Creating click-able hyper-links in CSV files programmatically

If you are programmatically creating CSV files intended for Microsoft Excel users, and cannot figure out how to make URL data in the CSV files behave like click-able hyper-links for your users, this tip is for you.

There is a special format in which URLs should be formatted, that is used by a number of spreadsheet applications to interpret URLs as click-able hyper-links. The format is this:

=HYPERLINK("URL")

The URL must be enclosed in quotes for the format to be interpreted properly (without which, at least, Microsoft Excel complains).

Resize images with Preview on Mac OS X

Thinking that there’s no way built into Mac OS X to resize images, I have been for a long time hunting down free third-party image resize applications. What I did not know and could not find until today is that the Preview application, which is used to preview images by default on Mac OS X, has a convenient resize feature built right into it. It is found under the Tools menu, aptly named “Adjust Size“.

One apparent gotcha that can bite you crazy about resizing using Preview is that after adjusting the size for an image, the preview of the image will shrink considerably to a size smaller than you would expect. Don’t let that mislead you. Once you save the image, Preview will re-display the image in the proper, expected size.