Recently I’ve had a few people ask my “favorite” this and my “favorite” that and it got me thinking. I have a few random favorites that would be fun to share! Excel Function – VLOOKUP I can’t tell you how many times I have been confronted with needing data in one spreadsheet to have a field or 6 from another. And they are never 10 records – always several thousand. That’s where VLOOKUP comes in. You tell it to match a field from one sheet to another, and when it finds a match, bring over additional data. AWESOME! So how do you use it? Here’s an example: A client exported a list of customers from their contact management system, added a bunch of information and then realized they forgot the company name. Email is a unique identifier so we were able to run a VLOOKUP […] Continue reading
Are You a Digital Hoarder?
Clearly hoarding is something looked at as an anomaly since there are entire shows about it. But what about being a digital hoarder? Â This week I’ve spent a large number of hours taming one client’s email. Â It went back as far as 2004. Â His Inbox alone was 28,322 emails. Â That didn’t include subfolders, sent items, deleted items (that was 3,270 alone!) and drafts. Â His feeling was if he kept it, he would always have it if he needed it. I beg to differ. Outlook as a piece of software was never designed to handle that kind of volume. In fact, it was really only made to handle about 2GB worth of email. Â And for the average person, that’s all they can handle as well. We all get email every day that we will never need again – and probably didn’t need today. Â So rather than […] Continue reading
The Importance of Managing Outlook
So I’ve spent the bulk of the last week fixing Outlook for people. It isn’t that Outlook has a lot of problems, but most people don’t invest the time necessary to properly maintain it. First and foremost Outlook has a storage limit of 2 GB. With most emails being around 14 kb, it takes a long time to get to 2 gb. But, when you do, it takes a long time to fix! Instead, make it part of your daily management and you won’t have problems later. 1. Shift+Delete is your friend. Shift+Delete actually deletes the item from Outlook rather than moving it to your recycling bin. For all those spam messages, jokes, and read newsletters, this is a great way to keep your Deleted Items to a manageable level. 2. Archive projects – Filing emails in folders will keep you organized. When you conclude […] Continue reading