Just 48 days after Microsoft began selling the Kin, a smartphone for the younger set, the company discontinued it because of disappointing sales.

via Microsoft Kin Discontinued After 48 Days – NYTimes.com.

All I can say is ‘Wow, that is really embarrassing’.

Now that we have so much data, we need tools to manage and understand it.  This reminds me of my eternal quest for a better to-do list that can manage all my tasks. There is just too much data for traditional tools to manage.

In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science.

Dr. Gray called the shift a “fourth paradigm.” The first three paradigms were experimental, theoretical and, more recently, computational science. He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood.

…

“We have access to too much data now to understand what’s going on,” Dr. Horvitz said….

…

In his chapter, “I Have Seen the Paradigm Shift, and It Is Us,” John Wilbanks, the director of Science Commons, a nonprofit organization promoting the sharing of scientific information, argues for a more nuanced view of data explosion.

“Data is not sweeping away the old reality,” he writes. “Data is simply placing a set of burdens on the methods and the social habits we use to deal with and communicate our empiricism and our theory.”

From A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing , Book: The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

Delete a predefined or custom cell style

You can delete a predefined or custom cell style to remove it from the list of available cell styles. When you delete a cell style, it is also removed from all cells that are formatted with it.

1. On the Home tab, in the Styles group, click Cell Styles.

   Tip If you do not see the Cell Styles button, click Styles, and then click the More button next to the cell styles box.

2. To delete a predefined or custom cell style and remove it from all cells that are formatted with it, right-click the cell style, and then click Delete.

via Apply, create, or remove a cell style – Excel – Microsoft Office Online.

Office 2007 is, at times, the bane of my existence. Microsoft took away all the menus I’d been familiar with for more than a decade and replaced them by a completely new format that slows down the speed at which I work.  I mostly use keyboard shortcuts, which they have, thankfully, kept, but I don’t always remember them exactly.

In Word 2007, I still don’t know how to get to Page Setup without going to Print Preview.  I routinely need to spend time locating menus that have moved.

Today’s Troubles:

Now, in Excel 2003 there was a lovely menu tool that let me modify the table borders as I please. Of course, the more powerful options were in the format cells menu, but this was good enough.  So, not finding this menu button in my Excel 2003 document opened in Excel 2007, I tried clicking the Table Styles button and found a pretty style. But, every time I saved, Excel would remark that the styles were incompatible with previous versions of Excel. It wouldn’t, however, till me how fix it. So, Heaven Help Me, I couldn’t figure out how to remove the style and ended up just recreating the worksheet and using Alt,O,E  (Format Cells) and borders to make my borders.

The “Format as Table” menu doesn’t offer any option to remove Table Styles.

I had found the Microsoft help page (quoted above) with the Google search “excel 2007 remove table style” and tried “Remove a cell style from data” which didn’t work. As I write this, I realize that these instructions are for “Cell Styles” not “Table Styles”. If I try this on from the “Format as Table” menu, as above, the option “Apply and clear formatting” appears but doesn’t do anything.

In any case, I really don’t have the time to figure this out.  All in all, it is very frustration for this techie to be stymied by what Microsoft presumably saw an an improvement.