As children, we were taught to share and were even graded on it in some preschools or kindergarten classes. As adults, many of us will work on projects with a team, or at least solicit an opinion on work we do.

Although having many minds working on a project usually yields a much better product, one person is often left with the onerous task of pulling it all together.

Although having many minds working on a project usually yields a much better product, one person is often left with the onerous task of pulling it all together. Whether you are a contributor or an organizer, these tips will help you understand how software can help you collaborate.

Using Track Changes for Collaboration (Word 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007)

By David McQueary

Collaborating on a document can often become confusing and frustrating if it is not clear which changes have been made and by whom. Even worse, when you overwrite text in a document without indicating you have made a change, the original text is not recoverable.

Using Word’s Track Changes feature can eliminate these frustrations.

When Track Changes is enabled, Word assigns a different color to each of the individual editors of a document to show which editor made which changes. When text is deleted, it is not completely removed from the document; instead, a strikethrough effect is applied to show that the text was deleted. Editors can also use the Comments feature to type questions, answers, or general messages to other people working with the document.

Word 2007:

1. Click the Review tab.

2. Click the Track Changes button in the tracking section and choose Track Changes.

Word 2002 and 2003:

1. Click the Tools menu and choose Track Changes.

Word 2000:

1. Click the Tools menu, select Track Changes, and choose Highlight Changes.

2. Check “Track changes while editing.”

3. Verify “Highlight changes on screen” and “Highlight changes in printed document” are checked; if not, check them.

4. Click OK.

You can also enable the feature in all versions by using the key combination Ctrl+Shift+E. Read more…

admin How To Help Desk, Microsoft Word, Office 2007, software support, track changes

Way back in April 2009, I posted a piece on CIO.com titled “Office 2007 Doesn’t Really Suck; It’s Just Misunderstood.” Little did I know it would create such a fuss.

Over the past 11 months, the piece has received a smattering of comments, many of which are tinged with vitriol. Office 2007 doesn’t just suck, according to CIO’s readers; it’s reviled, despised, detested, loathed.

Taking a stand by sticking with an earlier version of Office is hardly a political move.

Here’s a sampling of the comments:

“I’m a longtime Office user (since its inception). Office 2007 is an abomination and shows just how out of touch those developers are with real world use and workflow.”

“Thought my suckage meter was just already broken or something, it being beyond the warranty period, but as the 10 or so days went by from having installed this step backwards in software development, and having not latched onto what I had assumed was some kind of groundbreaking innovation in GUI, I started to suspect that Microsoft’s product itself had gone beyond the limits of my suckage meter and broken it… and everyone here has affirmed that.” Read more…

admin Office 2007, Rants AT&T, CIO.com, FORTRAN, Help Desk, Icelandic, Office 2007, software support, Swahili

The Dutch, who know a thing or two about frugality, have a saying, “Goedkoop is duurkoop.” The English translation: “Buying cheap is buying expensive.” And nowhere is that adage more fitting than in outsourcing.

University of Tennessee researcher Kate Vitasek offers an in-depth look at how shortsighted cost-cutting and nine other behaviors can hurt companies in her new book, “Vested Outsourcing,” which was published earlier this month by Palgrave Macmillan.

For her study, Vitasek looked at outsourcing deals and identified the most common mistakes companies make when contracting. Among them: Micromanaging, lack of formal governance, metrics obsession, and, of course, cost-cutting as a quick-fix measure.

Cost-cutting, Vitasek writes, is the easiest to identify. Companies desperate to trim the bottom line take the cheapest offer. The result is a tradeoff in quality, service or both.

For more about the study, visit Vitasek’s blog, which features a wealth of articles. It makes for great snow day reading. And for previous posts published on this blog about the subject, see the following: Wasting Money is Bad for the Bottom Line, When Mistakes add up to Millions, and The Real Cost of Offshore Outsourcing.♦

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

admin Outsourcing, This Week in Tech News CIO, goedkoop is duurkoop, Help Desk, Kate Vitasek, Outsourcing, the Dutch

Poka-yoke – I never had heard the word before, but I was delighted to discover it two weeks ago in a Harvard Business Review article written by Michael Schrage.

Poka-yoke is Japanese for “mistake-proofing.” Think of the “In Case of Fire Break Glass” boxes found in office buildings. Because they include a wee stick with which to break said glass, they would qualify as poka-yoke.

Best of all, your employees will experience minimal downtime and very little lost productivity.

In business, Schrage explains, poka-yoke is the “simplest, cheapest, and surest way to eliminate foreseeable process errors.” He urges managers to perform a poka-yoke audit of their own department.

“What are the persistently simple — and simply persistent — dumb mistakes we make that our technologies can help us catch and destroy?” he asks.

Here’s where I believe IT managers should start: the help desk.

Say your company is planning an Office 2007 migration, and you, as CIO, have decided that because of the current economic climate, assistance isn’t needed. After all, your reliance on internal help desk staff during previous Office upgrades didn’t turn out disastrously. Read more…

admin Office 2007 Migration Assurance Program, ROI CIO, Harvard Business Review, Help Desk, Japan, Michael Schrage, Outsourcing, poka-yoke, software support

Perhaps this scenario describes your desktop software situation: Half of your end users use Office 2007, and the rest are still running Office 2003. All you’ve heard from the former are “Where’s the file menu?” and “How do I save a document?” From the latter, you’ve likely listened to endless grumbling about their frustration with Office 2003-incompatible files created by colleagues.

Third in a four-part Office 2007 migration series.

It needs to be said: Finish what you started.

In part one of this series, I highlighted the reasons an estimated 50 percent of enterprise-sized IT departments are running mixed Microsoft Office end-user environments. Part two offered information on how to complete the migration with minimal downtime. This post lays out a project timeline and readiness checklist.

You want successful transition to Office 2007 and early ROI. In order to meet those goals, you need to keep your employees informed and trained before, during and after deployment. With a plan in place, you will minimize or eliminate dips in productivity and give your workers confidence to use the tools they rely on every day. This is what you should expect from a migration partner: Read more…

admin Finish What You Started, Office 2007 Migration Assurance Program Help Desk, learning curve, Office 2003, Office 2007, recession, shadow support, the Ribbon, Training

Perhaps this scenario describes your desktop software situation: Half of your end users use Office 2007, and the rest are still running Office 2003. All you’ve heard from the former are “Where’s the file menu?” and “How do I save a document?” From the latter, you’ve likely listened to endless grumbling about their frustration with Office 2003-incompatible files created by colleagues.

Second in a four-part Office 2007 migration series.

It needs to be said: Finish what you started.

In part one of this series, I highlighted the reasons an estimated 50 percent of enterprise-sized IT infrastructures are running mixed Microsoft Office end-user environments. This post offers information on how to complete the migration while minimizing downtime and frustration.

Most IT leaders realize that an Office 2007 deployment requires coordination, planning and oversight. As a result, many bring in a third party for migration assistance.

The support options and partnerships are abundant, including training companies, consulting firms, domestic and offshore outsourcers, and certified Microsoft Office 2007 migration launch partners. Read more…

admin Finish What You Started, Office 2007 Migration Assurance Program Help Desk, learning curve, Office 2003, Office 2007, shadow support, the Ribbon

I can never get enough of articles like this one about the state of tech support and published recently on CIO.com. It’s easy to write about help desk horror stories – we’ve all had a few – but it requires a bit more insight to see things from every side, which writer Bill Snyder does quite effectively.

They are conditioned to expect terrible service from their IT department. That’s truly sad.

And although his anecdote is about the business-to-consumer market, it could just as easily be used to illustrate the state of customer service within companies.

This company, PC Helps Support, is an outsourced software support provider, so we’re chin-deep in issues surrounding customer service on a regular basis. When a firm partners with us, our consultants become part of their help desk.

One of the most surprising — and troubling — things I have seen in my time here is how taken aback callers are when a real person (one of our consultants) answers the phone and doesn’t put them on hold. And when we solve an issue within one call, it blows them away.

They are conditioned to expect terrible service from their IT department. That’s truly sad.

One point in Snyder’s piece that resonated with me was about lingo. Indeed, the lingo needs to go. I wrote a few blog posts on this subject, and in one in particular, I noted how the recession has made IT/business alignment that much more important — alienating the rest of your company by speaking in terms no one but programmers can comprehend is not alignment. Understanding how technical tools and practices relate to the business as a whole, now that is.

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

admin Customer Service Customer Service, Help Desk, lingo

Steve Strawitz: Classical violinist and jazz guitarist by night, civil engineer and geologist by schooling, and PC Helps tech support consultant the rest of the time.

When he was a first-grader, PC Helps consultant Steve Strawitz learned to play violin. He was from a musical family – his father was a violinist; his sister, a pianist – so it was expected of him.

"If I am feeling lousy, music is my medicine," says Strawitz, a PC Helps consultant by day and musician by night.

When he hit his teens, however, he decided to switch to something a little more current, a bit louder: the electric guitar, purely because it could be amplified.

Strawitz knows a bit about the contemporary and the classic. He is a PC Helps old-timer, who has been working here since the early days (1995), when e-mail was fancy and remote desktop support was a fantasy.

Back then, consultants had to rely on imagination and expert listening skills to help them figure out what was going on with a caller’s computer. Receiving files to be worked on wasn’t a matter of attaching them to an e-mail; it required the postal service and a few days of waiting. The core skill was improvisation, and it still is today.

When Strawitz talks about music, you cannot slow him down. His tastes range from Rufus and Chaka to Clapton and Hendrix. And then there’s Bach. His eyes light up when he discusses the composer’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin – “some of the greatest music on the planet,” Strawitz says. Read more…

admin Consultant Spotlight Bach, Eric Clapton, Help Desk, jazz, Jazz Planet, Jimi Hendrix, Rufus & Chaka, software support, the Philadelphia Orchestra

Sometimes it’s hard to explain in just a few words what this company does. Of course we help people with their PCs — that’s how the company got its start in 1992. But over the past 18 years, we have expanded our offerings. We help with Macs, mobile devices, Tier 1 help desk, migrations, and much more.

“The Ribbon” almost became a profanity in 2009. It’s central to the Office redesign, and it has rendered even seasoned Office users lost and confused.

Are we “efficiency experts”? We think so. Are we “leisure enablers”? Yes, we are. Are we “ROI generators”? Precisely.

Here’s a breakdown:

1. Mobile Device Support

I, personally, cannot imagine a world without on-the-go access to e-mail, documents, maps and every other feature my mobile device affords me. And, I suspect, most corporate workers would agree.

And smart phones will only become more central to how we work. According to a 2009 study, mobile use for business will double from 2008 to 2011 and the variety of devices being used will increase. Problem is, IT departments will continue to be ill-equipped to handle the support needs. Read more…

admin Customer Service BlackBerry, Customer Service, Help Desk, iPhone, mobile device, Office 2007, Outsourcing, smart phone, Windows Mobile

I’m an obsessive list maker. I’ve tried every list app for the Droid in an effort to become more list-efficient, but so far nothing has worked better than using a pen and scraps of paper. I am so dedicated that when I create a new list, I make sure to transfer incomplete tasks.

How many times have you avoided a problem or simply “made do” because the thought of calling the help desk was just too painful?

Unfinished business renders me uneasy, and one lingering task in particular – calling my VoIP service provider – has been giving me heartburn lately.

I do not want to call because I know I will spend too much time getting nowhere. And I’m speaking from experience.

A few weeks back, I called the company to set up the service. It was a Saturday morning, and I had about an hour to kill before I was set to begin making pumpkin pancakes for guests. Plenty of time to fit in a call. Or so I thought. Read more…

admin Customer Service, Rants Customer Service, Help Desk, language barrier, pancakes, software support, VoIP