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

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

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

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

If there’s one idea that characterized 2009, it is “doing more with less.” If I had access to LexisNexis, I’d tell you just how many times it’s been used in print, but, alas, I don’t. Let’s go with it anyway.

The recession has forced managers and the C-suite to scrutinize budgets, choose which projects to embrace and which to scrap, and decide how many employees to sack. It has left a bad taste in many mouths.

“Doing more with less”: trimming the fat; getting back to basics; losing the bells and whistles; re-featuring; making tolerable tradeoffs; dialing down; innovating; repurposing.

Here are some variations of “doing more with less”: trimming the fat; getting back to basics; losing the bells and whistles; re-featuring; making tolerable tradeoffs; dialing down; innovating; repurposing.

Usually, I consider buzzwords and catchphrases as an affront, or a ruse to get me to think I matter as a worker. Then I remembered a column I read on Washingtonpost.com earlier in the year, “Eating Down the Fridge,” written by Kim O’Donnel, who happens to be a good friend of a good friend.

The column is O’Donnel’s challenge to her readers to skip trips to the grocery store for a week, and instead use what’s already in the fridge and pantry. It’s an experiment in doing more with less. (O’Donnel’s effort was inspired by fellow foodie Steven Shaw, co-founder of the web site eGullet.org, who endured his own no-shopping-for-a-week challenge.)

After re-reading it, the idea of getting back to basics in business offends me less, and almost seems noble. Read more…

admin Year in Review doing more with less, eGullet.org, Kim O'Donnel, kohlrabi, Outsourcing, recession, shallots, software support, Steven Shaw, trueslant.com, Washingtonpost.com

In a recent post, blogger Seth Godin throws out an interesting statistic: If you ask 100 people to do something, expect two of them to get it wrong.

Make it OK to not know something — allow your employees to get their work done with minimal downtime and frustration.

According to Godin, managers have two choices in dealing with this errant 2 percent:

“Design systems that have the good sense and gracefulness to permit the 2% to proceed; or annoy, demonize or lose these people.”

Unfortunately, most companies today opt for the latter. In a recession, quality desktop application support usually is the first to go when budgets are cut. It’s hard to quantify its return on investment, and the demand for such support is often hidden.

Companies annoy, demonize or lose employees by making them figure out software problems on their own, but hold them accountable if their workarounds fail. Figuring it out on their own can mean fruitlessly scouring Microsoft help files for solutions, asking for assistance from colleagues who know a little more about software, finding flawed workarounds, or doing nothing at all. That’s the hidden demand, and it wastes heaps of time and money. It also creates frustrated employees.

A smarter solution is to acknowledge that the 2 percent is inevitable and take steps to minimize the effect. Offer software support and training; make it OK to not know something; allow your employees to get their work done with minimal downtime and frustration.

Read Godin’s blog here.

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

admin Rants Seth Godin, software support, Training

We see it all the time. Customers call for help after they’ve wrestled with a software snag for an hour or sometimes more. They preface the call with “I should know how to do this” and “sorry for the stupid question.”

The reports and surveys tell a compelling story. Actual customer feedback is even more powerful.

They are usually exasperated, and often embarrassed. Who wants to admit lack of knowledge, especially if they believe their job is on the line?

The employers themselves, the ones chanting “do more with less, do more with less” at every all-hands and in every company-wide e-memo, are partially to blame. If a corporation doesn’t offer software support, workers must find their own solutions — which usually cost dearly in downtime and lost productivity. If a company does offer how-to support, it’s considered a luxury and its use may be frowned upon. (This recent Dilbert cartoon, sent to me by a colleague, captures it precisely.)

In sour financial times, desktop application support usually is the first to go when budgets are cut. It’s hard to tally its return on investment, and the demand for such support is often hidden.

But the need is there, and even more so now when many companies are operating with fewer employees and the same workload. (See a post I wrote in October titled “Basic Training: Why Workers Need Software Support.”) Read more…

admin Worker Productivity Access, Dilbert, downtime, How To, software support

The beauty of Excel is its simplicity: If you enter your data correctly, it works. However, it can be ugly, especially when it returns a mess of formula errors, which sometimes are as understandable as Sanskrit.

We have gathered some tips that will help you root out the potential problems in formulas. If you can identify the issue quickly, then we’ve done our job. As for helping you fix it, that’s for another post.

A circular reference sends Excel into an endless loop where it will never stop calculating the cell. Excel goes around and around, never stopping to give us a final number…

1. Formula Evaluation Tool (Excel 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007)

by David McQueary

If you’ve ever created a formula, you no doubt have come across a dreaded #N/A, #DIV/0 or other type of error. This can be frustrating, especially if the formula you entered is long and complex. Sometimes it is not easy to see what is causing the malfunction, and trying to read through the formula to spot the offender is not always a fruitful effort. Excel offers a Formula Evaluation tool, which assesses a formula step by step, showing each calculation and enabling you to view exactly where the error occurs. Here’s how:

Excel 2000, 2002, 2003:

1. Click Tools and move your mouse over Formula Auditing. Read more…

admin Excel, How To circular reference, formulas, software support, Worker Productivity

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the best way to keep your top executives is to make it easier for them to leave.

When the economy rebounds, if your employees aren’t happy, they will leave.

That’s right — offer them challenges, enhance their skills, expand their networks.

Perhaps that would have made perfect sense 30 years ago, when taking a job often meant staying with a company for the duration of your career. But today, when job-hopping is standard and one-company careers are a relic, grooming employees just doesn’t seem prudent.

But it is, and even more so in an economic recession. (When the economy rebounds, if your employees aren’t happy, they will leave.) Consider the article’s points, and apply them to employees at any career stage, from entry-level to C-suite. Read more…

admin Rants, Training recession, software support, Wall Street Journal