I haven’t needed to convert cell text into links until now and I may not need it again anytime soon, but I thought I’d make a note of it here and you might be able to use it as well.

LibreOffice Calc is the tool I employ most often for my spreadsheet needs, though I sometimes have to turn to Gnumeric or Excel. I started trying out Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet program, but it will take some doing to figure out how to use it and I’m not sure it handles certain features of Excel spreadsheets all that well based on my initial tests. And no, Google Docs won’t do for complex and large spreadsheets like this.

I was doing some analysis on a product list for a particular vendor and I wanted the link text to be an actual clickable link so I wouldn’t have to be copying and pasting to see the web page of the link. I found the answer here:

https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/6692/calc-convert-text-to-link/

Essentially, you’ll want to use the Find & Replace function to wrap the text in the cell in the HYPERLINK function. You’ll probably want to convert the whole column, except for the first row if it’s a heading, so select it first.

In the Edit > Find & Replace dialog, fill out and select options as follows:

Search For:

(.*)

Replace with:

=HYPERLINK("&")

Note: If this doesn’t work after a copy-and-paste then type it in manually.

Check option: “Regular expressions”

Search in: Formulas

Click on Replace or Replace All per your needs.
Note that I had a specific column selected and a check box was in “Current selection only” which was just what I wanted.

Bingo! I now have clickable links and can do faster product research.

For the uninitiated, GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a free PhotoShop-like program for creating and manipulating images. This article assumes that you are already familiar with the basics of installing and using GIMP. If you need help getting to that level, please visit https://www.gimp.org/ as a starting point.

Here’s one way to produce images with rounded corners. For this article, I’m going to make an image to be used as my favicon for my site. It appears in the tab when you visit a web site and also in the bookmark or favorite when you bookmark a site.

1. Open a new image of the desired size. WordPress recommends 512 x 512 as a minimum, so let’s use that size.
2. In the layers dialog, right-click on the layer for the new image and ensure that “Add alpha channel” is selected. Alternatively, click Layer from the menu bar, then Transparency, then Add Alpha Channel.
3. Click on the “Select” menu option, and click on “Rounded Rectangle.”
4. Set the radius to 50% in the dialog that pops up. You can adjust that value up or down to see what works best for you.
5. Go to the edit menu and select “Copy”, or use Ctrl-C.
6. Go to the edit menu again and select “Paste as”, then “New Image”, or use Shift-Ctrl-V. You now see transparent corners giving the rounded corners effect.

You can continue to finish your project with your rounded corners base image.

Many people are adopting the WordPress content management system as their platform of choice for blogs and web sites. My latest project will be to convert an existing static web site to WordPress. I worked with WordPress in the past but haven’t done much with it until recently. I have several candidate web sites for conversion. I’m not really sure how well any site will convert, so it may ultimately have to been converted manually. The goal is not really to replicate the old site anyway, but to build a newer, more flexible — and to some extent, user-maintainable one.

The Plan
Rather than installing WordPress directly on my local web server installation on my desktop computer for the conversion and refinement phases, I chose to download and run a virtual machine appliance from Bitnami with WordPress pre-configured and ready to go. I’ll be trying out a couple of plug-ins to import the existing HTML pages and create a complete backup of the newly configured WordPress web site when it’s tested and ready for migration to the live web site domain. The plug-ins I have initially targeted to employ for this are Import HTML 2 and Duplicator. The web site for this is actually for my sister’s farm business, Ricochet Farms at http://ricochetfarms.com. It’s actually pretty amazing that she’s been able to maintain it as well as she has since she’s had no training on computers to speak of. She uses Dreamweaver for most of the work. We also plan to monetize the site with some affiliate links and unobtrusive pertinent ads.

Configuring My Computer For a 64-Bit Virtual Machine
The BitNami virtual machine I downloaded is a minimal configuration of 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04. Initially, 64-bit options were not available in my instance of VirtualBox. There are settings in the BIOS of the Dell 780 computer that are turned off by default. And yes, it’s an older machine I got for free, upgraded the processor to the fastest available with the most cores possible, added 8 gigabytes more RAM (10 GB total currently,) and migrated the system to an SSD (solid-state drive). It’s very quiet and fast enough for most purposes. Before I tackled the BIOS changes, I “upgraded” VirtualBox which required removing the older version first. All of my prior settings for my virtual machines were intact afterward.

I had to ensure that I had the following settings configured:

Security > Execute Disable (set to On)
Performance > Virtualization (set to On)
Performance > VT for Direct I/O Access (set to On)
Performance > Trusted Execution (set to Off)

Don’t ask me why, but I had to reboot twice for the 64 bit client creation options to show up. I rebooted again to double-check the settings, exited the BIOS and continued booting, and then the 64 bit options appeared.

Importing The Bitnami WordPress Appliance
The appliance file I had downloaded was unzipped, the OVF file imported into VirtualBox using the included VMDK file as the existing virtual hard drive, and then it was started up. I logged in to the command line interface that appeared, checked the IP address, and then browsed to it using my desktop browser. The default WordPress web site dutifully presented itself which was gratifying. However, I knew that the work was just beginning.

Transferring Files to the Virtual Machine
In order to import an existing web site, the files have to exist on the same server as the WordPress install. The virtual server is configured with no FTP or SSH access by default. To use SSH or SFTP, sshd must be enabled on the virtual server. Detailed instructions are available here.

$ sudo mv /etc/init/ssh.conf.back /etc/init/ssh.conf

$ sudo start ssh

Now SSH or SFTP access is possible, using an FTP client like the free FileZilla, for example.

Rather than using FTP to get all the files from the live web site, I used the command line utility wget. One reason I did this is because there are a lot of unused image files on the site and I didn’t want to transfer all of them to the virtual machine. I took that subset of files and used FileZilla to transfer them to the virtual machine. Then I used the Import HTML 2 plug-in to import the site by choosing Plugins from the admin interface, then Import HTML 2, and setting the options. I went largely by the instructions provided on the Import HTML 2 User Guide. The result? Well, the first pass yielded a site with most of the pages created, but there is still a lot of manual tweaking to do unless I can specify some different options in the plug-in and try it again. For example, I am seeing links that are absolute to the local machine. That won’t work when the site is uploaded.

More updates coming soon…