January 2009 - Posts

• Choosing Between Friends: Removing People From a List

  It’s getting closer to my birthday.  I need to make an invitation list and email all the people on that list nice and early so they have enough time to get me a nice present.  I usually don’t want to tell people about my birthday too late or else I’ll just get stuck with DVDs and T-shirts. So I’m going through my Maximizer Address Book at home and I ask, what’s the easiest way for me to create a list of friends?  That’s easy... do a search for all my friends!  When I first started my address book, I added a category item called friends and flagged all my friends with it.  So I do an All Fields search where category equals friends and I get a list of all my friends. Upon careful inspection of the list, I noticed I’ve neglected updating my Address Book over the years.  So I have friends on there that I have lost touch with, people I would consider more of an acquaintance than a friend and people I don’t want to see at all (i.e. ex-girlfriends). So how do I get rid of just a select few people off my list?  Well, one way is to update my list and redo the search.  But other than the ex-girlfriends, I still consider some of these people friends and I don’t want to create a whole new classification for these friends.  But, as a good business practice, you should definitely go through your Address Book list from time to time and update your user-defined fields! Here’s how it’s done!    1. selected the people I no longer wanted on my list.    2. Go to edit > invert selection.  This unselects the people I selected in the first step and also selects everybody else.    3. Go to edit > make selected list current. This removes anybody who is not selected (the ex-girl friends especially)! I guess what I could have done from here is to create a Favourite List with all my good friends, but that’s another discussion for another day. Posted Jan 30 2009, 11:47 AM by wleung with no comments

• Making the tough choice: one, not both.

  Doing a search only gives you 2 options: must match all or must match one or more.  How about one but not another? This can get tricky because when originally selecting the fields to search for, you can only select a field once. Here is the trick Step 1: After configuring the first part of the search, click the add fields button again. Step 2: Select the same field but this time, select the opposite value(s).  Step 3: When you get back to the search screen, select the field in step 2 and select the not equal option Step 4: Select must match all in the Search Condition area. This will search for one, but not the other. Here’s an example: You want to search the Escona database for companies who deal in White wines only.  I made a UDF called “Type of Wine”.  I assigned both Red and White wine to ABC Wine Shop.  I assigned White to Wines Are Us. So we want to retrieve all companies who deal only in White wine.  So a successful search would bring back only Wines Are Us. So go to search> all fields.  Find the Type of Wine user-defined field and select white.  Hit ok.  You should get this following screen:   Then, hit the Add button again and find the Type of Wine user-defined field again.  This time, select red.  Hit OK. When you get back to the Search By All Fields dialog, highlight the Type of Wine = Red line and then press the “not equal” button. Also, make sure that “Must match all” is selected.  That way, it will look for both Type of Wine equal to White and Type of Wine not equal to Red. So the end search should look something like this (sans the red highlights) Posted Jan 22 2009, 11:29 AM by wleung with no comments