Microsoft Excel, which is a spreadsheet meant for crunching numbers, may be the tool of accountants. But I rely on it heavily to help me with text. I generate text using Excel in order to feed data cleanly into systems. No, Excel is my powerhouse for assembling text. It occurred to me that people might get some benefit from learning how to do this, so here is my method:
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Since I released my video on my OneNote work planning system, I have gotten questions about how to personalize the notebook. This video is about how to save time and effort by using templates to customize a OneNote notebook.
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I had to recently switch from paper to electronic notes for work due to the need to do fast searches. Searching through five notebooks that were haphazardly backlinked was almost impossible. I made the switch to OneNote, and have worked hard to get a simple but workable system. This is a tour of how I use OneNote for work.
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I dislike wasted effort. Typing the same thing over and over again is wasted effort. Breevy saves me that effort.
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When I really need to blast through a lot of work, but really don't want to, I use the (10+2) * 5 method invented by Merlin Mann. It's a modified Pomodoro method, but instead of 20 minute work sessions followed by a 5 minute break, it shortens both work and break times. I prefer (10+2)*5 to Pomodoro because the 10 minute start seems do-able, whereas the 20 minute block often seems insurmountable.
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One of the most powerful things about Gmail is that you can add a “+tag” to your email address, turning your single email address into an infinite amount of addresses. These modified plus addresses can then be used to filter email with great precision.Microsoft finally is getting on board with this, setting the Plus addressing as a default as of April 22, 2022. It can still be overridden by system administrators, but hopefully most people will take the default.
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I thought I would present a list of other shortcut keys that can make things easier.
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I spend a lot of time at my computer. It involves a lot of navigation between and within programs, and it really slows me down to have to reach for a mouse to access menus. Here is a tip for accessing Windows menus from the keyboard:
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I work in IT. As a function of my job, I know a lot of little tips and tricks for many programs. Excel is one of my go-to programs, but I rarely use it for numbers - I generate code and do a lot of data work with it instead. I recently had a long list of information to print out as reference material. It contained several columns, and I wanted a quick way to follow the information across the printed row without having to use an external guide.
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When I made the decision to move away from Evernote I knew I had to find a new home for my information. After a lot of searching and trial and error, I settled on OneNote and Trello. However, I was facing a major pile of pain in moving the information over. There was nothing on the web that told me how to do this. So I cobbled together a solution. Today's article is about this solution.
