04.26.2009 by Don Wood.

Recently I was visiting someone at an upscale apartment community. I struck up a conversation with the Property Management and being me, I asked her what PM system they used. She told me and said he didn’t like it. No names needed here. I asked her why she did not like the system and discovered a crucial reason.

It turns out that she has to fill out a report in Excel every week and email it to the Regional Manager. All, I repeat all, of the data on this Excel report is from the PM System. I suspect that not only does each Property Manager fill out and email this report, there is someone at the corporate office that consolidates the data and creates another report.

This very manual process could easily be automated with a custom report. It might cost a few thousand to create it but it would be a quick return on investment in process efficiency and accuracy. All it takes is for corporate to talk to the on-site Managers about there system needs.

Leverage the system you have!

Posted in Process Improvement, Productivity, Multifamily Software, Real Estate Software | Print | No Comments »

02.27.2009 by Don Wood.

I wonder how many people have upgraded to MS Office 2007 and long for the old familiar look? I for one don’t love the new “Ribbon” look. I’ve been told by a Microsoft Partner that the reason for the change was to make it easier for people to find features. The story, as told to me, was that Microsoft did a survey of most wanted enhancements for Excel and the most requested features were already in the product! The Ribbon design is an attempt to make it easier to find these features.

If you don’t like the “Ribbon” you can have your old menu bar back; at a cost. I have not done this so I can’t recommend any vendors, but if you do a Google search you will find a few companies that sell a tool to display the old menu bar.

Whether you are on WORD 2007 or an earlier version there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts you can use. Everyone is familiar with the popular ones like Crtl+B to bold a highlighted word, and of course the Crtl+C to copy and Crtl+V to paste. Here are some lesser known shortcuts that can be very handy:

The shortcuts

If you would like a list of 80 MS WORD 2003 Shortcuts, send me an email request and I’ll send you a copy.

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02.27.2009 by Don Wood.

We all want to work smarter, right? Well, I have a great way to increase productivity and improve your communications at the same time. There are software companies offering tools that provide additional functionality to Microsoft Outlook. I’m not promoting any particular company. However, there are two providers that I have tried and used their products with success:

• MapiLab
• Sperry Software

Both companies offer similar products. I have successful experience with two products that offer these features:

• Manage attachments
• Send an individual email to multiple email addresses

There are other add–n features that I have not tried but sound promising such as:

• Hide fax numbers
• Reply to all monitor

My experience
The manage attachments add-in was a huge productivity boost to me when I worked for a firm that limited the size of our inbox. This add-in automatically removes the attachments in an email and saves them on your hard drive. There are options on how you organize the attachments. The tool, inserts a link in the email that you click to open the attachment. For example, if John Smith sends me an email with a 2MB file attached, the tool takes the file, removes it from the email, replaces it with a link, and saves the file to a folder organized, in my case, by the sender’s name. It saves me from having the 2MB file in my Outlook folder and getting a warning that my mailbox is over the size limit.

My favorite tool is the Send Individually by Sperry Software. In the past I have sent emails to a large number of people using blind copy to protect everyone’s privacy. But when I do this, if I’m soliciting advice, I get few responses. I believe most people think “oh, someone else will respond to him”. With the Send Individually, add-in I can have the tool send an email to multiple addresses, each with the person’s name inserted into the body of the email, this makes it appear to the receiver that I typed a personal email to them. When I have done this, I get a much higher percent of people responding.

The other two products I mention sound promising but I have yet to try them.

Hide Fax Numbers
When you click the “To…” button on an email compose screen you get a dialog box that lists all of your contacts, the list includes fax numbers. This tool hides the fax number entries.

Reply to all Monitor
How many of us have clicked the “reply to all” button in an email and regretted it later? The Reply to all Monitor add-on pops up a warning anytime you select “reply to all” to make sure you really want to send it to everyone on the email list.

There are many more add-ins for Outlook. I encourage everyone to consider these tools as an easy productivity boost.

Posted in Process Improvement, Productivity, Microsoft Outlook, Real Estate Software | Print | 1 Comment »