Let Excel SMS Via Skype. (Experiments With Skype)
Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
Skype is good! It lets us monitor our laboratory apparatus from afar. Share Skype’s Peter Kalmström’s post about sending SMS from Microsoft Excel through Skype was a gem of an idea.
I always had data on spread sheets that needed to share, with my colleagues and myself at different locations. But basically we always needed a portion of the spreadsheet data but we always shred the whole spreadsheet, either via email, Google Docs and sometimes file sharing. But we always griped that we only needed a single line of data at most of the situations. It could be a research lab project that need to run constantly for 48 hours or more and spews out volumes of data. In between all these data, there is a line that reads the status of the apparatus (temperature, voltage/current and the general health of the machine.). We really need to monitor this bit of data as well as analyze other data that is quite a handful, which usually done later at leisure.
We already had the said health data piped out to separate spreadsheet but yet we needed to constantly monitor the data on this spreadsheet on a nice monitor with bunch of graphics etc. But this makes someone needing to be in the lab rather than near the lab. We have to pull sticks to decide who will stay behind while the rest goes out for nice lunch and a walk.
Once I saw Mr.Kalmström’s work I immediately jumped on it. I downloaded the script and found out that it will not run with my Open Office (I will work on it later), fished out a copy of Microsoft Office, had the project modified so that we all get notifications via SMS. Now we are getting our simple machine monitoring via SMS. (The larger versions of apparatus already had SMS capability). We still had to get special permission as not to get blocked by filtering and IP Management software that runs in our facility.
Now I have done it, Said some thing nice about Skype.
Peter Kalmström post:Excel spreadsheet that sends sms
