February 2009 - Posts

• Speeding Up Snail-Mail by a Few Seconds

  I don’t write letters much anymore.  Email has replaced snail-mail in my mind. But sometimes, on the occasional time where I have to write a letter or make something look professional, I want to insert the name and address of the person I’m contacting at the top of the letter. So I would say that three quarters of my time is spent actually writing the letter and the other quarter of the time is used hunting for the right merge field to insert into the header. But recently, I found the “name_and_address” merge field. It’s always been there, it just never occurred to me to use it. So rather than inserting all of the individual merge fields into your document, you just need to insert the one name_and_address merge field. You can change the format of the name_and_address merge field by going to file>preferences and selecting the format tab. In the Address format area is where you will need do some leg work and select all of the important fields that you want to include in the name_and_address merge field.  This is also happens to be the same place where you would format your the addresses on any labels you want to print. This little “trick” will save you a few seconds here and there. It may not seem like much, but a few seconds here and there adds up to a few minutes here and there. And those minutes turn into hours. And those hours turn into days... you get my point. Posted Feb 26 2009, 04:52 PM by wleung with no comments

• Adding the Same Note to Multiple Entries at the Same Time

  There will be times where you want to add a note to a couple of different entries at the same time.  A good example of this is if you know of a few people or companies that owe you money, or if you have a couple of opportunities where the competitors are the same. You can leave a note under each entry saying “These guys owe money” or “Beware: ABC company is the competitor and is throwing money at them”. And yes, there is a better way other than copying and pasting your way through your address book. Select all of the entries that you want to add a note to. These entries can be Address Book entries, opportunities, or customer service cases. Go to Edit>Global Edit. Go to the Note tab. Enter the note. You can set the category and security rights as well, which can be useful. Hit OK when you are done. This will place the note you entered into all the entries that you’ve selected. Caution! There is an option to global remove for User-defined fields, but not for notes. So if you do insert notes for multiple companies by accident, you will have to delete all of the notes manually! Posted Feb 20 2009, 10:56 AM by wleung with no comments

• Feeding your Excel Addiction: Exporting to Excel

  Back when I was doing tech support for Maximizer, I remember talking to countless people who didn’t know that much about Maximizer (and computers in general).  Sometimes, I found that the easiest way to get people thinking about Maximizer stuff was to relate it to Excel. Will: “Click on the Address Book Window.” Customer: “Which window?” Will: “The Address Book Window. The one with all your information on it” Customer: “I don’t see it.” Will: “The Address Book Window.  The one that kinda looks like an excel spreadsheet.” Customer: “Oh!  I found it!” I find that people have a strange love affair with Excel. Maybe it’s become engrained in people’s mind that anything that is organized in any sort of a grid or table is like Excel.  It’s just like how people call all sorts of chicken balls, “McNuggets”, or flying discs, “Frisbees”. People use Excel for anything and everything. Traditionally, Excel is supposed to be used as spreadsheet software that makes it easy for you to add and graph things, although I’ve seen many people use it for things that it probably has no business being used for. Maximizer makes it easy throw the list contained in any controlling window into an Excel spreadsheet.  With this information in an Excel spreadsheet, you can generate pivot tables, graphs, or anything else that you want. Create a column view with all of the information that you want to put into your spread sheet. Do a search for whatever you want to export.  You can also do an all entries or a very broad search and individually select individual items you want to export. If you don’t select anything, then it will just export whatever is on the screen. Click the Export to excel button (). Yes, it is that easy. Posted Feb 12 2009, 11:46 AM by wleung with 3 comment(s)