What do you do?
At a business women’s lunch yesterday both key speakers opened with the comment “it is important to know your customers’ needs and wants”. After the presentation someone asked me “What do you do?”.
Now, I’m in a reflective period at the moment, so my answer to the question was not as polished as my usual 10 second elevator response that starts “I…”. Instead, I talked about technology and training, and stumbled my way through to a reasonable reply.
So here is the thing: I’ve always been in technology. My initial university study was in technology. I graduated and worked with punch cards and mainframes, then moved into Personal Computers (yes, I was around when the first PC was introduced!), and my focus has always been helping customers to learn how to get the best out of their technology investment.
So I have always, and still answer with “I …”, as in “I’m a technology trainer”. But when people hear this now, they look at me and walk away. Thus I have to question – is it my deodorant? Bad breath? Or, is the potential customer not interested in what I do? But the realisation suddenly came to me that people may not understand what I am saying, or what I do.
So here is the tip: a colleague (Tim Eldridge) suggested that I go to Pinterest and type in what I think I am and see what the audience thinks of this.
This was an eye opener:
| Search on “Technology” | Search on “Productivity” |
 Lexus Hover Board |
 Productivity Excel |
| I don’t think so! | More like it! |
What I learnt was that I’m about productivity. So here is my new elevator pitch (thanks to Pinterest) “I do productivity training with apps”.
Let me know what you think!
Who moved my mouse?
Seeing small fast moving objects is difficult at the best of times. Add the complication of working on a high resolution laptop and if you have anything less than 20/20 vision you can have trouble finding your mouse – I know I do!
There is an easy way to solve this problem.
Windows 7
- Click on the Windows button (bottom left corner) and select Control Panel from the right hand options
- Select Mouse
- You will now be presented with lots of mouse options. I suggest only changing one thing at a time and make a note of what you change (so you can undo the feature if you don’t like the result)
- To make your mouse stand out, select the tab Pointers and you might like to change the scheme from “Windows Aero (system scheme)” to “Magnified (system scheme)”
- Click on Apply and then on OK
- To change this back, simply repeat the steps and select another option.
PS: Some other options you might like to experiment with are on the Pointer Options tab. You can choose to “Display pointer trails”, which will help you see the pointer more easily as it moves. And at the bottom of that same tab, you can check the box that says “Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key”.
Windows 10
- Click on the Windows image (bottom left corner) and select Settings
- Now you can type “mouse” into the Find a setting field, or select Devices
- Select Mouse & touchpad then Additional mouse options
- You can now follow from step 4 above
And while we’re on the subject of vision – don’t forget our earlier tip around eye strain. You can use an app to monitor your time on the computer or tablet and ensure you take breaks and/or do eye exercises to help you reduce fatigue.
Spring clean your computer
Are you guilty of keeping every file you’ve ever created or been given? If so, now is a good time to prepare to spring clean your computer and free up some space.
Although computers are now being made with bigger and bigger hard drives and running out of space isn’t such a problem, cleaning up will help your system run faster. Plus, keeping old files and multiple copies only makes it harder to find something when you’re looking for it.
Here are a few handy ways you can save on disk space:
- SpaceSniffer: a good tool for figuring out which files you should delete, especially those you haven’t used in a while.
- CCleaner: another useful piece of software, which will review your files and make suggestions.
- An an old faithful of Windows is the disk defrag. This is a quarterly activity you should think about.
BUT, whichever option you consider using, it is important to save or close all your current work and the applications you are using, and do a back-up beforehand.
If you feel even slightly unsure about doing any of these, have a chat to your IT tech person first.
Driven mad by auto-complete?
If you use Microsoft Outlook you’ve probably been frustrated more than once by the auto-complete address function. As soon as you start typing 
an email address it cleverly tries to anticipate who you are emailing. Sometimes the electronic anticipation is not so clever or you hit enter in a hurry on the wrong address. This can result in the wrong person getting a bizarre email from you on a subject that’s of no relevance to them, or worse that contains personal information meant for someone else.
There is a way to get rid of these email addresses and it’s quite simple once you know how.
When in a new email message, in the TO: prompt, start typing the name of the person that you have an incorrect (or old) email address for. When you start to see this email address use the arrow up or down keys to select the address then simply press the [Delete] key. It’s that easy! If the [Delete] key doesn’t work in your version, Right Mouse button on the address then select Delete.
You can also turn the auto-complete option off if you wish. It could be tempting to save mistakes, but leaving it on as long as you are careful, saves a lot of time typing email addresses or selecting contacts.
To turn it off in Outlook, (depending up on your version) go to Tools > Options > Preferences > Email Options > Advanced Email Options, then towards the bottom of the list, uncheck the box “Suggest names while completing To, CC, and BCC fields” and selecting OK. It’s a simple matter to turn it back on again by checking the same box.
Free Windows upgrade – to take or not to take?
If you are running a PC or laptop with Windows 7 or 8 operating system you may have noticed a new icon with the four windows boxes. Clicking on this icon leads you to information on how to reserve your “free*” upgrade to Windows 10 once it is available (currently listed as sometime after 29 July).
I am naturally a little skeptical about anything that claims to be free especially when there is an asterisk after the word “free” and you have to read the fine print for the conditions! However this does appear to be a genuine free upgrade for those who already have Windows 7 or 8. The question then is, whether to download automatically or wait until later to get your upgrade, or indeed, whether you need to upgrade at all (even though it’s free).
Naturally, Microsoft encourages you to take the upgrade because they’ve spent a lot of time and effort developing it and enhancing it with all sorts of new functionality, but it will still have bugs no matter how rigorous their testing. If you take up the free upgrade option, it will apparently download to your computer as soon as it is available, and you will then be able to choose when to install it.
Windows 10 looks like it will be fairly different from what you may have been used to in the earlier versions and my advice is to take your time and not to upgrade until you are ready and have some time to spend learning how it works. No-one needs to arrive at their computer and find a whole new operating system to come to grips with before even starting work! I expect Microsoft will be offering the free upgrade for some considerable time to come – it is in their interests after all – so there’s no need to rush in.
Easy attachments in Outlook
Here’s a neat trick for those using Outlook trying to add an attachment to a new email.
Normally when you forward an email, any attachments on the original won’t attach to the forward automatically. To avoid the hassle of saving the attachment(s) to your system and re-attaching them, try this …
Open your original email (or view it in the reading panel), right click on the attachment you want and select copy. Then go to your new email and anywhere in the content area, right click and select paste – a neat little trick.
PS: If you want to use all the attachments from the original email, when you right click, first choose “select all”, then right click again as per the previous example. Your chosen attachment(s) will then be included in your new email.