Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Create Google Chrome Incognito Mode Desktop Shortcut

Posted: 22 Sep 2015 01:15 PM PDT

Google Chrome’s Incognito Mode is a great way to use the browser without any of your browsing or downloading history being recorded locally on your machine or in your Google account. It is a simple way to browse privately so that anyone who has physical access to the computer will not be able to see what sites you visited.

It’s worth noting that Incognito mode is not some way to browse the web securely or anonymously. For example, you can still be tracked online by your ISP, your employer or by the website you are visiting. In Incognito mode, cookies are not downloaded, but web sites can still see your IP address. In addition, you can still be infected by malware or spyware if you visit malicious sites.

However, the ability to erase your browsing footprint on the local computer is a great feature and very useful for many occasions and situations. You can enter Incognito mode in Chrome in a couple of different ways: you can right-click on the taskbar icon, choose New Incognito Window from the menu panel when you click on the settings icon in Chrome or by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + N and Command + SHIFT + N in OS X.

If you use Incognito mode a lot, however, a good idea might be to create a desktop shortcut that opens Chrome directly to Incognito mode. In this article, I’ll show how to create the Incognito desktop shortcut in Windows and OS X.

Windows Incognito Shortcut

In Windows, you have to add what is called a command line argument to the shortcut’s path. In order to do this, you need a working shortcut on the desktop first. If you don’t already have a Chrome desktop shortcut, you can create one by browsing to the following path in Explorer:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application

Right-click on chrome.exe, select Send To and then click on Desktop (create shortcut).

Now go to your desktop and right-click on the Chrome icon and choose Properties.

You should already be on the Shortcut tab where you will see a box called Target. The path to the EXE file will be listed in quotes. Click inside the box and move your cursor to the end past the last quote.

Now type in a space followed by –incognito. It’s worth noting that you can either type in a single dash or a double dash and both of them work just fine. Officially, you should put in two dashes, so that is what I have shown here.

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –incognito

When you click OK, you might get a UAC warning that you don’t have permission to make the change. Just click Continue and it should update the shortcut without any issues.

Now double-click on the shortcut and you should see a new Incognito window open right up. It’s probably a good idea to change the name of the shortcut also so you can differentiate between the two shortcuts.

If you want your Incognito browser to open automatically when Windows starts, you can use another command line parameter and just add it after the –incognito parameter. The parameter to accomplish this is –auto-launch-at-startup.

OS X Incognito Shortcut

On OS X, you can’t simply right-click on the dock icon and add parameters. For OS X, you have to create your own little application that simply runs Chrome with the same incognito parameter. Sounds complicated, but it’s pretty easy actually.

First, open a program called Apple Script Editor on your Mac. You can either click on Spotlight search and type Script Editor or you can go to Applications, Utilities and click on it there.

Click on New Document to create a new project file. In the top window, copy and paste the following code like shown below.

do shell script “open -a /Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app –args –incognito”

Now click on File – Save and you’ll get the Save As dialog box. First, give your application a name. This is basically the shortcut name. Next, for Where, change it to Desktop. Lastly, change the File Format to Application.

Click Save and you’ll now see a new icon on your desktop. You can now click on this shortcut that is actually an application in OS X and it will open Chrome in Incognito mode. The only problem is that Chrome cannot already be open.

If that isn’t acceptable, there are a couple of other options. Instead of that one line of code above, you could replace the code above with the following code:

tell application "Google Chrome"      close windows      make new window with properties {mode:"incognito"}      activate  end tell

This script will close all current Chrome windows and then open a new Chrome window in Incognito mode. This is still not a perfect script because all your other Chrome windows will be closed. Luckily, there is one more script you can try that does get the job done properly.

on is_running(appName)      tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName  end is_running    set chrome_running to is_running("Google Chrome")  if chrome_running then      tell application "Google Chrome"          repeat with w in (windows)                  if mode of w is "incognito" then                      set index of w to 1                      tell application "System Events" to tell process "Google Chrome"                          perform action "AXRaise" of window 1                      end tell                      activate                      return                  end if          end repeat      end tell      tell application "Google Chrome"          make new window with properties {mode:"incognito"}          activate      end tell  else      do shell script "open -a /Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app --args --incognito"  end if

This script will keep any current Chrome windows open and will open a new window that is in Incognito mode. The only issue is that the icon for the application is just the default Script Editor icon.

In order to change this, you have to single click on the application on your desktop and then press COMMAND + I or right-click and choose Get Info. In order to change the icon for a Mac application, you have to click on the icon in the upper left corner and then paste the new icon.

When you click on the icon at the upper left, you’ll see it is highlighted in blue. Before you paste a new icon, you’ll have to find one and copy it to the clipboard. On Macs, you can’t use JPEG or PNG images, ICO files or anything like that. You can either use icons already on the system or you have to create an .ICNS file, which is the icon file format for Macs.

To make it easy for us, just open the Applications folder in Finder and do Get Info on the current Chrome icon like shown below.

Click on the Chrome icon at the top left and it’ll be highlighted in blue. Now press COMMAND + C to copy it. Open the Get Info screen on the new application we created, select the script editor icon at the top left and press COMMAND + V to paste it. You’ll now have a nice Chrome icon on your desktop that you can run on OS X to open an incognito window without messing with your regular Chrome tabs.

If you run into any trouble during the process, post a comment and I’ll try to help. Enjoy!

The post Create Google Chrome Incognito Mode Desktop Shortcut appeared first on Online Tech Tips.

Use Summary Functions to Summarize Data in Excel

Posted: 22 Sep 2015 09:30 AM PDT

For those who use Excel regularly, the number of built-in formulas and functions to summarize and manipulate data is staggering. Excel is literally used by everyone: from students in a financial class to hedge fund managers on Wall Street. It’s extremely powerful, but at the same time very simple.

For those just getting started with Excel, one of the first group of functions you should learn are the summary functions. These include SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, MIN, MODE, MEDIAN, COUNT, STDEV, LARGE, SMALL and AGGREGATE. These functions are best used on numerical data.

In this article, I’ll show you how to create a formula and insert the function into an Excel spreadsheet. Each function in Excel takes arguments, which are the values the functions needs to calculate an output.

Understanding Formulas & Functions

For example, if you need to add 2 and 2 together, the function would be SUM and the arguments would be the numbers 2 and 2. We normally write this as 2 + 2, but in Excel you would write it as =SUM(2+2). Here you can see the results of this simple addition of two literal numbers.

Even though there is nothing wrong with this formula, it really isn’t necessary. You could just type =2+2 in Excel and that would work also. In Excel, when you use a function like SUM, it makes more sense to use arguments. With the SUM function, Excel is expecting at least two arguments, which would be references to cells on the spreadsheet.

How do we reference a cell inside the Excel formula? Well, that’s pretty easy. Every row has a number and every column has a letter. A1 is the first cell on the spreadsheet at the top left. B1 would be the cell to the right of A1. A2 is the cell directly below A1. Easy enough right?

Before we write our new formula, let’s add some data in columns A and B to work with. Go ahead and type random numbers from A1 to A10 and B1 to B10 for our data set. Now go to D1 and type in =SUM(A1,B1). You should see the result is simply the value of A1 + B1.

There are a couple of things to note while typing a formula in Excel. Firstly, you’ll notice that when you type the first opening parenthesis ( after the function name, Excel will automatically tell you what arguments that function takes. In our example, it shows number1, number2, etc. You separate arguments with commas. This particular function can take an infinite number of values since that is how the SUM function works.

Secondly, either you can type in the cell reference manually (A1) or you can click on the cell A1 after you typed the open parenthesis. Excel will also highlight the cell in the same color as the cell reference so you can see the corresponding values exactly. So we summed one row together, but how can we sum all the other rows without typing the formula again or copying and pasting? Luckily, Excel makes this easy.

Move your mouse cursor to the bottom right corner of cell D1 and you’ll notice it changes from a white cross to a black plus sign.

Now click and hold your mouse button down. Drag the cursor down to the last row with the data and then let go at the end.

Excel is smart enough to know that the formula should change and reflect the values in the other rows rather than just showing you the same A1 + B1 all the way down. Instead, you’ll see A2+B2, A3+B3 and so on.

There is also another way to use SUM that explains another concept behind arguments in Excel. Let’s say we wanted to sum up all the values from A1 to A12, then how would we go about it? We could type something like =SUM(A1, A2, A3, etc), but that is very time consuming. A better way is to use an Excel range.

To sum A1 to A12, all we have to do is type =SUM(A1:A12) with a colon separating the two cell references instead of a comma. You could even type something like =SUM(A1:B12) and it will sum all values in A1 thru A12 and B1 thru B12.

This was a very basic overview of how to use functions and formulas in Excel, but it’s enough so that you can start using all of the data summation functions.

Summary Functions

Using the same set of data, we’re going to use the rest of the summary functions to see what kind of numbers we can calculate. Let’s start with the COUNT and COUNTA functions.

Here I have entered the COUNT function into D2 and the COUNTA function into E2, using A2:A12 range as the data set for both functions. I also changed the value in A9 to the text string hello to show the difference. COUNT only counts the cells that have numbers whereas COUNTA counts cells that contain text and numbers. Both functions do not count blank cells. If you want to count blank cells, use the COUNTBLANK function.

Next up are the AVERAGE, MEDIAN and MODE functions. Average is self-explanatory, median is the middle number in a set of numbers and mode is the most common number or numbers in a set of numbers. In newer versions of Excel, you have MODE.SNGL and MODE.MULT because there could be more than one number that is the most common number in a set of numbers. I used B2:B12 for the range in the example below.

Moving on, we can calculate the MIN, MAX and STDEV for the set of numbers B2:B12. The STDEV function will calculate how widely values are dispersed from the average value. In newer versions of Excel, you have STDEV.P and STDEV.S, which calculates based on the entire population or based on a sample, respectively.

Finally, another two useful functions are LARGE and SMALL. They take two arguments: the cell range and the k-th largest value you want to return. So if you want the second largest value in the set, you would use 2 for the second argument, 3 for the third largest number, etc. SMALL works the same way, but gives you the k-th smallest number.

Lastly, there is a function called AGGREGATE, which allows you to apply any of the other functions mentioned above, but also lets you do things like ignore hidden rows, ignore error values, etc. You probably won’t need to use it that often, but you can learn more about it here in case you do need it.

So that’s a basic overview of some of the most common summary functions in Excel. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment. Enjoy!

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