Tips and Tricks

If you want to make a New Year’s Resolution that’s easy to stick to and will make a direct impact, try teaching yourself some new software skills. Here are ten tools that will have an immediate effect on your day-to-day production, from Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint:

1. Search Folders

As described in previous posts, Search Folders are a powerful, underutilized part of Outlook. A Search Folder is a saved search, which means that you can retrieve results from your Inbox like ‘All emails from James Joyce’ or ‘All emails about Project X’ simply by clicking the Search Folder.

2. Rules

Anytime you find yourself repeating the same organizational steps over and over again in your Inbox, look into programming a Rule. Rules can do things like reply to particular emails with a templated response, or redirect all emails from an important client into a folder for that client.

3. Categories

Categories are a powerful tool in Outlook – right-click any email or meeting, and your categories will appear. Later, you can use categories in one of two potent ways:

– Search Folders: by categorizing your emails as they come in and creating a Search Folder for that category, you remove the necessity to drag-and-drop between different folders in your Inbox. This may not seem important now, but come see me when you’ve got 150 folders you have to maintain.

– Advanced Search: the most important benefit of categories is your ability to apply them to EVERYTHING. Create a category, and soon you’re able to find the meetings, contacts, tasks, AND emails related to that category, with one search.

4. AutoReplace

In Word, AutoReplace is the tool that takes (c) and turns it into the copyright symbol. If harnessed correctly, you can replace any misspelling that you habitually make, or create an autoreplace that takes a code from you and create a long string of text.

5. Fields

If you want to enter today’s date, or create a Table of Contents, or have a page numbering system that can be switched between Roman numerals, Arabic numbering, and lettering, you need Fields. A field is a programmed portion of your page in Word that is responsible for outputting not a set result, but a dynamic value. That means tomorrow, the ‘Today’s Date’ field will pick up the new day. Or that the Table of Contents will pick up the new section you decide to add.

6. MailMerge

One use of fields is the ability to bulk email or create envelopes for everyone in your contact list – MailMerge. Using MailMerge, you’ll be able to simply type a letter and specify “First Name”, and Word will replace it with the first names of everyone you want.

7. AutoFilter

With a large quantity of data, it’s often important to isolate records that meet a certain criteria. In Excel, all you have to do is select the data that you want filtered, apply an AutoFilter, and get to work. You’ll find that there are drop-down arrows for every column, and if you want to show only the employees in IT, you should be able to do exactly that with two clicks.

8. Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts

When it’s time to go above and beyond filtering, Pivot Tables will allow you to take that large quantity of data, filter it, then run subtotals, averages, maximums, minimums… the possibilities are endless. And understanding Pivot Tables only takes about 15 minutes!

9. IF Functions

Most people can grasp SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, COUNT, etc. When the time comes for your functions to make decisions, however, like ‘Only add these numbers together if they are both sales from 2008′, then you need the power of an IF. There are many varieties – SUMIF, COUNTIF, and you can nest functions with an IF to make them more powerful.

10. Presentation Shortcuts

When in mid-presentation, sometimes you just need to darken the projected screen for a couple of minutes while a side conversation plays out. Turning the projector on and off is sloppy – try the ‘B’ key on the keyboard. There are a ton of those shortcuts that make your presentation that much more potent.

Over the next several months, these and many other tips will be thoroughly examined in this blog. In the meantime, look over an Excel manual, or take an Outlook class from us, or just start clicking around. You’ll be amazed at what you can pick up just by clicking random options.

Editor’s Note: Just like the ongoing Pen Tool Tutorials, this is the first in a multi-part series on Excel’s Pivot Tables. Continue to revisit the blog to read more soon.

One of the more prevalent uses of Microsoft Excel is saving large tables of information, and then wringing some quantity of interpreted information from that table. Unfortunately, many Excel users lean on an overuse of functions to interpret that information, when a pivot table would make their jobs easier. This needs to stop. Let’s start from the beginning:

This is a table of data. We have records that have categories like Department and Division, that contain numerical data like Hourly and Weekly Pay. Given this kind of data, I can foresee situations where you’ll need to show the total amount we pay out every week, or the average we pay per hour for a Development employee. You can very easily write a function to average the amount of money we pay to Researchers from Vermont, but what if we needed to get a summary report for all the averages? Or, what if we needed to quickly swap between totals, averages, and maximums? The most efficient solution is the Pivot Table. To create a pivot table, first select the data by clicking on the table. Then, choose the Insert Tab on the Ribbon and click the Pivot Table button.

Now we have the Pivot Table environment, and we need to populate it to generate table. There are two different ways of building the table, but both involve the same fields and information. Take a look at option 1, the actual table area.

The simplest way to think through the building of the table is this: in a typical table, we see data in the center of the table to be calculated. If, for instance, we were filling this with quarterly sales information, the center of the table would be the dollar amounts. Additionally, the quarterly sales table would have labels on the left and top of the table. These labels would hold information like ‘Quarter 1′, and ‘Region 1′. Think about these labels. Quarters 1, 2, 3, 4… these are categories, of which there are only a few. We probably wouldn’t have 100+ labels across the top of the sales table.

Take exactly this idea to populate the pivot table: fill the center with number values, and place categories across the top and left sides of the table. We can use the fields in the screen shot above, or we can use the panel on the right side of the screen:

So, we take things like Department and Division, and drag them to the appropriate areas, and the same for Gross Pay. The new information in these areas will look like this in the panel:

The final result:

There is a TON of customization that can be done to this table – plenty of material for more tutorials! In the meantime, check out our Excel and Excel 2007 courses. Day Two contains the information about Pivot Tables.

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Today, I’d like to do something very simple: give you my personal reading list. These blogs know what they’re talking about – do yourself a favor and visit them regularly.

Design Shard
CSS Tricks
Six Revisions
A List Apart
Function
Smashing Magazine
Noupe
Design Mag
Before & After Magazine

Good luck!

Your typical PowerPoint presentation to your typical audience typically makes everyone wish they were somewhere else, doing something else. The next time you have to give a presentation, see if you can apply one of these three ideas to make everyone’s experience more productive.

Idea #1: Don’t Give a Presentation

Hear me out on this:

Is the data easily misunderstood?

Do you have to convince anyone of your points?

Do your people have 10-15-30-60 minutes where they’re not doing anything really important?

If you answered ‘no’ to all three questions, why are you wasting everyone’s time? Some things can be emailed and understood. You’re neither that important nor that interesting to be giving random presentations for no legitimate reason. Self-editing is an important skill to master.

Idea #2: Know What You’re Talking About

In an earlier post, I mentioned putting the bullet points that you really want to talk about into the ‘Speaker Notes’ section of your presentation. Here’s the idea, a little more thoroughly fleshed out:

It has been studied extensively, and people can not read and listen at the same time. Therefore, putting bullet points on the screen and talking over them will result in less comprehension and retention. You should really shoot for far less text on every slide – instead choosing to communicate through other channels. If you want the audience to have your speaking points, don’t put them on the slide – instead put them in your speaker notes and provide a printed copy for your audience members – after the presentation.

Now, I find a lot of people hear this advice and still don’t heed it. When pressed, they can’t give a solid reason why they’re so attached to text on the screen. Here’s the real reason we all love text on the screen:

‘As you can see from the slide, ladies and gentlemen, our revenue rose by 32% because of three factors…’

We love to be able to turn and read the screen, to be reminded of our points.

Very few of us are paid, professional presenters. Most are professionals at other skills, like programming, or accounting, or fundraising. Presenting is a secondary, often terrifying, part of our job. We like the training wheels to stay on if at all possible. Break that habit, now. If your audience deserves a quality, engaging, persuasive presentation, do whatever is necessary to make that happens. It begins by practicing your presentation.

Idea #3: Be the Center of Attention.

It’s interesting what happens in many presentations – the presenter feels like stage dressing, like someone who’s being paid to lead us through a deck of slides. But nothing could be further from the truth. No person in that room came here today because they were going to be shown PowerPoint slides. They came into that room because you, the presenter, were going to communicate something important to them. Own that.

One of the easiest ways to be the center of attention is to, from time to time, cut off the presentation. It’s very simple. Either, on your keyboard, hit the ‘B’ key – for black screen – or actually schedule black screens by having blank slides in your presentation. If you have something important to say, make sure that your audience is paying attention to you – and not thinking about the third column in your chart.

For more presentation tips & tricks, try out our classes on PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, Presenting Data In PowerPoint, or Presentation Skills for the Professional.

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I my first post in this series, I tackled the basics of what the pen tool was, and how to use it. In part two, I’d like to discuss Adobe Illustrator’s complementary pen tools.

To see the tools I’m speaking of, click on the Pen Tool in Illustrator and hold the left mouse button down. You’ll see the Pen Tool, Add Anchor Point, Delete Anchor Point, and Convert Anchor Point. In addition to these tools, there is another complementary tool. The second tool on the toolbar is a white arrow named the Direct Selection Tool. This will also be used to help your work.

First, the Pen Tool is responsible for creating points and creating curves as you work. The problem is that many of us can’t see how many points we need, where we need them, and how the curve needs to bend as we work. That’s why these tools are helpful – if we don’t get what we need at first, we can use them to clean up the mess and realize our vision of the picture.

The Add Anchor Point Tool is simple enough – if, as you’re creating your graphic, you realize that you need a point somewhere you did not initially draw it, you can add the point later. This is very helpful because if you don’t have a point to work with, you can’t bend at that spot. See the example below for pointers.

The Delete Anchor Point Tool should be self-explanatory, but many people question the need for it. The reason you would remove anchor points is this: as you’re working, the more anchor points you have – the more potential you have for lines bending, stretching, and skewing. If you don’t need the power of a point in a given spot, you really don’t want an extra point sitting there. It makes your life more complicated. The animation below shows how removing an anchor point can resolve an issue.

Now we get to the fun tools. A common problem I’ve had to deal with over the years is my inability to get curves right the first time. The Convert Anchor Point Tool and Direct Selection Tool allow me to change a curve many times over, including creating curves that the Pen Tool by itself can’t create. Let’s start with the Convert Anchor Point Tool.

The Convert tool allows us to create a curve where there wasn’t one in the first place. In the example below, I actually create a straight line out, then back. Afterward, using the Convert Anchor Point Tool, I create a curve by clicking on one of the end points and pulling out; then clicking the other end point and pulling out.

The Direct Selection Tool allows me to click any point and do one of two things – either change an existing curve, or move the point altogether. Simply click on one of the extended poles coming from a point and drag it back and forth to see the change of the curve, or click directly on a point to shift that point. It is extremely valuable when you realize, for example, that a dog’s snout is far too long!

Finally, if you return to the Convert Anchor Point Tool – it also allows you to create a curve that is different on either side of the point. If you want a wave instead of an arc, that’s how you do it.

Stick Around

In the next installment of this tutorial, I’ll show how to use the Pen Tool to create some very interesting characters.

Until then, please feel free to check out our classes in Adobe Illustrator to give you more experience with these tools.

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Note: This is the first post from Productivity Guru Alex Mozes. Alex is the creator of our Microsoft Office Maximized classes, which help you get right to the most efficient way of doing things.

You probably use folders to organize your e-mail, right? You’ve got a folder for all the messages relating to that big project, and maybe a folder for all the messages from your boss, and maybe another 30 folders you used for once, for something, but now it just sits there mocking you. Folders are great, don’t get me wrong. They are a critical tool to let you get information out of your inbox and free up space for the onslaught of new and unread messages. Ideally folders give you a place to look for all the messages of a given category, like all the messages relating to Project XYZ, which in turn helps save scrolling and searching time. The problem is a typical folder structure has 2 inherent weaknesses, both of which can be solved with the use of a great Outlook tool: Search Folders.

First of all – with a typical folder, I need to move messages manually, often with a click and drag. With dozens of folders and subfolders, this action is a chronic loss of precious seconds, adding up to minutes and hours. A search folder is in essence a saved, constantly running search. It is a place I can go to see all the current results for a set of search criteria without having to manually run the search. This means if I have a regular folder for all the messages from my boss, to which I am manually dragging messages, a search folder would already have all those messages (with “boss” in the From line). No manual move required.

The second big obstacle to regular folders is the Organizer’s Paradox. I have to choose which folder should house a message (and remember it later!). Imagine you have one folder called “Project XYZ”, and another folder called “Invoices.” What do you do when you get an Invoice for Project XYZ? Whichever folder I put the message in, it will lose its association with the messages of the other folder. Now Invoices isn’t all invoices, nor is Project XYZ all of project XYZ. And what about the sent messages on Project invoices?! If you’re thinking “it’s ok, I’ll just make a copy or forward the message to myself” forget it. IT will come after you for your mailbox size, and if you were to reply or forward one of the messages, you wouldn’t see the indication of that action on the copy. The Organizer’s Paradox is a doozie.

Search Folders solve the paradox. They are not actual locations like a typical folder. Instead, they are like a magic window, showing all the messages that meet the specific criteria, but the messages still live in their respective location or folders. This means that if you have one search folder for messages that say “Project XYZ” in the subject or body (or for ’07 users has the Project XYZ category assigned) and another search folder for messages with the word “Invoice”, then that one message is visible in both locations! In fact, when a new message arrives in your inbox meeting the criteria of multiple search folders the single e-mail will be in the inbox AND all relevant search folders. It is not making a copy, just like the search results are not copies. If you delete it from the inbox or any of the search folders, it is deleted everywhere. If you reply, it shows the reply everywhere. The search folder is your answer to the Organizer’s paradox.

Next Monday, we’ll have a step-by-step instruction on creating your first Search Folder. For more information on this and other Outlook topics, try our Outlook, Outlook 2007, and Managing Your Everyday courses. Also, both Categories and Search Folders were referenced in an earlier blog post Five Outlook Tools You Should Be Using. I wasn’t kidding!

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When dealing with Outlook, there are a wide range of techniques to cut down on your wasted time and make you feel more effective. Today, we’ll explore three rules most people should be using.

First, a quick point: when I say rules, I actually mean that we’ll be using a section of Outlook labeled Rules and Alerts:

To get this in action, click Tools at the top of the screen, and roll down that menu until you find Rules & Alerts. Then, click the button for New Rule in the top-left corner of the dialog box. Finally, select the option Check messages when they arrive and click Next. Now, you’re ready to try the following:

Rule #1: Cut Through the Limitless Carbon Copies

If there’s one thing I’ve found to be consistent among Power Users of Outlook, it’s that we receive far too many CC’s on things that aren’t any of our concern. You spend most of your time wading through CC’s looking for emails that pertain to your life. So, why not filter out all those emails that have you in the CC line? By definition, someone simply decided that you ’should be copied’, not that you had to perform any action related to the email.

To eliminate everything but the emails you’re concerned with, first create a folder inside your Inbox called ‘Copied On’, or something of that nature. Then, on Step 1 of the Rule process (Select Condition(s)), click the checkbox ‘where my name is not in the To box’. This will identify everything that is only tangentially your concern. Continue by clicking Next at the bottom of the dialog box, and then select ‘move it to the specified folder’ on Step 2. Finally choose the specified folder you created (mine was called ‘Copied On’, if you remember), and finish the rule. Every email that is not directly addressed to you will be moved out of your inbox, and into a subfolder that you can check twice a day. You’ve eliminated 25-75% of your email checking per day!

Rule #2: Work With Categories

In an earlier post, I told you I was a big fan of Categories. To help you categorize more efficiently, identify something specific, like a client or group of team members, that needs to be categorized. For example, last month I was put onto a team with several other instructors to complete a 6-month project. It’s already obvious to me that this will entail almost unlimited emails back-and-forth, which I’ll have to go back and reference constantly. The problem is, I don’t want to run searches every week.

Here’s what I did: on Step One of the rules procedure, I identified two things. First, all the emails would be coming from one of 4 different email addresses. Secondly, we agreed that all our emails would contain a specific ‘project phrase’. So, I clicked the checkboxes for ‘From people or distribution list’ and ‘With specific words in the subject or body.’

I set the email addresses that the emails would come from, as well as the phrase, then I moved on to Step Two, where I clicked the checkbox ‘Assign it to the category category.’ I picked the category I wanted all my emails to have, and I was done. Now all I have to do is filter, search, or sort based off the category I picked, and all the emails between my coworkers come to the surface. I’ve saved myself time in searching and in categorizing all at the same time.

Rule #3: Handle Your Business While You’re on the Beach

Here’s a common problem among support staff, whether it be customer support or technical support. You’ve planned a wonderful week in Tahiti, but you’re still in the middle of two or three problem-solving situations. You talk it over with a coworker, and they agree to handle the cases while you’re getting a tan. However, the client is still emailing you directly for help. Here’s how you get them in touch with your coworker:

Step One: identify their email addresses, and add them to the rule. Step Two: Click the checkbox for ‘forward to email address.’ This has the wonderful ability to redirect those problem emails to someone who’s around to handle the situation. Select your coworker’s email in the Step Two part of the process, finish off your rule, and go enjoy some much-needed rest and relaxation.

Each of these rules stands a good chance at making your life easier – and isn’t that what it’s all about? These tools should be making our jobs the central focus, but more and more, the tools are becoming the central focus. Do you have tools that work especially well for you? I’d be interested to hear what others are particularly popular.

To see more about how Rules can benefit your work, as well as unveiling every other tool in Microsoft Outlook, check out our Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, and Managing Your Everyday courses. I think they’ll really work wonders!

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The Pen tool is a very important piece of several different design programs. It is probably most integral, though, to Adobe Illustrator. It’s also a complicated tool to master. This is the first in a multi-part series designed to break down the tool and make it more approachable.

Pen Tool Basics

The Pen tool is otherwise known as the Bezier curve tool. The Bezier curve was invented to draw smooth, curved car lines for the automotive industry, and now has been used for any curved drawing in digital format. The basic idea is that a computer would prefer the ’shortest path between two points’ – drawing a straight line – instead of an arc of some kind. What came about was a system of points with an added component – direction and velocity. With direction and velocity, a computer connects points the same way a car driving quickly would – long, sweeping curves.

To draw with the pen tool, not only click to draw a point, but also hold the mouse button down and drag. This will add the directional component to the points.

With this tool at your disposal, you can draw nearly anything you can imagine – you just need to know how to make it work for you.

Click and Drag – Where?

The idea of click-and-drag with the point is to give the line that ‘leaves’ that point a direction to go. If I click and drag up, like the image above, the line wants to leave the point going up. Then, when drawing the second point, dragging up means two things – the line ‘leaving’ the point goes up, but also, the line entering the point comes in from the bottom. That’s why the animation above has an S-curve. The line leaves the point at the left going up, and goes into the point at the right from the bottom. The line must bend in the middle to make that happen.

Basic Drawings: The S-Curve

To draw a basic S-curve, the line must leave the first point in a single direction, and enter the second point from the opposite angle. This necessitates the S-bend in the middle of the line.

Basic Drawings: The Horseshoe

Drawing a horseshoe, a single bend, can be done two different ways. Possibility #1 – create 2 points, and have the line that leaves both points go in opposite directions. Possibility #2 – create 3 points, and only bend the point in the middle.

Stick Around

In our next installation, I’m going to discuss how to make the pen tool a little more user-friendly. When I was starting to get the hang of things, using the complimentary tools to the pen really helped ease the transition.

To learn more about the Pen tool and Bezier curves, try out our classes in Adobe Flash, Illustrator, and Photoshop. You’ll see it in action until it becomes second nature!

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Everyone who changes from Office 2003 to Office 2007 has a learning curve. During the weeks and months after you transition, you’ll find yourself wondering: where is that tool I used to use all the time?

To help you through those moments, you may want to use Microsoft’s Command Reference Guides:

• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Outlook

Each of these is a direct translation of your old tools to your new tools. If you’d like an in-person walkthrough of how these work, try out our Office 2007 Tips and Tricks class. If you find that you want more detail, we have three-day courses in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and two-day courses in Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft PowerPoint. Also, there is a one-day course on Microsoft Visio

As a web designer, one of the biggest issues I have is finding the right typography for my sites. Using Cascading Style Sheets, we can plan out every facet of the type design on our sites, but you have to get a handle on each setting. That’s why CSS Typeset is one of my favorite sites.

This site is fairly one-dimensional, but it delivers on its dimension. As you can see, there are two panels on the screen. The one at left represents the ‘visual’ of your finished product. The panel at right is the code that creates that product. In most WYSIWYG web editing programs, you can pull sliders and enter values to change the formatting. Now, however, you have a real-time view as to the results.

When working with CSS, probably the biggest problem first-timers have is a desire to work ‘outside the box’ too often. While it is true that CSS permits a very wide range of formatting, the problem is that we are all constrained by what our users can support. That means that if you pick a weird font, and the viewer of your website doesn’t have it, the viewer won’t see it the way you drew it up.

The best recommendation I can give to the beginning CSS artist is – work within the simplest of solutions, but do it creatively. An example of this is that, while Arial and Verdana are the most widely-used fonts on the Internet, you can still keep them fresh. See the shot below:

By adding a slightly different value in ‘line-height’, ‘word-spacing’, and the like, you can get something that barely resembles the text of so many others’ websites. And you get it with only a .00001% chance that the user will see something different. That’s really important.

Oh, and of course the reason I love the site so much: I didn’t have to pull 1.5 em, 2.2pt letter-spacing out of thin air!

To further discuss web standards, best practices, and great websites, check out our 8-hour session call Web Design Theory and Best Practices. It’s worth your time, I promise.