The Poorhouse's discovery of the day: DocTranslate - A heavenly, and free, treat for those of us poor info-workers who deal with several countries, not all of which are polite enough to speak English as their first language.

Using the mighty power of Google Translate, this downloadable program takes as input a Microsoft Word or Powerpoint document and translates it to/from any combination of languages that Google knows. It comes out with some oddities due to the limitations of computer translation at the best of times (although if you’re good at languages you can apparently improve it further), but even so it rather beats one’s random guesses at what any of a particularly dull looking document might mean. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Update frequency around here is not impressive, the Poorhouse knows. He's mainly been trapped behind a sea of Excel for a few millenia so it feels. In which case, let's liven things up, by discussing...Excel.

Whoop. Yep, here's a handy tip of something used in recent days. Not original or mindblowing but handy if you don't already know it.

No spreadsheet is complete without a few formulae to manipulate those magic numbers. A formula usually looks like "=A1 + A2" to add the contents of cells A1 and A2. But what if you don't know, at the point of writing your spreadsheet, exactly what cell you want to use? Rather, you want the cell used to vary depending on what has been input in another cell. There are a few different ways, but a quick, easy and perhaps dirty - albeit VBA free - one is utilising the wonders of INDIRECT.