Tag: Gsd Tips

How To Add 2 Factor Authentication to Protect Your Xero Account

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

A huge bee in everyone’s bonnet right now is IT security. And as you’re accessing your company’s financials with Xero, you’ll want to make sure your account is as secure as can be. Adding two factor authentication (or as Xero calls it, two step authentication) to your account will help you do just that.

A quick word on two-factor: While nothing can guarantee your account’s safety, two factor authentication will get you pretty close. Two-factor in security means you have to have 2 things to get access — usually something you know, and something you have. For many apps it’s something you know — a password — and something you have — an authenticator app on your mobile.

Start by logging into Xero. In the upper right hand corner you’ll see your name. Click on that.

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How to Get Google Docs, and Other Apps, to Read to You

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

In today’s mobile world, having a document read to you, say when you’re driving or working out, is helpful, if not essential. Google Docs, like Microsoft Word, has an Accessibility feature set that helps people who prefer or need to have webpages or documents read to them.

The best app I tested for this purpose was a Chrome browser extension called Read&Write from TextHelp.com. If you follow this link from within Chrome, it will ask you if you want to “Add to Chrome” (below it says “Added to Chrome” because I completed the task before I wrote this post).


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These Two Slack Shortcuts Will Turn You Into a Keyboard Samurai

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

via N I C O L A, Flickr

So your company has made the switch to Slack, eh? But while the messaging service has helped streamline a number of internal communication issues, you’re not one to do anything half-assed. In order to truly master the new medium, you’re going to need to brush up on your keystroke game.

Slack may not be able to instantly create the muscle memory earned and learned by plugging away on those messages day in and day out, but the company does thankfully offer users two easy ways to learn the dozens of shortcuts built into the app.

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5 Tips for Using Trello to Get Sh*t Done

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

Prioritize and Organize, Use Shortcuts, and Trello Board Examples

By Jeff.lasovski (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Trello is well-known as a collaborative task management tool, but are you using Trello to its fullest? To help you make the most of the online solution, we’ve gathered five of our top tips for getting sh*t done.

Tip #1: Prioritizing Your Trello Tasks Using Labels


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Sync Your Calendars Using Microsoft Flow (And Yes, Google Calendar Works Too!)

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

For many of us, some parts of each day can feel a bit like the movie Groundhog Day. Why? Because we have to perform the same tasks over and over. For example, we spend lots of time working between our various calendars saying things like, “OK, I’m free at that time on my work calendar, but what about my personal calendar?”

Thankfully, a new service entitled Microsoft Flow changes all that. It features pre-built ‘recipes’ to connect together the different calendars you use, as well as the ability to create custom workflows from scratch. Let’s take the example of ensuring you see all of the events across your calendars in one place.

First, head to https://flow.microsoft.com and sign in. You’ll need to read and accept the license agreement, as you are giving Microsoft access to other accounts so they can pipe data between them

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Use ‘Action Items’ in Google Docs to Turn Comments Into Tasks for Your Team

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

Google Docs is great for getting everyone literally on the same page. But sometimes it can be difficult to turn that feedback and group brainstorming into actionable tasks for people to go away and do.

Thankfully, Google has implemented ‘action items’ to help with this as part of the built-in commenting functionality. Here’s how to get started.

1. In your Google Doc, select the text you want to comment on:

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How to Use Logic Branching in Google Forms (and Why That Matters)

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

Google Forms lets you control the questions presented to users based on data already collected. It helps you ask follow-up questions that depend on earlier responses. But it’s not clear how — or why you should bother. Let me show you how it works.

We ask follow-up questions all the time. Here’s a few examples:

  • You’re planning a lunch event, and need to find out if an attendee has dietary restrictions. The people who answer, “No” don’t need to be distracted by a question asking what type of meal is acceptable (vegan, gluten-free, etc.).
  • We ask people using an eCommerce store where they found out about the website. If the user clicks a form choice that he learned about it from a flyer in a local coffee shop, we ask him to identify one of the three coffee shops in which we posted flyers. If the user instead had a personal referral, we might ask her for the friend’s contact info so we can send that friend a “thank you.”
  • We prompt for a location specification. A chain of car dealerships is in certain cities in a few states. To help users find the nearby options, we ask them which state they’re in, then follow up to ask about the cities in that state.

The technical term for this kind of survey logic and data management is logic branching. Google Forms calls its implementation threading and flow, and it’s mighty powerful. This short example shows how to put it to use, using that third example: the common state and city logic branching.

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This One Trick Will Mean You Never Lose an Unsaved Word 365 Document Again

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

If you’ve ever lost a few paragraphs of fantastic work then you know you need to save regularly. No matter how hard you try however, it will probably happen again.

Thanks to the autosave feature in the Microsoft 365 version of Word, you can always find your lost document, even if you didn’t save it. The tricky part is that the app saves your documents in a format you may not be familiar with: .asd. Finding these files can be a bit tricky. Here’s a quick way to find them.

And stay tuned — I have a bonus tip for you, below, on how to make Word save your file once every minute so the most up-to-date version is always autosaved.

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Automatically Populate an Excel 365 Spreadsheet With SurveyMonkey Responses

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

Data collected on platforms like SurveyMonkey can often be far easier to work with and analyze in an Excel spreadsheet. But manually transferring that data and keeping it up to date can be a huge pain.

Fortunately, Zapier offers a way to automate this process. The quickest way to find the workflow we’re looking for is to enter the apps we want to connect into Zapier’s search bar:


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Use Slacker To Add A Touch of Anonymous Fun to Your Slack Groups

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

Image Source: Anonymous9000 on Flickr

Slack has become something of an office sensation in recent years, with users praising both its ability to streamline business communications and its infinite opportunities to add a little levity to the 9-to-5 daily grind. This trick may not win you any corporate comm awards, but posting secret celebrity messages to your office’s #random channel may bring a smile to your coworkers’ faces.

Developer Nathan Hoad’s brilliant Slacker web app integrates seamlessly with Slack itself. After logging in at https://slacker.nathanhoad.net, simply select the team you’d like to authorize Slacker to post from:

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