoft Office? Because that’s what I do at work. At home I use, and have used for many years, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. Why? Because they save me money, the support forums are generally more congenial and providing support lets me give back a bit for the value I get.

One of the things I really enjoy about providing support is seeing all the ways people are using software to do things they need to do. Things I would never have conceived of. It is a real eye opener to get a handle on someone else’s requirement. And then very gratifying to help someone meet their need.

One of the recent support requests was for a bowling league score sheet kept in Apache OpenOffice. The requestor wished to have the latest match value always be shown in a particular cell. The league has 32 weeks in its season and for each week the bowler’s score is entered for each of three games. The game total and average are calculated and displayed for each week.

The latest week’s match value always needs to show in a particular cell. The method being used was to update the cell manually each time a new week’s scores were entered.

I came up with a solution, posted it. Then, as I often do, rethought the whole idea. What I realized was the way I designed the solution it would always show the value for the 36th week, the last week of the season, rather than the most recently entered week! Not good.

After some deeper inspection I recognized this happened because the formula to show the score for the latest week actually just checked to see if there was anything in the referenced cell. And it counted a formula in the cell as something, even if the formula displayed nothing.

This needed to be fixed! I couldn’t provide a solution that didn’t work.

After some thinking I realized a formula to show the latest value needed to recognize whether the formula on each row displaying the value was showing a numeric value, a blank “”, or a label “DNB”. DNB, Did Not Bowl, was a label indicating the bowler hadn’t bowled that week.

Again, the season is 36 weeks. Scores are entered week by week. This meant the rows showing score and average were always followed by rows showing nothing. Even though cells in the rows contained formulas, the formula result was “” for each week after the latest one entered.

My original formula was detecting a formula in a cell as something. I needed to come up with a formula that could identify the row before the first row with formula result “”. Finally an idea struck. I could use a function that counted the rows where the formula result is “”. A blank. These are always the weeks of the season that are not yet played. The season is 36 weeks. Subtract the number of blank rows from 36 and that’s the last row with a score. Problem solved!

That formula is…

=INDEX($Sheet1.G6:G41,36-COUNTBLANK($G$6:$G$41),1)

With that part of the problem solved I saw that some formulas I hadn’t touched were returning #VALUE! errors. These were formulas that calculated total pins week by week. These errors were happening because of changes I’d made to the formulas to sum the pins for each week and to produce the pin average for each week.

My fixes created the problem so I was determined to resolve it.

I created what I call a “dynamic formula”. A formula that changes based on where it is in the sheet or what it reads from a value elsewhere in the sheet. It didn’t work. It has been some time since I created such a formula in OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

There’s quite a bit of compatible functionality between Microsoft Office, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. For the most part spreadsheets created in one work in the other without modification. For the most part.

As it turned out, I was creating the “dynamic formula” as if writing it in Excel. Dynamic formulas are one of the things that are a bit different between the Microsoft and OpenOffice/LibreOffice spreadsheets. Once I recognized that, I was on the way to developing a solution.

The below dynamic formula, “the solution”, totals values in a column beginning at a specific row and continuing to the row the formula is in.

=IF(ISNUMBER(I6),DSUM($G$5:INDIRECT(CONCATENATE("$G",ROW())),1,$BB$5:$BB$6),"")

The formula needs to calculate a sum from a fixed starting row to whatever row the formula happens to be in. And in the case of the bowling league it needs to do that for thirty-six rows. If the formula couldn’t tell which row it was in and sum from the first row to the formula’s row then thirty-six different formulas would need to be entered. One for each row.

Entering the same formula in thirty-six rows is much easier in my opinion. And easier to maintain and easier to modify.

By tackling this person’s question I:

  • Helped solve a problem
  • Familiarized (again) with the difference between Calc and Excel dynamic formulas
  • Learned about a process, a “functional requirement”, I wasn’t familiar with and provided a way to support it

For me, this was a win all around. What could be better than the warm glow of finding the solution to a previously unknown use case?

Remote Support

Using RealVNC and AeroAdmin to help people at their computer

I provide remote computer support to people. Mostly to family but also occasionally to friends and acquaintances.

For family I’ve been using RealVNC. For other folks, AeroAdmin.

RealVNC has several advantages from my perspective. Two important ones are there’s a native Linux version. Family doesn’t use Linux but I do and I want to be able to run something directly on my system rather than running it through layers. Secondly and most importantly for family, it’s running all the time on their system. If support is needed we get on the phone, I start the connection, a message pops up on their screen and they click OK to allow the connection. Shazam! remote support has started. There’s nothing for them to install, no program for them to start. Just ask for support then click OK.

Other pluses are it runs on Linux so I have remote access to my own system when I’m away from it and I can register up to five systems in my RealVNC account with no subscription license required.

For the person I’m tutoring now and others I’ve helped in the past AeroAdmin has been the way to go. There’s a free license that allows occasional usage without charge. When I say “occasional” I don’t mean to imply crazy limited. From my perspective the free license is very generous with the time and connections allowed. I have certainly never bumped into the usage limits.

Of course there’s drawbacks to both. With RealVNC the issue is running it on my system. RealVNC occasionally freezes and restarts. When it does I either have to wait out the freeze before I can begin using my pc again (same experience whether I’m connected remotely or at the keyboard) or I restart my system if I’m at the keyboard. An issue I choose to live with because it gives me remote access to my system and I know how to deal with it. When I’m at the keyboard I sometimes just shut down RealVNC so there’s no chance it interrupts me. I really should file a bug report but haven’t bothered yet. And since it’s me that’s affected, not family I provide remote support to, I know what’s going on and corrective actions I can take.

EDIT 3/2020: I found the issue back in January. A wall paper changer set to change wall paper every five minutes. Increased the interval to 15 minutes and the problem became less frequent. Switched to a different wallpaper changer and the problem has gone away

AeroAdmin is a different story. The biggest challenge is always getting the person who needs to use it to get it on their system, get it started, provide me the information I need to connect, and finally make the correct choices when the connection starts so I can actually help. That sounds hard but it’s not. But it is for many people.

I’ve made documentation and sent it to people. I’ve recently made this video, AeroAdmin, letting someone help you. But it is still a challenge. Getting the connection started so people can get help always seems to be the biggest issue.

Another AeroAdmin drawback, for me not the person supported, is that I need to run Wine to run AeroAdmin. I’ve never been a fan of Wine because whenever I tried it my system was changed in ways that I couldn’t easily undo. Plus, depending on the install package, it added things to my system that I didn’t want. Getting stuck with things I didn’t want was one of the reasons for getting away from Windows. However AeroAdmin does run well under Wine so, when I need it, I run it in an isolated Linux vm with Wine installed so Wine isn’t impacting my actual running system.