Being Smarter

What I love about this job is that you can find new ways of working on an almost hourly basis. There are 000′s of tools out there to help make your life easier. The trick is to find the right ones and then educate your clients / colleagues to use them – once they are proven.

I work with a number of clients building courses for The 8.45 Club. This involves building a dozen videos or so for each course. As you can imagine – there is always the need for a snagging list – changes the client want and we want too after seeing the first draft. Of course, the standard approach is to bounce emails between each other. For 12 video snag lists – this quickly gets out of control. How about emailing a spreadsheet? Better – but still not great – changes easily get out of sync.

The solution is to share a spreadsheet so that you can both make changes at the same time. Great if you’re on the same office network. No one is these days…. So – using Google Docs – their collaborative spreadsheet is great – give a third party read / write access and off you go.

Even better – as their interface isn’t necesarily familiar to your client – point them in the direction of www.offisync.com – it’s a simple downloadable add-in to Microsoft Excel 2007. It adds a ribbon to the toolbar…

And then enables you and the client to open documents held within Google Docs using the familiarity and functionality of Excel…

Totally brilliant!

Always a favourite subject in the Being Smarter office – how to do stuff faster using keyboard shortcuts. It constantly amazes me that Microsoft doesn’t do a better job of publicising these really handy productivity tools – they can really speed up the browsing experience and don’t take up an awful lot of brain power to remember them!

Here’s some of my favourites for Internet Explorer 7 – there are many more out there – but these should get you going if you’re new to the shortcut game.

View Bookmarks – CTRL+B

Open a new browsing tab – CTRL+T

Scroll down a webpage – SPACE

Zoom in or out of a page – CTRL+ or CTRL-

Select next tab – CTRL+TAB

Delete auto-complete entry (previously visited addresses in the address bar) – SHIFT+DELETE

Open link in a new tab – CTRL+LEFT CLICK

Go back a page – BACKSPACE

Go full screen (remove the toolbars) – F11

Close the browser window – ALT+F4

Many of these shortcuts will work for Firefox too.

Business in a Box is still one of the best places to go for the best business letter samples and legal documents. If you’ve not heard of it, take a look at some of the dozens of documents that they offer – you can download the application and view all of the document for free.

They have put in some really clever protection software – as despite the fact that their application integrates beautifully into Word, they’ve disabled the copy / paste / drag functionality – so you have to buy the app to actually use any of the words.

(I wouldn’t recommend rekeying them either!)

Check out what they have to offer here…

Synchronising data is a perennial problem. Having the right files with you at the right time has been an issue for many years, however as home lives and business lives start to merge and technology has become more accessible and virtually free, there really is no excuse now for getting organised!

For me, the hard bit is not the technology – it’s about figuring out which data you need where and which data is important and timely. Get that right on a piece of paper first and you won’t go too far wrong.

I wanted to talk about Windows Live Mesh, which has just become available as a beta tech preview (whatever that means.) It was launched earlier in 2008 to a great fanfare essentially in competition to Google Apps (mentioned elsewhere on this site).

It’s still very much a work in progress, however with 5GB of free space available to everyone, it shouldn’t be ignored and overtime will almost certainly integrate into Windows Vista seamlessly, which will be where they will be able to steal a march over Google.

If you go to the Windows Live Mesh site, login with a Passport linked email address on a Windows Vista PC and go an explore.

Essentially, the easy to use interface allows you to upload files to folders (no drag and drop as yet) and stores those documents in the ‘Cloud.’ If you then login from another Windows Vista pc, this time perhaps at home and connect that PC, you will then be able to see and connect to those files.

If you install the Live Mesh software on each PC, the service is more seamless. Mesh or Cloud folders appear as normal Windows directory folders and so synchronisation is a breeze.

There is an automated posting system which tells users of your particular mesh what files / folders have been created which is a nice touch.

Go try it – it works.

For those of you not using Firefox (and you really should give it a try!)

Have you ever tried typing the domain name only (ie NO http://www or .com) into Internet Explorer and pressing CRTL-ENTER? Try it – it’s a real timesaver.

There are many resources online which discuss productivity. Google Trends show many of them on the rise at the moment, as everyone looks to get more things done, faster, quicker, smarter. Productivity monitoring – getting the most from your teams is a growing subject and there are many smart new ways of doing this.

There’s a great here reviewing a piece of software called RescueTime, which is the ultimate in productivity monitoring. Yes it’s Big Brother, however I use it on myself to show myself I not only work hard, but have effective days too. It’s free too which is cool.

You could try it on yourself before trying it on your teams too. I bet they would actually be really interested in making the most of their days if they really thought about it…

There are so many things which can cause your PC to slow physically slow down. Please note that this is quite different from you slowing down because your PC isn’t set up as effectively as it could be.

To cover both of these topics in detail would take some time and will be a video series in a few weeks time. However, in the meantime let’s look at some practical ways of how to speed up your PC. These all apply to Vista and XP.

Step 1) Clear all those unused and unneeded shortcuts and files you don’t need off your computer desktop. They should be filed away somewhere useful… subject for another post. There is school of thought that says PC’s perform better with fewer files on the desktop.

Step 2) For me the single biggest hog of resources and the thing which slows the PC down more than anything is having dozens of programs installed, which you never use. The best PC is a PC which has no software on it… Not very practical, but there we go.

To get rid of unwanted programs – trials etc – go to CONTROL PANEL>ADD REMOVE PROGRAMS and

Step 3) Stop any unneeded programs from starting up automatically and hogging memory and CPU cycles.

You can do this by going to START>RUN and typing “MSCONFIG”, which will bring up a dialogue box called System Configuration. Click the startup tab  and untick the programs which are starting up which clearly should not be… demos of trials etc…

To go the whole way with this, you could use a PC cleaning tool like CCleaner It is free and works a treat.

Step 4) Another biggie – Temporary Internet Files need to be removed – which could take up as much as 1GB of space on your hard drives.

To get rid of these files in IE7, goto TOOLS>INTERNET OPTIONS>BROWSING HISTORY DELETE> and then DELETE TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES.

Step 5) Once you’ve cleaned everything out above, make sure your PC is pugged in, pour yourself a nice glass of something one evening, and hit the defragmentation button and leave it running over night.

If that little lot doesn’t speed up your PC, then it’s time for a reinstall/new one*

*delete as applicable.

Yet again, the much under-rated Office Labs folks come up with another excellent innovation, which is a great time saver.

When you are charting in Excel – things can often get a little cumbersome finding the right type of graph for the data array that you are looking to demonstrate.

Chart advisor (only available for Excel 2007) is an Excel Plugin which interprets the data that you have selected and are looking to represent, and provides you with a recommendation of the best graph and settings based on its analysis. It then provides a selection of other options, each ranked, based on its analysis. Once you’ve chosen the one you want, you then have the option to customise it within the Chart Advisor plug-in.

You can download it here.

Check out the video demonstration below:

You’ll find a review of one of their very cool PowerPoint initiatives – PowerPoint of the future here.