For many, the end of 2003 could not have come soon enough. Though a modest improvement over the previous year, last year was nonetheless a tough one in business terms. With Christmas now behind us, the months ahead carry promise of new opportunities and potential. However, before you get stuck in, take a moment to consider how you may best equip your business and yourself for a fast New Year take off.
No doubt most of your computing needs are well catered for by the Microsoft Windows package of your choice, ably supported by one flavour of Office or another. Nevertheless, this is a good time of year to see if some small-scale expenditures may improve productivity over the coming months.
Try as hard as I have, there isn’t anything to beat Microsoft Office for being able to do your spreadsheeting, word massaging and slideware creations, and Star Office ain’t yet made the grade. While for the productivity stuff that you really buy the Microsoft package for is top stuff, I am less convinced that the latest edition, Office 2003 Professional, brings any new must-haves to the table.
You don’t have to use all of Microsoft Office to get your money’s worth, do you? I still swear by Eudora for my e-mail (www.eudora.com), especially since it has nowhere near the target appeal of Outlook for virus vandals and very inexpensive it is, too. Also, Eudora can be enhanced with one of the best spam blockers around: Spamnix (www.spamnix.com). Eudora is available as an advert-supported freebie or bought for less than a night on the town. It’s available in both Mac and PC flavours.
However, one job that chronically gripes me is keeping my address book up to date. I don’t use Outlook because I am a Palm user and the Palm Desktop does just fine for me. Friends use ACT (www.act.com) with their Palms and swear by it more than they swear at it.
Sadly, a neat Web/organiser utility, Infuzer (www.infuzer.com) no longer works with ACT, but still can give Palm Desktop and Outlook users amazing international calendar notations and automatic weather briefs for globe trotters – truly useful stuff for website marketers as well as punters like thee and me. The nick name ‘calendar commerce‘ is a good one.
I generally eschew Outlook because it’s a red rag to every coding misfit on the planet. I prefer to have my data elsewhere when the latest batch of malware slides down my wire. You’ll know by now, constant reader, I believe that a life with as little Microsoft software in it as possible offers a more pleasant life.
However, I discovered a little Web-based contact database application that does more than my trusty Palm Desktop, namely Plaxo (www.plaxo.com). Like every other address book on the planet, it does a fine job of keeping things in alphabetical order and allowing you to sort your names and numbers into orderly heaps to facilitate searching. Moreover, Plaxo does just a bit more: it keeps itself up-to-date without a bit of work on your part, thanks to the miracle that is the Internet.
Plaxo automatically mails your buddies, colleagues and deadbeat relatives and asks them to update their info if anything has changed. In these fast moving times, Plaxo saves you – and them – a fair amount of work, keeping the communication lines open.
I was extremely sceptical about entrusting the integrity of something as vital as my address book to a freebie service that might misuse my quality names to flog gizmos, hawk mortgages or titillate acquaintances with cyperporn. Thus far, the company seems legit and trustworthy. Its revenue model does seem a little ‘1998‘, but time will tell. Maybe the next dotcom revolution is just around the corner!
Having spent many an hour chasing errant bits around a webpage in HTML, I sure do appreciate the utility Adobe has built into Acrobat for fixing a document’s format. Adobe’s format fixer offers added peace of mind against documents being corrupted or destroyed by bizarre browser antics, evil doers and so on. It also reduces problems all to often encountered by the recipient when sending .doc, .xls or .ppt e-mail attachments. In fact, the whole Acrobat suite (www.adobe.com) is a good investment, though it is a bit pricey.
On certain occasions I have had to spend quite a few hours taking somebody else’s PDF artistry and retyping it into Word. There is an alternative! Scansoft’s PDF Converter (www.scansoft.com) does exactly what it says on the box.
The Word document retains the same format as the Acrobat-encapsulated original and does it in more than 100 languages. It’s not 100 per cent as good as Scansoft would like you to believe, but it’s not far short of 99 per cent. It’s a heck of a lot faster than retyping, for sure. You’ll still need the full-tilt boogie version of Acrobat if you want to turn your Word doc file back into a PDF, though.
Paper is a pain in the butt, frankly. The trees disappear faster than they should and in my experience, any important bit of data on one of those dead tree slices either gets chucked in the bin or misfiled before its value is completely extracted. My filing cabinet is filled with stuff I will never use and the stuff I need is never where I can find it.
While talking to Scansoft about their lovely PDF Converter, Scansoft mentioned that it had a package that converted the other way, with knobs on. Paperport Pro 9 from the Scansoft stable is nothing less than a light-weight document management/workflow system suitable for a small business or work group. With a single installation, you can do network scanning of hard copy, convert the usual document formats into PDF and, most important for me, find all of your myriad stuff with a simple but reasonably powerful search engine that works with content, keywords or annotations – no more thrashing through piles of paper! I love being able to annotate PDFs with little electronic bits of yellow paper.
While I am on the subject of creating order out of chaos, my favourite holiday season application has to be Adobe’s Photoshop Album 2.0. Whether your digital camera work is for use in the day job or you’re just preserving the family’s happy moments, you soon wind up with a lot of megabytes of files, many with the same name and no way to sort them out easily to find what you want six days, let alone six years on from now. Just go buy Photoshop Album and relax.
I couldn’t finish my list of gotta-haves for the year ahead without mentioning Brainstorm, quaintly christened ‘The Ideas Processor’ when it was launched 20 years ago. It’s still going strong. I have also grown partial to iGrafx FlowCharter (www.igrafx.com) from the enterprise corner of the Corel stable. Dead handy it is when you need a picture to simplify or communicate complex business structures or processes. It doesn’t do you any good to make your customers feel thick.
Lest we forget, here are two stalwarts that help maintain focus on the task at hand: Grisoft AVG antivirus software (www.grisoft.com) that costs an individual nothing, but can save a fortune in downtime if the gremlins get in. Then there’s Stopzilla (www.stopzilla.com) that fries those stupid browser pop-ups before politically challenged language fries the ears of nearby coworkers.
It’s a relief to get back to work again, but let’s not work harder than we have to, eh? Propping up Office with some of the soft stuff above might free up a few extra Fridays!
26/01/04
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