[Dxbase] ARRL Diamond DXCC Award

Tue Jan 10 00:34:48 EST 2012

Here's a gotcha for anyone using the Excel spreadsheet from the ARRL web 
site to track your Diamond DXCC progress. Unless I'm missing something, I 
cannot get Find to work in the spreadsheet. Using Find makes it easier and 
faster to get to the country you want, but without Find working you must use 
the mouse to repeatedly scroll up and down the list. Then there is a 
problem in finding some countries as they are not alphabetically listed by 
current country, but historical country. I had a problem trying to find 
Indonesia today. The former name is Sumatra, so unless you're a geography 
wiz...
Absent getting Find to work in the Excel spreadsheet my work around is to 
also download the Diamond DXCC country list in pdf format. Find does work 
in the pdf file so if I get stuck looking for a country that had a previous 
name I can search the pdf file to find the present day name in the row of 
its' former name, then jump over the the Excel spreadsheet and scroll to the 
correct former name. A bit of a pain unless someone can figure out how to 
make Find work in the spreadsheet.
Oh, another gotcha. In making an entry in the Date/Time field I messed up 
and tabbed to the next field after entering just the date and not the time. 
When I saw my mistake I went back, hit F2 to edit the cell entry and added 
the time to the field. When I hit Enter only the Date still displayed, not 
the Date and Time. In checking the cell entry line at the top of the 
spreadsheet I could see the time was now there along with the date, but it 
would not display in the cell. I tried to go to Format the cell, but it is 
grayed out in the selection menu.
Fortunately I am working on a copy of the original spreadsheet as suggested 
in the ARRL instructions. I opened the original empty spreadsheet and 
copied the empty cell from the Date/Time column and pasted it into my 
spreadsheet. That restored the cell formatting and let me enter date and 
time so it displayed correctly.
73,
Gary AL9A