It takes more than technology to be productive.

Most everyone appreciates technology and its promise. The flip side is it can also be a pain. It could be you have the right tools but you aren’t sure how to use them to your advantage. How many times have you stared at a screen and wondered, “now what?”. I have and it’s frustrating. The goal of this site is to pass on my learnings.

Whether you’re frustrated or simply trying to level up your skills, we’d like to help. We’ve written a number of tutorials and informative articles covering everything from Amazon’s Alexa to Microsoft Excel with lots in between. And we’re open to suggestions.

FEATURED ARTICLE

Finding Word Count with Excel

Recently, I attended an industry summit that had an expert’s panel where people provided their best tips. One Excel tip involved filtering cells with a certain number of words. A nice tip, but it left some attendees wondering where is Excel’s word count function. The program doesn’t have this feature, but you can get the answer by creating an Excel formula to count words. (Includes sample Excel worksheet and formula) The summit tip was for a specific product, but opportunities exist where you might want to count words in an Excel cell. I do a similar process when I pull ...
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EASY TUTORIALS

How to Add a Signature in Outlook.Com

Microsoft has several email products. One of the most popular ones is the free version called Outlook.com. However, the feature set is different than the paid counterpart in Microsoft 365 (Previously called Office 365). One difference deals with creating your ...
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Quick Guide to Excel Solver

Some time back, I wrote an article about a useful function in Microsoft Excel called Goal Seek. It quickly allows you to solve easy “what-if” scenarios. Although helpful, it comes with limitations. However, Microsoft has a more powerful add-in analysis ...
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Simple Ways to Protect Your Online Accounts

I met a friend for dinner who found out that someone broke into his online accounts. Naturally, he was concerned about his data, but also the amount of time it would take to fix the problem. I told him one ...
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Make Your Own Word Keyboard Shortcuts

Sometimes Microsoft Word menus and toolbars are slower. Granted many built-in commands have keyboard shortcuts, but many do not. This was the case for me when I wanted to use Word's Reading Mode. Instead of finding the correct tab and ...
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ActiveWords is More Than a Text Expander

PC users often feel limited by rules and structures. Sometimes this means slogging through many folders to find a needed file. Other times, it means typing text passages on a recurring basis to suit a need. Many people consider these ...
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GIFTS & PLANNERS

Practical Gift Ideas For Anytime

This is not your typical gift-giving guide. Those tend to be centered around specific holidays whereas I wanted to do one which was date agnostic. I plan to continually add to this one. I have a number of products which I'm testing and a few which are on pre-order. Also, ...
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