Removing leading and trailing spaces from Oracle SQL*Plus spooled output

Oracle's SQL*Plus application spools fields with spaces even if you try to trim the fields, because SQL*Plus is "doing you a favor" by making the fields line up. One way to work around this is to concatenate all fields into one big field so that SQL*Plus spools one big field. However, when I tried this with some very large fields, I got an error implying that I was concatenating too many characters. So how to work around this?

Here's what I did: I let SQL*Plus spool a tab delimited file with leading and trailing spaces (trailing blanks for all fields except for a field which uses STRAGG and had one leading space). Then I created an awk script to remove the leading and trailing spaces with code similar to the following:

Showing Outlook 2007 Calendar Appointments in Different Colors for Different Statuses

In Outlook 2003's calendar, appointments and meetings marked as "Free", "Tentative", "Busy", and "Out of Office" all automatically appeared differently on the calendar view to make it easy to visually distinguish them. Outlook 2007 offers the same "Show time as" options, but does not automatically visually distinguish these statuses by default.

I wanted this feature back in Outlook 2007, because I use my calendar not only to block out time for meeting and appointments which I mark as "Busy", but also as reminders for things I'd like to do if convenient, which I mark as "Free". Items I mark as "Free" are things like "Read the corporate newsletter", "Drink water", etc.

One way to visually distinguish meetings and appointments in Outlook 2007 is to manually assign each meeting and appointment a category which is associated with a color. This is what I did at first, but thought there must be a better way.

Oracle Wallet and tracing didn't work when executed by cron jobs

For those who may find it helpful, here's a problem I ran into along with the solution.

When a Korn shell script using Oracle 10gR2 client's sqlplus was run manually at the command prompt, the script successfully used an Oracle Wallet to log in and run an SQL script.

However, when the same ksh script was run with a cron job, I would get the following error:
"ORA-12534: TNS:operation not supported".

Workaround for SQL*Loader-297/ORA-01756 problem

Upgraded Oracle SQL*Loader (a.k.a. sqlldr) from a 9i version to a 10gR2 version on two computers, with release 10.2.0.1.0 on one computer and release 10.2.0.4.0 on the other.

Some ctl files have the following line:

flag "'N'",

When I'd run sqlldr release 10.2.0.4.0 or the 9i version of sqlldr, the above line caused no problems.

But when I'd run it on release 10.2.0.1.0, I'd get this error:

SQL*Loader-297: Invalid syntax or bind variable in SQL string for column FLAG.
ORA-01756: quoted string not properly terminated

I found I was able to get the ctl files to work with release 10.2.0.1.0 by changing the problematic line to this:

Outlook 2007 changing font and other formatting on reply or forward

Outlook 2007 is driving me crazy: I'll reply to an email using my default Outlook font of Calibri. Then I'll open the email I just sent from the "Sent Items" folder and find that the text I just wrote get converted to Time New Roman font. Also, the font for the text for all preceding emails was usually, but not always, also converted to Times New Roman. For example, in an email I'm looking at right now that has a long string of replies from different people, some people's signature line text got converted to Times New Roman, but some signature lines did not.

Value of Excel Formula Won't Show

This problem has driven me nuts on more than one occassion, so I am documenting the solution here for reference. Maybe this will help you.

Problem: Enter formula into cell such as "=B2". After entering formula, instead of seeing the value of the B2 cell, you see "=B2".