Solid state mass storage is gradually becoming a reality. Though still prohibitively expensive for most applications, non-rotating solid state mass storage “drives” are coming. But with the adoption of this new and very different technology comes many questions: Do solid state drives have a battery to keep them “alive” a motherboard’s BIOS RAM? Do they need to be defragmented? How secure are they? What sort of data recovery procedures might be necessary?

Leo and I will examine the technology of solid state drives and answer all those questions, and more.

Create your first pivot table. Summarize revenue by region and product.
• Insert – Pivot Table.
• Verify the data range. Click OK.
• Note the new interface. You now select fields in the field list and arrange them in four drop zones at the bottom of the field list. This is easier than dragging fields into the worksheet.
• Simply checkmark the Region and Revenue fields.
• When you check the Product field, you need to drag it to the column area.

Change the Pivot Table:
• Add Customers as a new row field.
• Notice the expand and collapse functionality

New Features in Excel 2007
1. Formatting a pivot table has dramatically improved. There are now 24K formats instead of the old 14 formats. Remarkably, most of the new formats look good, while none of the old formats looked good.
2. Filtering by row fields; easy to filter dates to a specific month, revenue to above average, or text fields to those containing a value.

I will post show notes at http://www.mrexcel.com/tip154.shtml

With technology advancing at lightening speeds what was once only available to higher end users or server based environment is now available to the average user. RAID is the best way to ensure that you have some form of redundancy for your data. RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 1+0 all of this can be very confusing.

RAID (Redundant array of independent disks, formerly redundant array of inexpensive disks) is in short a failover system for hard drives. A certain number of hard drives (2–4) work together as one logical drive. If anyone of those disks fails at any time none of the data is lost, you simply have to replace the failed drive and the system will automatically rebuild the array.

RAID comes in many flavours.

RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume). This is essentially a JBOB (Just a bunch of disks) configuration and provides no data redundancy and is not recommended for maintaining data integrity. Essentially you add up the space of two hard drives (or more) and it will show up as a single big drive.

RAID 1 creates an exact copy or mirror of a set of data. This is great for ensuring that data integrity is maintained because if any disk fails the other one immediately takes over and is completely transparent to the user.

Raid 5 uses stripping to both provide performance and redundancy. By using a min of 3 disks you can achieve super fast speeds and complete data redundancy, as long as only one drive dies. If multiple hard drives fail you will lose all your data. You generally get 75% of your total drive capacity in order to maintain speed and redundancy.