Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 October 13

= October 13 =

Question about formatting in Excel
Without doing any formatting, if I start to enter data into the cells of an Excel spreadsheet, it will look like this.

However, what I actually want is for it to look like this below. (That is, I want a little bit of blank white space – a slight indent – to the left of each person's name. I want some extra blank white space so that the person'  name does not start to the immediate right of the black line separating the columns – as it does above.)

Is there some way in Excel to format a cell (or an entire column) so that the cell has some indented blank space before (to the left of) the entry of the cell (in this case, before the person's name)? What I am doing right now is actually typing in, say, 5 or 6 "blank space" characters before the person's name. Is there a way that I can avoid typing in all these extra blank space characters, and have Excel automatically format some type of indent in the cell for me? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:02, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Just to be clear, you don't want the text to be centered in the cell, right? Because that's quite easy to do but the text from one cell to the next below it won't all be justified, i.e. they won't all have the same amount of space preceding the text.  Dismas |(talk) 04:12, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, that is correct. I am not interested in a "center" alignment.  I know how to do that.  But, exactly as you say ... it won't make the names appear in a nice, neat, straight column that is left-justified (with the same amount of white indented space before the name).  If I do "center align" a column, that will look fine for the first column above, which contains the number (only because each entry is exactly one character long).  If I do a "center alignment" with the names column, there will be a "zig zag" effect in appearance, since each name has a different amount of characters than the other names.  Thanks.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 13:25, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's no problem. With the text left justified, which is the default unless you change it, you just use the indent command. Unfortunately I am using Excel from microsoft office 2008 so you probably have a later version so I do not know if you will have the commands in the same places. But go to view, open up the formatting palette and under 'alignment and spacing' you will see a field for indent. Just place a 1 or 2 in there and it will indent the cell. You can highlight and format as many cells as you want to do this to. In the formatting toolbar there are also buttons for increase indent (and decrease indent) which does the same thing. A third way is to go to menu options, choose format, then cells, then aligement, and you can indent from there.--108.46.110.208 (talk) 04:35, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Hmmmmm. Thanks.  I never knew about any of these features that you mention.  Thanks.  I have Excel 2010, by the way.  I will go in and take a look at the options you mention.  I am glad that this seems like an easy "fix".   In the past, I have fiddled around with Excel and its Help functions, but I could never find anything applicable.  Or, if I did stumble across those features that you mention, I was not able to figure out how to use them.  I will give this a try.  Many thanks!   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 13:34, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, I tried what you suggested. It works perfectly.  Thanks so much.  The locations for these functions are slightly different in Excel 2010, compared to your references for Excel 2008.  But, I was able to find them, and it worked perfectly.  This does exactly what I wanted it to do.  Thank you!     Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:16, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Great!!! I figured they would be a bit different but at least one would be in the same place, which is why I listed three different ways to get there. I'm actually not a computer wizard but the programs I know I use A LOT. I use Excel every day (and I will tell you that I think 2008's version is better than all others I've tried, strangely enough). Sometimes improvements are not really improvements. Excel is one of those programs that has super really powerful tools but because it's kind of user unfriendly, 99% of people don't know the tricks, like merging cells, filling down, pasting formulas and the like.--108.46.110.208 (talk) 00:10, 15 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Ha ha! Yes, I agree.  Excel has very powerful capabilities.  But, due to it being so user-unfriendly, those powerful features get lost on most of us.  (My question above is a perfect example of that.)  In fact, after this discussion above, I finally decided to buy a manual for Excel, like Excel for Dummies or Idiot's Guide to Excel.  I can only imagine how much I am missing out on all that Excel can do for me.  Thanks again for your help above.  Much appreciated!   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 02:54, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Reduce saturation in GIMP
How to desaturate the color of an image (but not reduce it to black and white, just make the colors look duller) in GIMP? Czech is Cyrillized (talk) 10:01, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Colours->hue-saturation, drag the /saturation/ slider part way to the left. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 10:09, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

How does www.(some site) differ from (some site)?
Today I just visited https://commonapp.org and https://www.commonapp.org. I see the former seems to have a certificate error. So can www.somesite be a whole different site from somesite?--163.125.85.93 (talk) 13:01, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * That site has a wildcard certificate with CN (common name) set to *.commonapp.org         - that * means "match exactly one subdomain", so it would match foo.commonapp.org but not foo.bar.commonapp.org, and because commonapp.org has zero subdomains specified, it doesn't match. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:06, 13 October 2013 (UTC)


 * To answer the general question, www.somesite.com and somesite.com are different fully qualified domain names, and so can be mapped to different IP addresses by the Domain Name System, and therefore to different web sites, though this would be a rather perverse thing to do. (In fact even if they're mapped to the same IP address, they can still go to different sites, by use of virtual hosting.) AndrewWTaylor (talk) 16:34, 13 October 2013 (UTC)