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:

Image: www.SXC.hu

• 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 associate to build your online network.
• Online/offline presence management (reputation): tracking the information that is reported about you and your business. Ensuring that there is a positive message being communicated.
• Customer service: providing what your customer would need to feel comfortable with your services and/or products.
• Product/Service development: creating and management the products/services that your business is known for.
• Documenting processes: creating a standard way for handling business processes and managing the information through a document portal.
• Team building: encouraging the strengths of your team members so that they excel regardless if they are virtual or local.

As a business owner, focusing on these 10 key areas at all times may be difficult for you to do but I have found that surrounding yourself with a great support team can help you excel in each of these areas. Remember that you should apply yourself where you feel you are naturally strong and then outsource to a support team member or a business partner where you are weak.

Case in point, I love managing and developing web projects and bringing everything together in the final look for a website. My strong points are project management, programming, and functionality whereas my weak point is design (I can do this but my preference is to usually outsource complex projects). In outsourcing complex design projects, I not only free up my time but I am also able to redirect my efforts to the areas where I’m strong.

I want to hear what you have to say. Please feel free to share your own experience of excelling in each of these areas.

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 MS Excel video tips:

How to use MS Excel as a database

Additional excellent tips and tricks, including form creation

Cartesian coordinates and Venn diagrams in Excel

 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 different in v9).  Really if you’re dying for a free office suite … Yeah Google Docs & Spreadsheets coupled with OpenOffice is going to work for you just dandy.

 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 need quickly, including ways to:

• Reduce workbook and worksheet frustration: Manage how users interact with worksheets, find and highlight information, and deal with debris and corruption.
• Analyze and manage data: Extend and automate these features, moving beyond the limited tasks they were designed to perform.
• Hack names: Learn not only how to name cells and ranges, but also how to create names that adapt to the data in your spreadsheet.
• Get the most out of PivotTables: Avoid the problems that make them frustrating and learn how to extend them.
• Create customized charts: Tweak and combine Excel’s built-in charting capabilities.
• Hack formulas and functions: Subjects range from moving formulas around to dealing with datatype issues to improving recalculation time.
• Make the most of macros: Including ways to manage them and use them to extend other features.
• Use the enhanced capabilities of Microsoft Office 2007 to combine Excel with Word, Access, and Outlook.

 Source: Excel Hacks, Second Edition ~ Windows Fanatics

Being able to do powerful sorts and formatting tricks can make a huge difference.  And as much as I really like Office 2007, I’m still saying “where the heck is…” sometimes.  Maybe I don’t need Excel Hacks as much as Office 2007 Ribbon for Dummies.

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:

1. Salesforce.com
2. Zoho office
3. Basecamp
4. Wordpress
5. 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 Intranets.com isn’t on the list. Heck I haven’t heard from them in years. Are they still out there?

The great thing about a lot of the good Web 2.0 apps (wikis, blogs, etc) can be installed on your own servers. So in a couple minutes you can have a Wordpress blog (or blogs in the Multiuser version), Socialtext powered-wiki (because they released it to the open source community) and a raft of other tools.

If you’re running your own small business and use a host like Dreamhost, check for one-click or Fantastico installs. Dreamhost in particular has a great selection of tools to try out.

Disclaimer: I use Dreamhost for One By One Media, but I’m not receiving affiliate commissions or compensation for mentioning them–I just like them.

Really you’re probably only an hour away from a fully-featured virtual office. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.

Any suggestions to the list?

Update: I’ve given Zoho a try and while I think the apps are cool, they are missing something like a dashboard where I can go to jump from one app to another.  Right now the project and CRM apps aren’t really integrated into the mix either.  That’s the biggest gap that I see.

Tags: GTD, RSS readers, Web 2.0, Wordpress, wikis, Socialtext, Zoho office, Google Apps, Basecamp, online tools

 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.

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 the ctrl arrow key.  It jumps to the next filled cell.  If you combine that with shift, you get an ultra-powerful way to select a ton of data with one click.