OVER 2 YOU, 123 (23/03/03)

CAR LOGOS

My Great-grandson is coming up to four. He is mad keen on cars and can recognise most models at a thousand paces! I would love to do him a birthday card of all the car manufacturer logos. Does anyone know of any suitable clip art?

Arthur Barwell, Bromley

I have about 90 car manufacturers logos as part of a commercial clip art package. I would be happy to e-mail them to Mr. Barwell. They are in *.eps format so he would need a program that could open or import them.
Peter Normington

Visit http://www.geocities.com/dgreg7/index_E.html.  They are organised alphabetically.  Hover the mouse pointer over the logo and the name will appear.
H.T.H.

Arthur Barwell should find http://www.info.org.il/logos/logos.html, useful for his great grandsons car logos.

Joe G, via email

LANDSCAPE BUILDER

Can anyone recommend geographical landscape builder software? I would like to make a rough 3D plan of Cherbourg and the Cotentin and add salient features, such as roads, towns and villages to the basic land contours. I'd rather it was cheap and easy to use than completely accurate.

David Jordan, via email

A program called ‘Worldbuilder’ sounds like the answer. It can create highly detailed 2D and 3D landscapes, imagined and real. More details and demo version can be found at the following web site: http://www.digi-element.com/awb3_overview.shtml

Jonathan Ewell, via email

TIMETABLE ANALYSIS

I am working with a travel timetable list, which contains 200 "premium rate" date/time entries. By entering a date and time (separately or together) I would like my Excel spreadsheet to identify whether or not this particular date/time combination matches any one the 200 "premium rate" date/time combinations on the list and return a result, in another cell which indicates, by copying another cell value, whether it is a "premium" or "standard" fare category.   

I see the problem as follows: e.g. IF the entered day/month/year (Cell B5) AND entered time (Cell C5)  = any of the 200 premium dates/times (these could be listed), THEN , if true, Cell G7 = N13 (premium), otherwise, if false, G7= J13 (standard).

I've wrangled with the formula syntax and got so far, but this one has become an obsession and it's got me beaten - I give up!  Please can anyone help?

‘Wren’, via email

The 'premium rate' date/time combinations should be listed on the same sheet as the data entry cell(s).  Select the data entry cell(s) and use 'Data' 'Validation' to allow data that matches a 'list', specifying the range in which the list has been entered.  The 'input message' can remind the user of the required time/date format, and the 'error alert' can be either warning or information, which will be displayed when the data entered matches any entry in the designated list.  This works if time and date are entered manually in a cell, but not if they are entered in separate cells and strung together by a formula.
Ian Martin, Aldbourne, Wilts

If the date/time you want to match is in cell A1 and the list is in cells C1:C200 then the correct formula would be =MATCH(A1,C1:C200,0). The 0 represents the match_type, which in this case looks for an exact match. The
function will return the position of the matched item within the list.

Note that if the date and time are entered separately then they should be added together to get the match e.g. if time is in cell B1 then use =MATCH(A1+B1,C1:C200,0)
Neil Watson

Use the VLOOKUP function either on its own and 'eyeball' the result, or in combination with the IF function. Assuming your input date/time is in cell A1, and the result in B1, and your list of Date/times is in C1 to C20 (or though they could be anywhere on another sheet). You formula in cell B1would look like this: =IF(VLOOKUP(A1,C1:C20,1,TRUE)=A1,"Premium","Not Premium")

Your list of premium date/times must be in ascending order. I would strongly suggest you use an XL date/time format for all the fields. If there is a match cell B1 will contain "Premium” if no "Not Premium" Using TRUE in VLOOKUP will return the nearest match and not #NA, the IF will then establish if it is equal.  

J. M. C

The problem can be solved using the "Format" menu and "Conditional Formatting". We had over 200 employees at various stages of training and certification of skills concerning IT equipment, including main frames, servers and software. It was necessary to "see at a glance" those whose skills entitled them for varying levels of responsibility to service and update major customers upgrades etc.

This facility met our needs, giving three colour options within the data record held on Excel. If more than three "colours" are required, then using the visual basic recorder we would have extended the code in visual basic to meet our needs.

Jim Bindley

Assuming your list of premium date/time combinations is in A1:A100, a date is entered in B5 and a time in C5.  In G7, enter the formula:
=IF(ISNA(MATCH(B5 C5,A1:A200,0)),"Standard","Premium")
Steve Procopiou

PIANO TUNING

Having spent a considerable time renovating an 1830's Broadwood Cabinet piano, including re-stringing in the original iron and brass wires, now comes the task of tuning.  Does anyone know of any software that can be used to measure the vibrations of a string either through sound or ‘touch’?  I need to measure vibrations between about 30 and 3000 cycles per second.  It would need to be fairly accurate to within a few cps.

Alan Haddington, via email

I have also restored a Broadwood square piano. I found a £24.00 Seiko ST757 tuner was more than adequate for tuning purposes and was more sensitive than my ear and I play the cello and have reasonable pitch.

Colin Granger MD

SWISS CONNECTION

We will be moving to Switzerland in May/June for a three-year period.  We currently use AOL for the Internet and e-mails, unlimited use monthly charge, but they've told us we have to close our UK account and open up a new one when we get to Switzerland! Also we won't be able to keep the same e-mail address.  Does anybody have any experience of Swiss Internet providers, typical monthly rates and the quality of service, etc?
Bob & Kate Minor, via email

I live in a small village about an hour away from Zurich and I use Sunrise as my provider with a broadband connection for which I pay a monthly fee of CHF 49. I am very satisfied with Sunrise, which we also use for our telephoning and they, being the daughter of a Danish parent Company are multi lingual and are happy to answer queries in English. Swisscom will probably be more amenable and quicker to providing Broadband as they have the cable monopoly to the house wall and Sunrise have to wait for Swisscom to carry out the switching process which in my case took many months. The backlog of ADSL connections at the moment will not be normalised until April but could be longer.
Jim Cowper, via email

CAN YOU HELP

I recently came across a photo-booth type machine that took your picture and then turned it into a surprisingly authentic-looking pencil sketch, with a hand on the screen ‘drawing’ the picture. Does anyone know of a PC program that can do something similar?

Lew Fraser, via email

My daughter's family shares a computer, it has two drives, and I was hoping to install the same operating system on each one, so that my grandson's mess was confined to ‘his’ drive and the other could be kept clean and fast. Can anyone recommend a program for dual-booting a PC, the software I’ve tried is unfriendly with tables of drives, partitions etc. It’s fine for geeks, but all I’m looking for is something that presents a simple choice like ‘Tom or Mum’?

Peter Brown, via email

I regularly use Excel but with increasing age, I am finding it more and more difficult to read the tabs at the bottom of the sheets. Is it possible to enlarge these?

Jenny S., via email