General Business Blog

Common Mistakes Made by Users of Microsoft Word

Ask just about any computer user if they use or have used Microsoft Word and you can confidently expect the answer “yes”. Word is everywhere, even on Apple Mac. So, most bosses automatically assume that their people know how to use it and they do, up to a point. But many casual Word users make some pretty basic mistakes. This article looks at the most common.

* Are you ever guilty of pressing the Return key at the top of a document to move the cursor down, perhaps when creating a document to be printed on your company stationery? If so, this means that you are creating a document with unwanted characters at the start. Much better to click on File – Page Setup and change the top margin (in Word 2003) or click on Custom Margins in the Page Layout tab of the Word 2007 ribbon.

* Leaving two spaces after the period which ends each sentence is another common error among users. In fact, one space is fine with modern typefaces since they are proportionally spaced (e.g., the letter “w” takes up more space than the letter “i”). The two space habit is a throwback to the days when people were using typewriters with monospace typefaces such as Elite and Courier.

* The habit of pressing the Return key twice at the end of each paragraph is not a good idea because it creates a sea of extra white space on the printed page. Only one return should used to end the paragraph. Extra space can then be added using the paragraph spacing commands. To find these options, in Word 2003 or earlier, choose Paragraph from the format menu. In Word 2007, click on the Page Layout tab.

* Casual users who have never attended any Microsoft Word training courses are often at a loss as to how tabs work. At worst, they use the space bar to attempt to align elements on the page. This never works and when the document is printed the columns do not align properly. The Tab key should be used instead of the space bar.

* Although you can get away with pressing the Tab key to create columns of text without actually setting any tabs, it’s not usually a good idea. This method uses Word’s default tabs and means that the user often inserts a varying number of tabs between columns. It’s much better to set up your own tabs by clicking on the Word ruler. That way, you will only ever need to press the Tab key once between columns.

* A lot of newbie Word users will always format their documents, even long ones, either manually or by using the Format Painter. The best way to format text in long documents is to use Microsoft styles. Each style has multiple attributes associated with it which are applied automatically to any text formatted with that style. In addition, if the attributes of a style are changed, all text in that style is updated throughout the document.

* Then there’s the question of who’s in charge: Word or the user. You will often hear users complain that Word has a mind of its own: “It tries to do everything for you”. Remember, almost any setting in Word that irritates you can be modified by going to Tools – Options in Word 2003 or earlier or choosing Word Options from the Office Button in Word 2007.

Appointment-Scheduling Software Can Make You More Professional

Today, when we hear about professionalism, we often think of high quality, outstanding conduct and ultimate skill. Usually, being a professional means that you have special training that qualifies you as such, especially in a particular field. And that being stated, whether you are a medical professional, legal professional or accounting professional, you will work in the skill-set with which you were trained and it does not stop there. Being professional goes way past just the training, it is a lifelong process.

One of the most important aspects of professionalism is time management. By managing our time properly, we can improve our efficiency and productivity, while ultimately improving our companys profits. Being profession certainly involves saving time. However, it also involves keeping appointments. Here are several ways that appointment-scheduling software can improve your companys time-management, thus improving its professionalism:

1. It puts the patient, client, or customer first

Whether we work in a medical clinic, attorneys office, or accounting firm, we must make a point to prioritize the needs of our clients. As the saying goes, The customer is always right. Scheduling softwares pop-up reminders keep you up-to-date with all of your appointments with clients. For instance, if you need medical scheduling, appointment-scheduling software can remind you of the specific date and time that you have scheduled at your clinic, hospital, etc.

2. It makes scheduling more efficient

The days of paper based appointment books are over! They are messy, confusing, smudgy, and require way too much work, only to have you flipping through, using up valuable time trying to find customer information. Erasers leave smudges, white out is a pain, and why bother rummaging through an appointment book when you could use software for all of your appointment scheduling needs?

3. Make your company more efficient!

Forget about using traditional appointment books in order to keep track of appointments. Do you realize just how much time these waste? You need to update them, and every time you do you need to flip through, find the client, find the section, erase or white out and then write in the new information. This can take up to 20 minutes if you have several volumes to keep track of! If you really want to save time, you will switch to an appointment scheduling software that will save you tons of time and money in the long run.

4. It saves people-hours and thus saves the company money

Using software in order to schedule as opposed to old appointment books will save money by effectively using time. When employees need less time to complete tasks, your bill decreases, and that means more profits for you and more bonuses and benefits for your employees. Reducing costs and increasing profits cant hurt your business, can it?

In our modern, professional world, companies just like yours are seeking to take their workforce to the next level. If professionalizing means teaching your staff to do a good job in a timely manner, then you need to seriously consider looking into appointment scheduling software. If it improves the bottom line of your company, produces better customers and helps your employees better know what they are supposed to do, it will make your company more professional. How can you argue with that?

Using InDesign’s Book Command

Whenever you choose New from the File menu in Adobe InDesign, you may have noticed the option to create a new book without ever knowing exactly what a book is. Well, it turns out that books are a pretty cool feature: they allow you to take a bunch of related InDesign document and treat them as a single entity; a book. All documents in the book can then share the same resources such as paragraph and character styles, colour swatches, master pages, sections and page numbering.

Having created a book, by choosing File-New-Book, the Book panel is displayed. It contains a panel menu with all the necessary options. The first task is to add documents to the book: from the Book panel menu, choose “Add Document” and select the documents you want to be treated as part of the book. The book panel can now act as a launch pad for each of the documents it contains: simply double-click a document to open it.

The book file can now be saved. The book is a separate entity to the documents it contains and the documents in a book do not have to reside in the same location as the book or as each other. To save the book, choose Save Book in the Book panel menu.

Next specify which of the documents in the book will be treated as the style source. The document elected as the style source will be used as the master document in the process known as synchronization whereby InDesign replaces the colour swatches and styles of all documents in the book with those in the style source document.

To control page numbering across the whole book, choose Book Page Numbering Options in the Book panel menu. The default behaviour is “Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers”: this will number pages in the documents within the book according to the order in which they are listed in the Book panel.

Books are a wonderful tool for division of labour since the fact that a document is part of a book does not stop it from being a regular InDesign document. If a book contains six documents, six different people can work on each of those documents and then, at the end, the whole book can be preflighted, printed and output as PDF as a single unit.

Both indexes and tables of contents can also be generated for an entire book as well as for a single document. Simply design and create the table of contents or index in the normal way but activate the option “Include Book Documents”.