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 [...]
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:
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
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.
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?
The Office 2007 Suite has improvements sprinkled throughout; one of my favorites is one that’s long overdue. For all the academics out there, I’d like to explore the Citation and Bibliography tools in Word 2007.
Whenever you’re a self-taught user of a program, certain tools slip through the cracks. I’d like to focus on five tools that you may have missed in Microsoft Outlook, and what interesting functionality they add.
There are some very powerful functions in Excel that few people ever use: the Database Functions.
There’s a metaphor for many things in life that’s derived from a nerdy concept in electrical engineering: your signal-to-noise ratio. Today, I’m going to apply the idea of increasing your ’signal’, or message and decreasing the ‘noise’, or everything else, to some office productivity ideas.
Here’s a talk Merlin Mann gave on the campus of Google back in 2007 about managing your time.
