I'm currently working on a project where I need to quickly make pretty graphs and charts for data in small but important SharePoint lists. After looking through a number of books and consulting with my SharePoint buddies, PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 seems to be the best tool for the job. Getting it to work hasn't …

While I usually like conversation-style technical books (think: Manning's In Action series and many Wrox books), Microsoft's Patterns and Practices series is one of my favorite even though they feel so formal. Recently, my buddy Buck Woody posted a link to the freely available Patterns and Practices book for A Guide to …

If you find that "Upload Multiple Files..." is greyed out or otherwise unavailable in SharePoint 2010 and you: Are running 32-bit version of Internet Explorer Don't have a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 available Have added your SharePoint site to the Trusted or Intranet Security zone in IE You can …

Once, after viewing a SharePoint 2010 document library in Windows Explorer, I ran a net use and saw that Windows 7 had stored the credentials of my SSL-secured SharePoint intranet server. It took a bit of fiddling, but I eventually found you can, in fact, map a secure network drive using the command line: net use W: …

I started on a new client site last week and my first task was immediately clear: I had to remove the Mixed Content Security prompt on the encrypted SharePoint intranet's front page. Firebug showed that my browser was making calls to feeds.feedburner.com even though the RSS feed was an entirely different address at …

Below is a formula for a quick and dirty autonumber for lists in SharePoint. There are a variety of ways to generate this field. Some solutions use workflow or external lists, but I prefer this method because of its simplicity. Note: Because this solution depends on the record's ID column, it generates the autonumber …

The free tool SharePoint Manager 2010 is super useful. Imagine a centralized place to look at everything on the server level from Content Type usage to running jobs and IIS setting. Check it: I found it after looking for a non-PowerShell solution to solve the whole "Content Type in Use" issue. The only …

I recently wrote a PowerShell script which copied documents from a filter to my local hard drive. I chose PowerShell for this task because it was one of the few programs actually allowed on my ultra locked-down workstation (and 'cuz I love it.) Because I only wanted specific types of files, I gathered the list of …

There's a bit of a debate on how best to update your DNS resolver on Mac OS X when connecting to an OpenVPN Server. For whatever reason, even if use DHCP on the VPN server, OS X won't use the assigned DNS server(s). It's been recommended to use scutil, but the scripts are crazy long and I've read the resolver order …

This is a bit more complex than it should be; I was hoping networksetup would make this easier but, alas. Using netstat -nr appears to be the best way to find your gateway from the command line: 1netstat -nr | grep '^default' | awk '{ print $2 }' If you haven't played around with networksetup, I …