LANcom Technology Blog

If you’re thinking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for your business Microsoft has an article available on their website detailing seven questions you should ask yourself. Here’s a quick summery:

1. How different are your customers? If your customers cover a board range of characteristics a CRM system may make managing customer information much easier.
2. How often do they buy something? If so, what? If customers buy on a fairly frequent basis, or buy a variety of products, CRM can be essential in knowing who’s buying what, how often and those times of year when those purchases are likely to occur.
3. Do you need help in watching overall trends?
4. Need help watching for internal competition or needless duplication?
5. How do you communicate with customers? If it’s through varied means, ranging from face-to-face to phone or Internet contact, a CRM system may be invaluable in keeping customer communications focused and organized.
6. Can you and will you and your employees actually use it?
7. Will it enhance your customer relationships?

To see the full version of this article click here. To learn more about CRM click here.

Microsoft surface is a new surface computer that turns a table top into an interactive surface. It allows you to interact with digital content thought touch, natural gestures and physical objects. There is no keyboard or mouse; instead users touch the screen with their hands.

Microsoft surface also recognise many points of contact at the same time (multi touch contact) which means you can use both hands and have several people gathered around the surface using it at the same time.

It can also recognise objects. So for example by simply placing a digital camera on the surface, the surface can transfer the photos and display them on the screen for you to search through, or change the size of all using your hands.

How will this be used?

The first areas that this technology will appear in are restaurants, hotels, and retail and public entertainment venues. Imagine using the table to look through what is available on the menu and order and then at the the end of the night using it to split the bill in anyway you want and pay.

Click here for more information and to see video of this technology in action.

A PDF creator is a free application which allows you to create PDF documents from any program you are able to print from for example Microsoft Office applications. Once you have your PDF creator all you need to do is go to print and select the PDF creator under your list of printers.

Why would you want one? Is has number of uses.

1. You may want to email a document to someone and are unsure if they have the software that will allow them to read it. For example you may have an Office 2007 document and want to send it to someone with an older version of office (older versions of Office require a converter to be able to view Office 2007 documents). By converting it in to a PDF you ensure they will be able to read it, all most all computers these days have PDF readers.
2. You may want to send a document that the receiver cannot easily edit.
3. A PDF document may increase readability. The page appears as it would if it were printed.

Click here to download a free PFD creator

Microsoft has a great selection of small business templates available on their website that might just save you some time in creating your own. These templates cover a wide range of areas from email newsletters (Publisher), to business cards (Publisher), to even an employee application form (Word).

To view the small business templates available for download click here.

Microsoft also has a number of other templates, available for download here, which may also be useful.

Another small problem that we here at LANcom encountered with Office 2007 had to do with the copying of cells in one Excel workbook into another. Previously we were able to use the Paste Special feature to ensure all formatting stayed the same when we pasted a selection of cells into a new workbook. When we tried to do this is 2007 we encountered a problem. In did not carry over the column changes.

For example here is how a table we create originally looked

And here is what a pasted version in the new Workbook looked like.

If you are having this problem and are finding manually adjusting the column widths to time consuming try this.

Copy the cells you would like in your new Workbook or new Sheet. Then in the new Workbook or Sheet click on the arrow below the Paste button on the Home ribbon and select Paste Special. Now select Column Widths (Selecting All does not carry over column widths, we tried this). Excel will now paste the column widths of the cells you previously copied. Now simply click Paste and the cells you have copied will appear as they did in the first Workbook or sheet.

At the end of last year we posted about how Google can be used as calculator. Now the new Live Search (formally MSN search) has an even better feature, the ability to solve your algebra equations.

Simply type your equation into the search box and click the search button and Live Search will solve it for you.

The Live Search website is www.live.com

There is no doubt that Office 2007 is an improvement on previous versions, but there have been a couple of things that we have found to be slightly annoying. One of these is line spacing between paragraphs.

You may notice that the default settings in Word have changed, one aspect of this is that Word will automatically add a line between paragraphs, which can be somewhat annoying especially if you are trying to write a list. To turn this feature off permanently, or to change the default formatting in any way for that matter, simply go to the bottom arrow under Styles on the Home ribbon

1. Then select Apply Styles and click Modify… From here you can modify the default setting for the ‘Normal’ style.
2. Now to turn off the line spacing between paragraphs click on Format and select Paragraph…
3. Now place a tick in the Don’t add spaces between paragraphs of the same style box and click OK.
4. Select the New documents based on this template box and click OK.

From now on all new documents you create under the ‘Normal’ style will not add a space between paragraphs. You can also make other changes to the default formatting through the Modify Style box, for example change the default font.

Alternatively if you just want the formatting to go back to the way it was in 2003 then on the Home ribbon click Change Styles then Style Set. Now click Word 2003.

Two of our engineers, Kevin Williamson and Luvern Naidoo, have recently become Apple Certified Help Desk Specialists. This means they can now support and trouble shoot essential Mac OS X functions. They can configure key services, and assist end users with essential Mac OS X capabilities. Well done guys!

We have found that our customers have been using Apple Macs more and more and have been disappointed with the level of support available from other providers. We have helped our clients with Apple problems in the past but just recently decided to make this Apple support an official part of the service we offer.

Getting a new PC and giving away the old one? Simply deleting your old files is not enough to ensure the new owner won’t be able to view them.

According to Microsoft when you delete a file you only remove it from the disks index, the file itself still exists on your hard disk. Also a previous or temporary version of the file may be saved in other places under a different name. They recommend using a hard drive wiping soft-ware such as Active@killDisk or DP Wiper (both free to download) to over write your data. Alternatively you could reinstall your operating system to overwrite files.

Click here for more information.

Want quick access to the Menu Bar in Internet Explorer 7?

Press Alt and the Menu Bar will appear, allow you to do what you need to, and then disappear again.

If you would like the Menu Bar to always be visible go to Tools on the right hand side and select Menu Bar. This also works if you already have the Menu Bar and would like to disable it.