In this newsletter: •  VALERIE'S TIP: Hot tips for career chicks
•  One-day workshop 8 October 2009: Excel - Intermediate to Advanced
•  PAUL’S QUICK CLICK: Outlook Field Chooser
•  PAUL’S KEYBOARD TIP: Toggle Filter
•  AWESOME ACCESSORY: Road mice

Hi everyone,

Welcome to Productivity Plus, your weekly newsletter on how to get more done in less time.


VALERIE'S TIP: Hot tips for career chicks
I’ve been reading this new book by Sydney author, Karen Andamedes: “Hot Tips for Career Chicks”. It’s a great insight into how to climb the corporate ladder and provides a framework of what is important for career success and practical tips to make it happen. Karen says she wants to raise the awareness that the culture of business is not necessarily intuitive for women and hopes it helps some of the chicks who read it!

Karen’s book is packed with cool advice but here are my own top 5 tips for career chicks.

1. Do what you love – and the money will follow. Even if that means a short-term financial sacrifice, they payoff will be a long-term gain.
2. Seek out mentors – whether formal, informal or from afar. Find people you admire or who have achieved what you want – and study how they go there.
3. Embrace technology – if you don’t, you’ll simply be left behind.
4. Find ways to leverage your time. There will always be a better, more efficient way to do your job.
5. Be generous and teach others – help others learn and your generosity will come back to your tenfold.

One-day workshop 8 October: Excel - Intermediate to AdvancedDo you want to power up your use of Excel?

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• use a range of lookup and reference functions
• create and work with headers and footers
• filter data in a table
• use a range of techniques to enhance charts
• protect data in worksheets and workbooks
• use the Data Consolidation feature to combine data from several workbooks into one
• use data linking to create more efficient workbooks
• understand and create PivotTables so you can manipulate data for multiple scenarios
• use goal seeking to determine the values required to reach a desired result
• use Solver to solve more complex and intricate problems
• create recorded macros in Excel
  
  
  

What: Microsoft Excel - Intermediate to Advanced
When: Thursday 8 October 2009
Time: 9am to 5pm (one day workshop)
Cost: $325 (includes GST)

You will receive a comprehensive take-home manual which is a handy reference for the future.

Click here to receive a course outline. Or enrol here.

PAUL’S QUICK CLICK: Outlook field chooser
There are many field/column headings that you can add to Outlook in order to view more information about the emails in a specific folder. You can add a field as a column heading by using the 'Field Chooser' tool.

Try this:

• Select your Sent Items folder.
• Right-click one of the current field headings such as the Subject field.
• Select 'Field Chooser' from the popup menu.
• Now drag a field that you like from the list and drop it next to one of the existing column headings.
  For example: you might like to drag the 'Cc' field and drop it in between the 'To' and 'Subject' fields.

PAUL'S KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS: Toggle Filter Ctrl + Shift + LWhen you want Filter a list/database in a spreadsheet, a fast way to 'toggle' the Filter funnel on or off is to the use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + L.

Tips before using Filter:
1. Ensure your database has field/column headings.
2. Ensure your cursor (active cell) is within the database/list.
3. Remove blank rows from the list.


AWESOME ACCESSORY: Road Mice
If you're sick of your boring old computer mouse and love cars, we've got the perfect solution for you!

RoadMice have beefed up the humble computer mouse and turned them into lean, mean navigation machines. You can choose anything from a good old Ford Mustang to a luxury PT Cruiser.