For months I would run across this strange issue where occasionally a folder of images would appear to become corrupt. Because no matter how I tried to open the folder it would crash the program – even just trying to open the folder in the Windows Explorer would crash Explorer (Not Internet Explorer by the way – but the operating systems basic folder opening program).

The folder once it began crashing would crash no matter how I tried to access the photos – if I tried to open an image from that folder in Photoshop it would crash Photoshop. It was real frustrating and caused me to use an ftp program to view the files in the folder than I could click to edit from the ftp program and it would open fine in Photoshop. But this is far from an ideal workaround for a guy that edits photos all the time as part of my webdev livelihood.

So anyway, I found the solution the other day to what was causing Explorer and Photoshop to crash when opening these image folders.

It was a conflict between XP’s built-in thumbnail viewer in Windows Explorer and Photoshop’s “Generate Thumbnail” feature. So to fix you need to disable the thumbnail feature for Photoshop files by:

1. Right-click on any image file
2. Choose Properties
3. Choose Photoshop image tab
4. Uncheck the “Generate Thumbnails” option

This will disable the feature for all image files – and I haven’t crashed since!

Adding some If…Then logic to our Excel formulas can really make creating dynamic spreadsheet easier.

Basically the IF logic statement in excel works just like it does in any web coding program, it check to see if a condition is met and then executes something based on the results.

It looks like this:

=IF(logical_test, value_if_true, value_if_false)

So for instance the formula:

=IF(A2>B2,”yes”,”no”)

Checks to see if Cell A2 is bigger than B2 and returns “Yes”if it is or “No” if it is not.

You can do an endless number of things with the true and false values, such as return text, return numbers, return a cell value or even execute a formula.

Lets look at some various options:

=IF(A2>B2,”yes”,”no”) — returns text answers
=IF(A2>B2,”why yes it is larger”,”no of course its not larger”) — returns longer text answers
=IF(A2>B2,1,2) — returns numeric answers
=IF(A2>B2,A2,B2) — returns cell values
=IF(A2>B2,(A2-B2),(B2-A2)) — returns nested formulas
=IF(A2>B2,”Sorry, you are at your limit”,(D2*4)) — returns combination of options

Ok, so lets take it up a notch. If you want to check more than one condition you can use an AND or an OR operator:

=IF((AND(D2>5,C2<100)),2,1)
=IF((OR(D2>5,C2<100)),2,1)

Now – you can even nest multiple AND/OR statement into the same IF formula, the difference here is that while each logic test can have its own value if True, you can only have one value if all are false. You can nest up to 7 IFs in one formula, so that means you can return up to 8 different results (7 different values if true and one value if false).:

=IF((AND(D2>5,C2<100)),3,(IF((OR(D2>5,C2<100)),2,1)))
=IF((B2=”Michigan”),4,IF((B2=”Indiana”),3,IF((B2=”Ohio”),2,IF((B2=”Illinois”),1,””))))

Notice the second example the false value is left blank “” meaning the cell will be left blank if the item is not from any of the four states listed.

Ok – go forth and be logical.