About Tactical-Tech

Army Advice: Tech-Notes

Breaking it down, Barney style!

Search and Highlight Excel

28 August 2016

Situation: Change of Command Inventory.


Problem: It's all hands on deck getting equipment on the Commander's hand receipt lined up, in the hall way or out in the motor pool, in LIN order followed by NSN order along with all of it's BII. This is done in large part to minimize the time it takes for the Commander conducting the inventory to flip through the many printed out pages of his property book and find the item being inventoried. To save a few hours of his time, we spend a few days doing this work to prepare.


Solution: Wouldn't it be nice if we could just have that hand receipt on digits, scan a bar code, automagically search the document and highlight it? Well now you can! Introducing the Search And Highlight Excel (SAHE) xlsm document!

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AIMS Beta 2 Finally Released!

24 June 2013

It's been a couple months since my last major post of anything, but  I have a good excuse reason. I spent a good month or so studying and achieving the CISSP and the rest of the time working on the latest release of AIMS. Seriously took me about 2 weeks to figure out why lateral transfers and turn ins were taking so long to process (ended up being a primary key issue that took about 5 seconds to correct; figures). 

So, yes, there are some minor schema changes to the database. And using the new frontend with the old backend won't work. But don't worry, there is a script that will upgrade the old Beta 1 database to the new Beta 2 without loosing any of the old information for both the Standalone and Enterprise editions.

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Turn a Life-Gear Glow Light White!

18 November 2012

Problem: Ever tell a new guy to go to the COMMO shop and get some chem light batteries? Ask them now, they'll likely come back with some minicell batteries, which is what powers Life+Gear's Glow Light. The Glow Light is essentially a battery operated chem light and it makes a great light weight light to run with when it's still dark outside. Problem is they don't make white lights which happens to be the only type of Glow Light my unit allows us to run with.


Solution: Each light, regardless of color, has a white light in the flash light end. So buy one in your favorite color (they don't make them in multicam unfortunately), unscrew the glow end, take out the light module, flip it around and put it back in. Easy day and now you'll have a white glow light that you can run with.


Never use Boot Blousers Again!

16 November 2012
Tuck in your boots!

Blousers suck. They pop off, roll out, cut off circulation, take time and skill to configure each morning (neither of which I have for blousers) and when they do work, they ride up the leg exposing your socks. Tucking in or tying the pant leg lanyards (for lack of a better word) is another option for keeping your pant legs looking up to standard, but inevitably the pant legs pop loose and you have "snakes" spring forth from your boots. Fortunately, early on in my career I read those old Ranger Rick digest books and found a cool little trick that has kept me from screwing around with my pant legs every 5 minutes.

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Army Budget Spreadsheet

12 November 2012

Excel.jpg Need a little help figuring out your financial situation? This excel spreadsheet is specifically built with the military paycheck (LES) in mind and is meant as a serve as a budget guide and aid in budget and savings planning.