Matt LeBlanc (not the actor) lines up his toiletries in the order in which he uses them. I’d say he takes “doing more with less” a little to the extreme, but that’s his job as an efficiency expert.

The whole point of upgrading to Office 2007 is to utilize new or improved features.

LeBlanc was the subject of a piece last week on NPR’s Planet Money program, and his profession is a particularly timely subject in the current economic climate where “more with less” is the mantra and efficiency and productivity are the only goals. (Listen to reporter David Kestenbaum’s interview with LeBlanc.)

LeBlanc works for a global shipping company, and his role is to find ways to streamline processes. He is sent to different locations and told, for example, to save the company $500,000.

As he explained in his interview with NPR’s David Kestenbaum: When he tells people that he can save thousands of labor hours just by moving a printer, they don’t believe him.

This company, PC Helps Support, is also in the efficiency business. (We’re a desktop application and mobile device support provider.) But instead of demonstrating how moving a printer can save money, we show how eliminating shadow support and increasing productivity can influence their bottom line. Read more…

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Gartner, Forrester and other industry heavies say the most important thing to CIOs right now is efficiency. Doing more with less, doing more with the same — just doing more. They’re not thinking too deeply about the cloud or any non-critical projects. Just efficiency, plain and simple.

When scaled across an entire company, misprinted print jobs cost a corporation dearly.

Sure, big picture savings are great. But the best way to approach recession survival is by starting small. Although an extra printout or two may seem minuscule, when scaled across an entire company, misprinted print jobs cost a corporation dearly.

In the spirit of frugality, here are two PC Helps tips published by IT World that promise printing efficiency.

1. How to Master Excel Spreadsheet Printing
2. How to Create a New Print Style in Outlook

Enjoy, and print responsibly. Got any efficiency tips? Send them our way.

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

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The Wall Street Journal never fails to address topics that seem obscure but are awfully relevant to current affairs. This time the paper turns its attention to the growing battle over keyboard layout due to the proliferation of full-keyboard smart phones.

It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly.

It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly. That is, as ugly as a keyboard layout melee can get.

A little background: The first typewriter’s keyboard was arranged in alphabetical order, which proved to be poor design when two keys near each other were pressed in succession. The keys would jam. So inventor Christopher Sholes shuffled the letters around, placing the most commonly used keys away from each other. Thus, the QWERTY keyboard was born.

But there’s another keyboard layout, the Dvorak, which is not widely used. The Dvorak has been around since the 1930s, when an efficiency-minded inventor named August Dvorak placed the most commonly used letters, like vowels, on the “home row” (on a QWERTY, the home row starts with ASDF… and ends at single and double quotes). Read more…

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Efficiency. It’s the unofficial buzzword of 2009. It may summon fear in corporate workers; after all, it’s often heard as justification for layoffs. But that unassuming little noun can also motivate your employees, and maybe even give them renewed interest in your company. It depends on how you package it.

In a recent post on TechRepublic, Calvin Sun offers 10 tips on the subject. Here are three that warrant elaboration:

Less Imaginary Widgets, More Genuine Examples

If one of your employees is fumbling with the Access sample database “Northwind,” it’s no wonder. Read more…

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