Friday, December 30, 2011

How to improve your V.O.I.C.E?

Recently I read about the communication style and way to communicate. I get to know about the tips to improve our voice. I am sharing few tips which may help all of us.

What does VOICE stands for?

We communicate all the time with our family, friends, office colleagues and estrangers. Some time we communicate with our inner self. But to we pay attention to how our voice sounds to others? A research has confirmed that the words we speak only convey less than 10 percent of our message. The 90 percent of our message is conveys how we sounds to others?

Is not this strange to know? This does not matter that we speak flawless, use good vocabulary to the recipient of our communication but, how we sound and how our body language responds during the conversation is important.

VOICE stands for V.O.I.C.E = Volume, Output Rate, Inflection, Clarity and emphasis

##. My voice is Loud

If your voice is loud you are taken as an aggressive and unfriendly person. A loud voice can be controlled by keeping off from cigarette, chewing-gum, and chocolates in mouth.

##.My voice is slow

If your voice is slow the listeners will doubt about your ability to understand the topic you are talking about. Your knowledge on the subject, you are talking about is taken as low and not perfect.

You can improve your voice by concentrating on your breathing. You should try to breath from upper part of your chest.

##. My voice is good but pronunciation is not good.

If your pronunciation is not good or you have difficulty to speak the words your voice becomes the topic of interest rather than the content of the message. You can improve your voice by moving your tongue and lips fully. You should avoid dry, smoky and dusty environment to keep a healthy voice.

There many tips you can use like recording your voice and listening yourself to feel how you sounds, you can do some breathing exercise as well to strength your mouth muscles.

Remember our VOICE play an important role in our interpersonal communication so we should pay attention to improve this. A poor voice can be reason for not getting the growth you would have liked in your personal and professional life.

With this I would like to sign-off for year 2011 and wish you all a Very Happy New Year 2012.

“May God bless you and your family and gift you all the success, health and happiness all the time!!!”

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Do you care for your … Kinesthetic Communication Style?

This post is in continuation to my earlier post on communication style.

In my last post we discuss the “auditory style” communication and “visual style” of communication. To continue the discussion today we will discuss the “Kinesthetic Style” of communication.

Kinesthetic Style

People having “Kinesthetic Style” of communication drive most of his senses from what they feel – either physically or mentally. The people of this category put emphasis on what they touch and how they feel about it. Their emotions play a vital role in their though process.

How do you recognize a Kinesthetic Style person?

Gesture: Person with Kinesthetic style is easily recognized as they respond positively to physical contacts. Their gestures are very drooping. They like to demonstrate.

Eye Movement: People with Kinesthetic style often look at the floor while answering a question.

Speaking Style: Speaking style of kinesthetic people is often slow. They will often pause during the conversation. Kinesthetic people use action-oriented words in their conversation such as run, jump, move, hold etc.

These people are very sensitive towards their environment. Their mood is often drive by the surrounding things such as temperature, pressure, texture etc. These people likes to talk about how they feel about a situation or thing.

How to deal with Kinesthetic Style person?

People of Kinesthetic style are very emotional so they need to be supported emotionally. These people do not take much time to decide about what they like or what they do not like?

At the end, I designed following graphs which will help to recognize the person(s) of different communication style:

Do you care for your … Visual Communication Style?

This post is in continuation to my earlier post on communication style.

In my last post we discuss the “auditory style” communication. To continue the discussion today we will discuss the “Visual Style” of communication.

Visual Style

People having “Visual Style” of communication drive most of his senses from what they see. Pictorial representation of the communication makes them more comfortable to understand the point. People of this category see the world in the form of images. They are very much conscious about the image they are putting in their environment.

How do you recognize a Visual Style person?

Gesture: As these people are very much image conscious, they maintain the same in their gestures. They use their hand frequently during the conversation. They pay attention towards how they sit; how they look. They pay attention to their personal appearance. You will find even their desk very decorative and very clean.

Visual people think very quickly. You will find these people speak quickly as well. These people are often well-organized.

Eye Movement: People having Visual Style of communication frequently look up when answering a question.

Speaking Style: Another clue to recognize a person with visual style is that, he/she uses verb in his speech while talking. They speak quickly when talking about a picture. You will often find in their conversion that they talk about how a situation/thing/scene looks to them or sound to them.

How do deal with Visual style person?

Visual style people rely on pictures and images for the communication. So while dealing with them we should focus on our facial expression, gestures, movements etc.

These people are not good in remembering information or instructions given them verbally. Visual Style people got bored easily if the communication does not include pictures, images or anything which cannot catch their imagination.

Since Visual Style people do not pay much attention to the instructions given to them verbally they are bound to lose the track of the task they are dealing with.

Since a person of visual style is very sensitive to what he see; he/she is not easily diverted by Noise.

That is all about Visual Style of communication. I hope you like the post.

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Do you care for your …Communication Style?

What is the most important thing a person does when he is born and before he died?

Communication!!!

Yes, Communication is the most important thing we do in our life. Communication takes place in many forms – sometime verbal sometime written and sometime in signs language; even when we are not speaking our body language is communicating. Our facial expression, sitting postures and gestures are communicating with the outside environment.

But do we know what our communication style is? Do we know the most important and never-ending thing we are doing; are we doing it correctly? We communicate with family, friends, office colleagues, our boss and estrangers in our day-to-day life; do we care why we fail to communicate our thoughts or our view to other people? Why sometime we have to think that why the other person does not understand the simplest thing we communicate to him.

The reason could be the communication style. It is important to understand the communication style of person you are communicating with. This person could be your spouse, your children, your friends, relatives, office colleagues or the estranged shopkeeper you just talk to.

Communication style broadly falls into three categories

- Auditory Style
- Visual Style
- Kinesthetic Style

Every person has their individual communication style and his style falls into any of the three category.

Auditory Style

People with auditory style rely strongly on the sounds and words which they hear and make sense out of it. In other words they do create memories and thoughts using images, feelings, tastes but they give top priority to sound i.e. hearing.

How do you recognize an Auditory Style person?

Gesture: A person with auditory style will appear very modest and sensible in his gestures. When they are in meeting they are very attentive to speech. Look out for people in the meetings who tilt their heads while listening, these people has “auditory style” of communication.

Eye-Movement: A person with auditory style will move his eye to right (in right-handed people) or left (in left-handed people) while listening to sound. While remembering some sound and words the eye movements of right-handed people are into left and for left-handed people it is right.

Have you seen people talking to themselves?

Next time when you notice this, watch his eyes. If eyes move down and to the left he is a right-handed person and has auditory style of communication. If eyes move down and to the right he is a left-handed person and has auditory style of communication. A person with auditory style will be loud and might be audible while talking to himself.

Speaking Style: Another clue to recognize a person with an auditory style is that, he/she uses a lot of verb such as quiet, talk, speak, loud, listen, echo etc. in his speech while talking. They speak in low and musical voice.

A person with an auditory style is very much attracted to what he hears i.e. sound and music.

How do deal with an auditory style person?

Auditory styles people rely mainly on sound which they hear so next time when you have to give some message to them give it verbally; they will not only remember it but also like it.

Since a person of auditory style is very sensitive to sound and what he hears; he/she is easily diverted by Noise. So, next time when you have to share information or give feedback to an auditory person use a peaceful place for communication.

While doing conversation with auditory style person we should be careful to how we sound and what word we use; our tone, our pitch and speed of talking; this all play important role for them.

So any guesses what will you gift to an auditory person? Something related with Sound or music. Did you say a ticket to a music concert? Yes that is right. Anything which makes sound such as Audio tapes or music stuff or ticket to some concert is ideal gift for them.

We should be speaking Face-to-Face or on phone with people with auditory style of communication.

The point is if you know the communication style of the person it is easy to communicate with him and build a good rapport with him.

I hope you like the article

More to come!!

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

SSIS: Read public data of Twitter Users

Social networking is great tool of this decade and every one want to learn and explore this media. Google +, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc., there are many players in the race to get your attention and want you to experiment with them.

Twitter is one of the leading player among them. There are many mechanisms for pulling data from Twitter profiles. Twitter itself provides Twitter API and Twitter Widgets to do the same. We have other customized tools such as Tweet-SQL to pull the twitter feed/data. There are bunch of Twitter tools available which you can use.

When it comes to SSIS we can use one of the simplest things on offer to pull Twitter Feed or public data of a Twitter user. For example if you want to see the public data of my Twitter account you can navigate to the below link

http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?screen_name=vksingh24

This shows me following xml feed in my browser

You can replace the screen_name with your own twitter user name and see the results in your browser. We can use this URL to pull the public data of a Twitter user.

So I want to pull count of Followers and count of Friends of a twitter user from his public profile.

To do so, I created an SSIS package and created a package level variable (TwitterScreenName). This variable stores the screen name of twitter user whose public information (Friend and Follower count) I want to extract.

I added a script task “Read Twitter User Data” and launch the Script Task editor box. I am using the variable I created in Screen1 as a ReadOnlyVariable.

The Script Task has following code snippet. The code snippet reads the Friends and Followers count from the xml feed return from the Twitter API call.

After running the SSIS package I saw the Friends and Followers counts of mine Twitter account. (I know I am not very active on Twitter).

One can extract all the public information from the XML Feed such as when the twitter ID was created, profile picture location, latest feed etc.

Using this approach we can have a solution where we can pull the latest public twitter data of a twitter profile (person or organization or event etc) and store that in a table which we can latter use to show in reports or web pages as needed.

Twitter has put Rate Limitation on this approach. A twitter user profile data can be accessed 150 times per hour. An IP address can pull the twitter users profile data 150 times per hour.

I hope you like this post and mark your reaction in the footer. Thanks for reading this post

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Ms-Excel Lookup() function …What you must know?

Today while working on a excel template I learned a very interesting thing about Excel Lookup () function.

Excel Lookup function is used to find or return value from a range or array. The range could be a row or column or set of rows and columns. The entire syntax is like this:

=LOOKUP(lookup_value,lookup_vector,result_vector)

Just like we store data in SQL Server tables we can store the data in a tabular format in Ms-Excel. I had following data in my excel sheet.

I had another sheet which had customer name and their details. I had to fill up the Continent column using Lookup () function.

I applied the Lookup() function on column F like this

=LOOKUP(E3,Sheet1!$B$4:$B$10,Sheet1!$C$4:$C$10)

and the result was like this

As you can see the result was not as I expected. The result is showing incorrect Continents. How come UK is in America and India in Europe? This is not right Mr. Excel

I did some finding to fix this issue and while fixing this issue I came to a very interested point that is

“The RANGE you use in Lookup function must be sorted i.e. in ascending order”

I sorted the sheet1 data and all my results in sheet 2 got corrected.

This was interesting to know while dealing with Lookup you should be careful with the range you are using. Your RANE must be sorted to give you the right result.
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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

SSIS: How to Compress/Zip your file using 7-Zip?

This post shows how you can zip your file using SSIS .

As per the need sometime you might need to zip your files in order to save some space or you might want to create a zip file and set a password on it before sending to some one.

File compression is a very interesting topic. There are many tools available to compress/zip your file such as Winzip, 7-Zip, ezyZip, WindowsRar and many more. We can use any one to compress/zip our file. I have used 7-Zip to compress/zip my file for this post.

I have following file in my local drive.

The file name is RupeeStory.txt and file size is 474 KB. I want to Compress/zip this file. I know the file size is not large but this is purely for demonstration purpose.

In SSIS, I have created a SSIS package and on Control Flow tab I have added an Execute Process Task task

I have setup the Process tab of Execute Process Task Editor as following. My file name is RupeeStory.txt and my zip file name is ZipMyFile.7z

After setting this I run my SSIS package and it runs successfully and created a zip file in my local drive.

Simple!!

Now I want to create a zip file and set the password on it. I edited the Arguments as following

a "C:\ZipMyFile.7z" "C:\RupeeStory.txt" -pabc@2011

Where abc@2011 is the password. So anyone extracting my zip file need to know the password

You can use the other settings as well like adding your file to an archive, deleting a file from archive, extract files from archive etc. The only thing is you should be familiar with the command-prompt switches or Start-up switches of your favorite zipping tool. In case you use 7-Zip here is an screen shot of all the start-up switches you can use.

I hope you like this article.

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Friday, December 2, 2011

SSIS: How to generate HyperLink in Excel output

This post shows how you can generate hyperlink in excel output file using Script Task

Reading data and exporting it to Excel is one of the very common task in SSIS professional life. One of the very intersting thing which I come across is generating Hyperlink in Excel output files.

Let us assume we have following data in a SQL table. The table name is tblCompany inside the database [HumanResource] in my machine.

We need to export this data to an Excel file and want to generate the Hyperlink in excel file using SSIS. I want to generate the Hyperlink in Website and EmailID column. So when the file reaches to the end user they can navigate to the websites of companies listed in the excel file.

I started with creating three variables in the SSIS package.

ExcelFilePath
This variable is to store the excel file path. Currently this file has only columns heading (Company, Website and EmailID).

varColumnCount
This variable is to store the number of columns it has to read from the source i.e. from the SQL table mentioned above. Currently the SQL Table has only three columns.

varRowCount
This variable is to store the number of rows it has to read from the source i.e. from the SQL table mentioned above. Currently the SQL Table has only six rows.

The Control flow and Data Flow of my SSIS package looks like this

Execute SQL Task
This control flow task does one simple thing. It reads the number of columns we have in the SQL table. I have used the following SQL Statement.

select COUNT(*) as 'Columns' From sys.columns where object_id=object_id('[HumanResource].[dbo].[tblCompany]')

This task returns the result set in variable varColumnCount

Data Flow Task
The Data Flow task simply read all the data from SQL Table mentioned in picture 1 and store it in excel file. In between it assign the Row count to the variable varRowCount

Script Task
The script task is one which plays the major role in the assigning Hyperlink in the Excel output file.

If you have experienced the formulas in Excel you might be aware of a formula called HYPERLINK. This excel formula takes two arguments; Link_Location and Friendly_name. So if you simply open an excel workbook and write following formula it will show the Hyperlink.

=HYPERLINK("http://www.google.com","Go to Google Homepage")

Our Script task will be using the same Excel Formula to generate the Hyperlink. It will loop through all the cells in excel and if it finds the http or @ keyword it will create a hyperlink.

All the three variables are set as ReadOnlyVariables in the Script task.

Ater that we need to click on Edit Script button to launch the Code window. We need to add following two references in our Script task

The code snippet I have used in Script Task is below

After setting up all the components I run the SSIS package. The SSIS package runs successfully and generated the Hyperlink in the excel file.

Output Excel File has hyperlinks now.

This approach has some advantages and some disadvantages. One of the disadvantage is that it is using COM based Excel object libraries which needs to be present if you plan to use this approach. This is just one of the ways to generate Hyperlink. This can be done in SSIS using other mechanism.

I hope you enjoy the post.

Environment: Ms-Office 2007 and SQL Server 2008.

If you want to explore more with the Source code of this post; please visit Download Zone.

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SSIS: Read single cell values in excel using RANGE name

Reading data from excel is one of the regular stuff an SSIS professional do at his/her workplace.

Data in excel comes in various forms and nature. Some time you are reading data from a well-defiend excel file and some time your data in excel is scattered. In many occasion you have to read the data from a single cell only.

In a scenario when your excel file data is scattered or you want to read data from a particular cell you can try the approach discuss in this post. Let us assume my excel data is like below screen. I have to read data of B5, C2 and D6 cell and combined them into one column.

What I can do is I can create RANGE in the excel file. For simplicity I have created three range for all three cells. The Range Name is Company1, Company2 and Company3.
To define a RANGE in excel 2007 you can right click on the cell and select “Name a Range”. Now coming back to SSIS side, I created a Data Flow task. Inside the Data Flow Task I have following components.
Each of the Excel Source is reading one of the RANGE(company1, company2 and company3) in excel file. The Union All combines all the rows from three excel source(s) and shows the result in a Data Viewer. Row Sampling has no use in the data flow. It has been added just to show what data is being passed from Union All to the next components.

To read the single cell or RANGE we have to select the range from the Excel Source Editor. I am not selecting Sheet1 or Sheet2 but RANGE names (compan1, company2 and company3) which we defined in the excel file.

After setting the package components I run the package and as expected I had the values from all three RANGE in a single column.
This shows an example where we can read the values from a single cell or from a RANGE from excel file. There are other ways to achieve the same in the SSIS. I hope you like the post.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

SSIS: From Excel to Sql server table with IDENTITY column

Recently I came across one of the question in a popular forum about inserting data from excel to SQL Table with Identity column values of SQL Table coming from Excel. This is very much possible that you have a SQL table with an Identity Column and you want to insert data from Excel file and point of interest is values for Identity column of SQL Table are coming from the excel file. Let us assume we have a SQL Table with following structure:
The ID column is an Identity column. The SQL nature is every time new row will be inserted in this table, the Identity column will populate automatically with the next incremented value. But in a scenario when the ID column values are coming from Excel File – What should be the behavior? Let us assume we have a excel file and we have data like this.
We want to store ID column values of Excel sheet in the SQL table “Excel_ID” and want to store it in ID column of SQL table. With SSIS this is pretty simple. All we have to do is create a Package and add a Data Flow Task into it. We need two connections here. One Excel connection to point to our excel file and second OLE DB Connection to point to our SQL Server and SQL table. Under Data Flow Tab we have following structure
In the OLE DB Destination component we need to check the Keep Identity checkbox.
This will ensure that the Identity check is disabled at the SQL Server table and whatever values are coming from Excel file is stored in the Identity column. After running the package we found that all the values from Excel Column ID have been successfully inserted in the SQL table.
The same thing can be achieved using Execute SQL Task with SSIS.
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Sunday, November 13, 2011

SSIS: Read and Export Excel data from nth Row

This post shows how we can read and export data rom excel starting from nth row.

In SSIS we can read excel data starting from any number of row. Considering a scenario we have a excel file like below screen and we need to read data of Row 3 to Row 14 for Top 10 companies we can do this in SSIS.


To do this I create an Excel Connection manager in my SSIS package. I created a Data Flow Task in the control tab. On Data Flow tab I have following components.



I have put a Data Viewer between Excel Source and Sort. Sort component has no use in my package I simply wanted to show the data in the Data Viewer. I setup my Excel source to read the data from excel file (shown in picture 1). After setting up the Excel Source I went to the Properties window and setup the OpenRowset property value to Sheet1$A3:B14. This is because I want to read the values of Top 10 Companies and their location.


After setting the OpenRowset property I run the package and it shows the 10 rows it has read from Excel file.


In second attempt I want to read the Top 10 Companies of India. To do so I setup the OpenRowset property to Sheet1$A18:B27.


After setting the OpenRowset property I run the package and it shows the 10 rows it has read from Excel file.




We can further export these data to any table or flat file we want to. This shows an example when we have a boundation to read the data from a excel file of a specific row. The same property can be setup programmatically using Script Component.

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Sunday, November 6, 2011

SSIS: How to pull Currency Rates from European Central Bank

This post shows how you can use European Central Bank daily currency feed to pull the Currency Rates in SSIS without using any web services.

Each country currency has different values. When you visit a particular country one of the important thing you want to know is what is the currency and what the currency rate is.

European Central Bank is one of many sources which publish the currency rates every day. The currency rates are published in Euro. If you visit their daily currency rates feed by navigating the following URL; you will find the currency rates in 33 different currencies.

http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml




You can use the above European Central Bank daily feed in SSIS to pull the currency rates.

For the demonstration purpose I have create a table which has following three columns (Currency, Rate and LastUpdatedTime). This table stores the daily currency rates feed which is pulled from the above mentioned ECB URL.

To pull the currency rates from ECB daily I created one OLE DB connection in my SSIS project which points to the Database which has the above table. I created following task under the Control Flow tab.


The Execute SQL Task simply truncate all the rows from the SQL table


The Data Flow Task has following components


I created a package level variable to store the ECB daily feed URL.

The script component under Data Flow tab is a source. I have setup the ReadOnlyVariable values to User::ECBRL. I have added three output columns in inputs and outputs. The three output columns are Currency, Rates and LastUpdate.

I have following codes in the script component.

using System;
using System.Data;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.Wrapper;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Wrapper;
using System.Xml;

[Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.SSISScriptComponentEntryPointAttribute]
public class ScriptMain : UserComponent
{

    public override void PreExecute()
    {
        base.PreExecute();        
    }

    public override void PostExecute()
    {
        base.PostExecute();
    }

    public override void CreateNewOutputRows()
    {
        string strCurrency;
        string flRate;
        XmlDocument xm = new XmlDocument();
        xm.Load(Variables.ECBRL.ToString());

        XmlNodeList xnode = xm.GetElementsByTagName("Cube");
        
        foreach (XmlNode xmn in xnode)
        {
            XmlElement currencyElement = (XmlElement)xmn;
            if (currencyElement.HasAttributes)
            {                
                strCurrency = currencyElement.GetAttribute("currency").ToString();
                flRate =currencyElement.GetAttribute("rate");
                if (strCurrency.Length > 0)
                {
                    Output0Buffer.AddRow();
                    Output0Buffer.Currency = strCurrency;
                    Output0Buffer.Rate = flRate;
                    Output0Buffer.LastUpdate = DateTime.Now;
                }
            }

        }

        }


As you can see in the code we are pulling the Currency rates of each of the currency listed in the ECB feed using Syste.XML namespace.

The OLE DB Destination points to our table which is storing the Currency rates. I have mapped the Script Component output columns to the SQL table columns.

After setting up the Data Flow Task components I connected with the internet and run the package. It runs successfully and pulls the Currency rates values and updated them in the table.

This post shows one of the ways we can use to pull the Currency rates from one of the most trusted source i.e. European Central Bank. There are many ways to accomplish the same in SSIS.

I hope you enjoy reading the post. Thanks for the reading.

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