On Writing Scheduled Tasks for Windows AT Command

Less painful ways to write scheduled tasks for the Windows at command.

• Use absolute paths to reference files or folder because at starts in a default folder, not the folder you are currently using.
• Use caret (^) to escape the redirection characters so that you can combine the output (stdout) and error (stderr) streams to a file.

Here's an example that combines those tips: at 12:00 C:\Temp\Test.cmd ^> C:\Temp\Test.log 2^>^&1.

It is also be useful to dump the at command's environment variables so that you can check if the variables are set correctly (e.g. PATH): at 12:00 cmd /c set ^> D:\Temp\Env.txt.

2013/12/10: With Task Scheduler, you don't need to use the caret to escape the cmd metacharacters, i.e. Program = cmd and Arguments = /c C:\Temp\Test.cmd > C:\Temp\Test.log 2>&1.

Excel Data Validation Drop Down Control Not Visible

A user found a strange problem in an Excel workbook: the data validation drop down control did not appear for any data validation cells in a specific worksheet (they appear in other worksheets). I tried the possible solutions but they did not work.

The solution came when I tried to resave the workbook as an Excel 97-2003 XLS file and the Excel compatibility checker reported some formulas were unavailable (in this case, SUMIFS) for earlier versions of Excel. After saving the workbook as an XLSX file to avoid this error, the data validation drop down control reappeared in the worksheet. It looks like opening an XLS file using Excel 2007 in compatibility mode may cause unexpected problems like this.