Wireshark, a network analysis tool formerly known as Ethereal, captures packets in real time and display them in human-readable format. Wireshark includes filters, color coding, and other features that let you dig deep into network traffic and inspect individual packets.
Quick Analysis is a contextual tool that provides single-click access to data analysis tools, many of which you're already familiar with: Format: Preview and apply some of Excel's most popular.
This tutorial will get you up to speed with the basics of capturing packets, filtering them, and inspecting them. You can use Wireshark to inspect a suspicious program’s network traffic, analyze the traffic flow on your network, or troubleshoot network problems.
Getting Wireshark
You can download Wireshark for Windows or macOS from its official website. If you’re using Linux or another UNIX-like system, you’ll probably find Wireshark in its package repositories. For example, if you’re using Ubuntu, you’ll find Wireshark in the Ubuntu Software Center.
Just a quick warning: Many organizations don’t allow Wireshark and similar tools on their networks. Don’t use this tool at work unless you have permission.
Capturing Packets
After downloading and installing Wireshark, you can launch it and double-click the name of a network interface under Capture to start capturing packets on that interface. For example, if you want to capture traffic on your wireless network, click your wireless interface. You can configure advanced features by clicking Capture > Options, but this isn’t necessary for now.
As soon as you click the interface’s name, you’ll see the packets start to appear in real time. Wireshark captures each packet sent to or from your system.
If you have promiscuous mode enabled—it’s enabled by default—you’ll also see all the other packets on the network instead of only packets addressed to your network adapter. To check if promiscuous mode is enabled, click Capture > Options and verify the “Enable promiscuous mode on all interfaces” checkbox is activated at the bottom of this window.
Click the red “Stop” button near the top left corner of the window when you want to stop capturing traffic.
Color Coding
You’ll probably see packets highlighted in a variety of different colors. Wireshark uses colors to help you identify the types of traffic at a glance. By default, light purple is TCP traffic, light blue is UDP traffic, and black identifies packets with errors—for example, they could have been delivered out of order.
To view exactly what the color codes mean, click View > Coloring Rules. You can also customize and modify the coloring rules from here, if you like.
Sample Captures
If there’s nothing interesting on your own network to inspect, Wireshark’s wiki has you covered. The wiki contains a page of sample capture files that you can load and inspect. Click File > Open in Wireshark and browse for your downloaded file to open one.
You can also save your own captures in Wireshark and open them later. Click File > Save to save your captured packets.
Filtering Packets
If you’re trying to inspect something specific, such as the traffic a program sends when phoning home, it helps to close down all other applications using the network so you can narrow down the traffic. Still, you’ll likely have a large amount of packets to sift through. That’s where Wireshark’s filters come in.
The most basic way to apply a filter is by typing it into the filter box at the top of the window and clicking Apply (or pressing Enter). For example, type “dns” and you’ll see only DNS packets. When you start typing, Wireshark will help you autocomplete your filter.
You can also click Analyze > Display Filters to choose a filter from among the default filters included in Wireshark. From here, you can add your own custom filters and save them to easily access them in the future.
For more information on Wireshark’s display filtering language, read the Building display filter expressions page in the official Wireshark documentation.
Another interesting thing you can do is right-click a packet and select Follow > TCP Stream.
You’ll see the full TCP conversation between the client and the server. You can also click other protocols in the Follow menu to see the full conversations for other protocols, if applicable.
Close the window and you’ll find a filter has been applied automatically. Wireshark is showing you the packets that make up the conversation.
Inspecting Packets
Click a packet to select it and you can dig down to view its details.
You can also create filters from here — just right-click one of the details and use the Apply as Filter submenu to create a filter based on it.
Wireshark is an extremely powerful tool, and this tutorial is just scratching the surface of what you can do with it. Professionals use it to debug network protocol implementations, examine security problems and inspect network protocol internals.
You can find more detailed information in the official Wireshark User’s Guide and the other documentation pages on Wireshark’s website.
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This blog post is brought to you by Chad Rothschiller a Program Manager on the Excel team.
As part of our planning work at the beginning of the Office 2013 project, we (the Excel team) participated in several customer visits. We went in small groups to someone’s work environment (whether that was a large corporation, a small business, or even a home office), watched them use Excel, and talked with them a bit about what they were doing. Of course several patterns and themes were observed, but here are a few that caught my interest and really resonated with me and with several others on the team:
· Many people aren’t familiar with the variety of data analysis features that Excel has to offer
· Many people are hesitant to create / insert new features, even a chart. Some people feared they wouldn’t be able to change it back if they didn’t like the result
· Many people are simply unwilling to navigate away from the home tab to go looking for interesting features & capabilities
These are the main motivations behind Excel 2013’s Quick Analysis feature. We set out to create a dynamic interface that allows fear-free exploration of Excel’s analytical capabilities. The Quick Analysis galleries are dynamic: what appears in them changes depending on the type of data you’ve selected. Live preview makes it quick and painless to see what’s going to happen to the workbook before committing to a change.
Feel free to open the workbook and come along as we take a closer look at how it all works.
Getting Started: Select a Range of Data
The way to bring up the Quick Analysis interface is to select a range of data, and then click the little button that appears near the bottom right of the selection:
Clicking the button brings up a gallery of options to explore:
By default the Conditional Formatting gallery comes up, showing just a handful of choices, but there are other galleries to explore as well. The Charts, Totals, Tables, and Sparklines tabs in this callout each show a handful of choices from those respective categories to explore.
Conditional Formatting
Looking at my sample data, I might first be interested in taking a closer look just at the numbers, so I select G4:I20, and click the button. Hovering my mouse over the various icons in the gallery gives me a live preview of what choosing that option will do. Below are some examples with Data Bars and Color Scale. If you like what you see, click the button to add that to your selection, otherwise if you just move your mouse away the live preview will disappear.
(Data Bars)
(Color Scale)
Dynamic Conditional Formatting Gallery
In the example above I’ve selected numbers, so it makes sense that I’m seeing Conditional Formatting options that work well with numeric values. If I select all Text or all Date values, the items in the Conditional Formatting gallery change to work better with those types of data:
(Text values in the “Territory” column selected, showing a live preview of the “Text Contains” Conditional Formatting rule)
(Date values in the “Dates” column selected, showing a live preview of the “Last Week” Conditional Formatting rule)
Charts
Now let’s say I want show my data as a chart, but I’m not yet sure exactly what I want. I’ll select the entire range of data from B3:I20 (Names column all the way to Sales 2011 column), and take a look at the CHARTS gallery in the Quick Analysis callout. This gallery is dynamic as well – – in the background Excel is doing some light weight analysis of the data in the selection to determine some good chart recommendations to get started.
At first glance it seems that the Clustered Column chart is being recommended over and over again:
Looking through the live previews though shows me that these are different Clustered Column PivotChart recommendations. The indicator that a PivotChart (instead of a regular chart) is being recommended is the little PivotTable icon in the upper right corner of the chart preview:
Incidentally, the choices you see here are a subset of the recommendations you get when you navigate to the Insert ribbon tab and choose “Recommended Charts” (the maximum number of recommendations in the Quick Analysis gallery is 5, whereas clicking the ribbon button doesn’t limit the recommendations to 5). Also, if the recommendation engine has fewer than 5 recommended charts, then fewer recommendations will appear in the Quick Analysis Charts gallery.
Totals
To explore the Totals gallery in the Quick Analysis callout, let’s first select all the numbers for Sales 2009, 2010, and 2011 (range G4:I20). Looking at the icons in that gallery, I’m thinking that this part of the feature will put totals either at the bottom or to the right of my selection (OK, since I helped design those icons, I’ve got an unfair advantage J):
Live previews confirm my guess:
This particular gallery has more choices, with right/left scrolling arrows to see the additional options. Hovering over the 2nd “Sum” button shows a live preview of the totals placed to the right instead of at the bottom:
This gallery offers “Percent of Total” as well as “Running Total” at the click of a button – – which is a first for Excel.
Tables
Quick Analysis Tool For Excel On A Mac
Exploring the Tables gallery quickly shows me that this is the place to get recommendations about how to summarize my data in a PivotTable. This gallery is dynamic as well – – in the background, Excel is doing more lightweight analysis of the data in the selection to determine good recommendations to get started. Even if I don’t know what the word PivotTable means, I can see from the live previews that it’s putting subtotals into a nicely formatted layout:
Again, just like recommended charts, this is a subset of the options you get when you navigate to the Insert ribbon tab and choose “Recommended PivotTables”. Also, if the recommendation engine has fewer than 5 recommendations, then fewer recommendations will appear in this gallery. As an extreme example, if the engine doesn’t recommend any PivotTables, there won’t be any recommendations in the gallery; only the option to insert a blank PivotTable. This can happen if your data contains only unique values, column-wise, since in that case there isn’t anything to consolidate and subtotal.
Quick Analysis In Excel 2010
I’m really excited that you don’t have to know the word “PivotTable” in order to get good summary information about your data, and you get live previews of a good number of options to choose from.
Sparklines
Finally, let’s take a quick glance at the Sparklines gallery. I’ll select the numbers again, and hover over the “Column” icon to see a live preview of where the Sparklines will be inserted, and get a better understanding of what Sparklines even means:
Wrap Up
One aspect of this feature that was challenging for us to dial in exactly right was how and where the Quick Analysis button would initially show up: On the one hand we want people to see it and click it. We don’t want to be too subtle. On the other hand we don’t want to annoy people with a button always appearing and following them around as they work in Excel – – that would be a distraction. We tried to keep it toned down by having the button fade/disappear as the mouse moved away from it.
What do you think:
· Did we get the balance right?
· Do you think that people will notice it?
· Did you notice it?
· If so, did it draw you in to explore the feature?
Quick Analysis Tool For Mac
· Or is it simply distracting? (you can turn it off in Excel / Options)
Thanks everyone for reading and providing comments!
Quick Analysis Tool Excel For Mac
–Chad