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After my Outlook article on Tuesday, Ken Puls sent me a link to the Microsoft Office Labs site, where you can download the Email Prioritizer add-in for Outlook 2007. It has a Do Not Disturb setting that you can use to temporarily stop email from arriving. Good for those times when you need to focus for a while, but don't want to lose touch with the world for the long term.
My mail runs through MailWasher, which flashes in the system tray when a message arrives on the mail server. Sometimes I turn it off accidentally, and don't notice until a couple of quiet hours have passed. No alerts, so I get lots of work done, but it might be better to have it off for a shorter, and predetermined, amount of time.
You can also prioritize your email with the Email Prioritizer's 3-star rating system. I don't have
Continue reading Do Not Disturb
No, this blog hasn't gone political. I'm talking about polling co-workers, friends or family, to make a decision, or pick a date for an event. That might be easy to do if you're in a big office, and share an online calendar. But, if you're running a small business and trying to get a consensus on a decision among clients or associates, it's not so easy.
Instead of spending hours on the phone, or sending emails round in circles, you could use the online polling tool, Doodle. Create a poll, then send everyone a web page link where they can vote. No one has to register or log in -- they just follow your link, type a name and cast a vote.
To start, you set up a poll with a choice of dates, or other options. You can opt for email notices, or go to the page and see
Continue reading Make Your Vote Count With Doodle
You hit Send, then realize you forgot the attachment. Or you misspelled the recipient's name. Or you used Reply All, when you only wanted the message to go to one person. None of these things have ever happened to me (well hardly ever), but you might have been less fortunate.
All kinds of tragedies can strike in that ohnosecond, just after you fire off an email. As a bit of insurance, you can change a setting in Outlook, so messages are delayed a set number of minutes. Then, if you realize you didn't want to include everyone in the lottery ticket email, you'll have time to delete a name or two from the Send To list.
There are instructions for changing this setting on the Microsoft website. It will only take you a couple of minutes to make the change, and that investment will pay for itself the first time
Continue reading Delay Sending Outlook Messages
"Microsoft Excel has no keyboard shortcut for “save as”. Probably because they are *only* on version 11."
That was one of the Twitters that I posted on Saturday. However, as Jason Morin pointed out in the comments, you can use the F12 key to open the Save As dialog box.
Why didn't the twitterer know that? Well, when you go to the Keyboard Shortcuts topic in Excel's Help, there's an incomplete list. It doesn't even show Ctl + S as a shortcut to Save, let alone tell us how to do a Save As.
To find a full list of Excel Keyboard shortcuts, you can download one of the following files or view the list on the web page.
Chip Pearson's site
View: Excel Keyboard Shortcuts list
Download: Excel Keyboard Shortcuts Excel file
Contextures site
View: Excel Keyboard Shortcuts list
Download: Excel Keyboard Shortcuts Excel file
Microsoft Excel Team
Continue reading Excel Keyboard Shortcuts
Moved to the Excel Twitters archive:
Excel Twitters 20080913
Children around the world can learn how to make shiny 3D pie charts, thanks to the Create a Graph page on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) web site. The NCES is part of the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences, and collects and analyzes data related to education.
The Create a Graph page has a charting tutorial, and advice on selecting a chart type. Unfortunately, the sample charts are heavy on the 3D effects, such as the ones shown below.
The Create a Chart page is part of the NCES Kids' Zone. When you're tired of making fancy charts, you can try some of the other tools, such as Mind Benders, Word of the Day, or Dare to Compare, where you can test your knowledge against that of grade school students. I'm proud to announce that I got all the Grade 4
Continue reading Hey Kids -- Create a 3D Pie Chart
One of the things that I do while drinking my morning coffee is to check the statistics for my website and blog. It's interesting to see the fluctuations in traffic, and discover where's it coming from. I use Google Analytics and my web host also has a daily statistics file that shows me the hits and downloads.
Not that I'm obsessed or anything, but I track the statistics in a couple of Excel files, and even have a line chart for the monthly totals. Today I saw a blog statistics dashboard that a Canadian PR firm uses for its clients, and it puts my little system to shame.
Apparently the reports are created monthly, with lots of cutting and pasting, but you could probably automate something similar in Excel. It has a nice clean look, and you customize it to show the statistics of interest to you or your clients.
Continue reading Blog Stats Dashboard Template
These items are definitely productivity related, because you can't manage what you don't measure. At the Shana Logic site they're selling some interesting accessories, and I like this stainless steel bracelet with rulers in metric and inches.
They also make compass earrings, a level necklace and a thermometer necklace, so you'll be able to stay on course and get things done. I'd make a pun for each item, but will leave that for you to enjoy on your own.
Have you ever bought software that came with free upgrades for life?
In the Successful Software blog, Andy Brice asks if you should give customers free software upgrades for life. He created an income model in Excel 2007 that you can download, to test different scenarios.
I can't imagine why anyone would offer free software upgrades for life. Certainly, if there are minor upgrades or patches to the current version, or a major upgrade is released shortly after a purchase, then I would expect to get those at no charge. Otherwise, if I want to enjoy the new features that a developer has worked hard to create, I'd pay for the upgrade.
The article has an excellent list of things customers should expect in major upgrades, including two points that are key:
Any major bugs in version n should be fixed before releasing version n+1. A major upgrade should
Continue reading Free Upgrades For Life
I use Google to do web searches, and am pretty efficient at finding things, in my humble opinion. Last week my son sent me a link to All My Faves, which lets you find things, but in a completely different way than Google.
The Home page has rows of web site logos, grouped in categories such as Travel, Sports, Finance and Tech. The top row has weekly favourites.
There's a Weekly Faves tab, that has archived links from earlier weeks, and there's a best of 2007 row at the bottom of that page. Also, there are specialized tabs for Travel, Entertainment, Kids and Shopping.
This could be a great starting point if you're trying to generate ideas, or find new sources of information (or entertainment!) Instead of starting from a narrow search term, and digging in to different sites, All My Faves lets you start from the forest, and
Continue reading Find New Sites With All My Faves
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