Throwback Thursday: July 18, 2024

With over a million words scattered across more than 1,300 articles on this blog, you've probably missed a few things here.

That’s why each week in "Throwback Thursday," we’ll revisit some standout posts. Expect a blend of my personal favorites, insightful articles from other great minds, and a touch of coding humor to keep things light.

Highlights from NoLongerSet.com

VBA and Unicode

VBA and Unicode go together like Bailey’s and Lime. But pretending the problem doesn’t exist won’t make it go away. Even for us Americans.

No Longer SetMike Wolfe

Unicode-Friendly MsgBox

There’s a great big world outside of the ANSI bubble. Make every MsgBox in your program Unicode-safe in no time at all with this drop-in replacement.

No Longer SetMike Wolfe

Unicode MsgBox Revisited

A small improvement to my Unicode-friendly MsgBox and a handy trick for avoiding compile errors across Word/Excel/Access/etc.

No Longer SetMike Wolfe

Unicode Private Use Areas in VBA

Looking for a safe temporary character or text delimiter that is guaranteed to not exist in your data set? Look no further than the Unicode Private Use Areas.

No Longer SetMike Wolfe

Quick Tip: Alt Codes in Windows

Checkmarks, bulleted lists, section symbols, pi, daggers, copyrights, etc. Each of these symbols can be entered in Windows using an easy keyboard shortcut.

No Longer SetMike Wolfe

Wisdom from Around the Web

The history of Alt+number sequences, and why Alt+9731 sometimes gives you a heart and sometimes a snowman - The Old New Thing

Code pages and custom keyboard handling.

The Old New ThingRaymond Chen

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…

Joel on SoftwareJoel Spolsky

Developer Humor

OK, maybe I've just got a weird sense of humor, but I'm throwing this article about escaping semicolons in a semicolon-separated Value List under "Developer Humor" because the trick I used to make it work is so wacky and off the wall.  

Those zany, Greeks!

Escaping Semicolons in a Multi-Column Access ListBox

When adding items to a multi-column list box, the semicolon character is used to separate columns. What if the items themselves contain semicolons?

No Longer SetMike Wolfe

Cover image generated by Ideogram