Techno Frustration

There are lots of examples of automating office apps out there but Visio examples seem thin on the ground. I guess this is partly due to its relatively recent inclusion into the Office fold. The example below shows Visio code to create a diagram with two rectangles joined by a connector. Its written in Python and makes use of the win32com package provided by pywin32 . This is installed by default with ActivePython . I had some difficulty getting the makepy tool to see the Microsoft Visio 11.0 Type Library that showed up fine as a registered object in Visual Studio and Excel/VBA. In the end I had to explicitly point makepy at the VISLIB.DLL. That said the code below will work fine without this step as I don't make use of any of the Visio Constants. import os import win32com.client # Two lines below generated from the command: # python makepy.py -i VISLIB.DLL from win32com.client import gencache gencache.EnsureModule( '{00021A98-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}' , 0,

I've decided to bite the bullet and buy some software to fill my tax return in this year. My attempts to fill my tax return in online have always been thwarted by the fact that the Inland Revenue doesn't support any of the non standard forms. HMRC helpfully publish a list of supported software . Of course being the government they can't favour any one vendor so the list doesn't have any ratings of the individual software packages. Although the list is meant for individual tax returns the software isn't necessarily aimed at individual users - much of its seems to be aimed at tax agents. I whittled the list down based on the following requirements: I could fine the software on the website! There was a price The software looked like it was aimed at individuals/households I could get a feel for it with some kind of online demo This left me with the following list: TaxCalc 2007 (£24.99) Andica Self Assessment Personal (from £12.95) FTax (£14.95) Of these FTax looks to