As many know, when you bowl a strike you knock down all 10 pins with the bowling ball. When you bowl a strike in business, you are excelling in 10 key areas of a business. The 10 key areas that this post will focus on are:

Finance/Accounting: understanding and managing how you spend your business funds.
Marketing/Branding: managing how people see and understand your business’ products or services.
Communication: using different types of media to share the message of your business.
Partnering/Joint Venture: connecting with other business owner to cross-market your services or products.
Social Networking: interacting with potential and current clients along with business …read more

For the uninitiated, MS Excel is a pretty intimidating program. If it scares you, you probably settle for creating tables in Word. That solution has its uses, but sometimes, you will get more flexibility, control, and power via Excel. For those who are unfamiliar with it, here’s a brief introduction (more tips for advanced users below):

Are you organizing the office New Year’s party? Or how about the next client meeting? For the obsessive compulsive corporate slave, here’s a video instruction of how to make seating charts in Excel.

Apart from those, here are other useful …read more

 Gee I guess MSFT is feeling the heat from all the free office options out there:
Microsoft has released the new version of Microsoft Works as a free, ad supported office package that will compete directly with Open Office and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
The Works package offers word processing, spreadsheet and slide (powerpoint) functionality partially based on code from older versions of Microsoft Office. Source: Microsoft Offers Works For Free

So … you going to jump on that bandwagon?  I wouldn’t.  I’ve always hated MS Works.  It’s pretty stripped down and the spreadsheet didn’t play nice with XL (maybe that will be …read more

 Here’s a book that’s on my wish list now.  As much as I have a love-hate relationship with Excel, it’s also an app I know has far more potential to it.  I don’t think of myself as an expert, but watching folks struggle with it makes me wonder why all the power has been made so seemingly hard to tap into.  From Windows Fanatics:
So think of this book as a toolbox. When a need arises or a problem occurs, you can simply use the right tool for the job. Hacks are grouped into chapters so you can find what you …read more

Gili over on Connected Internet (one of my fav sites for new and opinion, btw) has picked the top 5 Web 2.0 apps for the enterprise. They are:

Salesforce.com
Zoho office
Basecamp
Wordpress
Google Apps

I haven’t tried Salesforce.com or Zoho yet (though I keep meaning to), they rest I have tried and I can recommend them without hesitation. I think, though, there are more apps that are worthy of the list.

A good online RSS reader with a sharing feature (Google Reader or Newsgator Online)
An easy wiki (Socialtext has come a long way since I first looked at it–and I actually like it!)

Interesting that …read more

 Diana Huggins who contributes to Lockgnome’s Windows Fanatics blog always seems to have those tips and how tos that people need.  Whether it’s watermarks in Word or new lines in Excel cells, Diana has posted them.
Sure, you might think they are simple, if you’ve already spent time trying to figure out how to do it through trial and error and Office help, but lots of people haven’t.
Instead of just posting every day her latest tip, just save us both some time and subscribe to the blog and get them via RSS.
 
Technorati tags: Windows tips, Vista tips, MS Office, MS Word, …read more

Ever need to make a line break within an Excel cell?  Sure, when you are typing a long description (like invoices).  The secret to doing it is alt-enter.  Yep, simple as that:
Quickie Excel tip: When you’re typing text into a cell, by default hitting Enter takes you to the next cell. However, to wrap your text in the current cell as you type? Hit up Alt-Enter.
Check out some more Excel keyboard shortcuts. Source: Excel Tip: Wrap text as you type with Alt-Enter – Lifehacker

Lifehacker is building a great list of shortcuts for Excel.  One of my favs is still …read more