It’s become pretty crucial to have a well-maintained calendar to track your availability and upcoming responsibilities both at the office and at home. Easier said than done though, especially if you work on multiple teams or projects, each with their own steady stream of things to do. That’s why this Basecamp tips is so useful.
If you use Basecamp 3, you’ll be familiar with the Schedule feature available from within any project:
Mike was one of my best employees. His projects were on time and well tested before going to QA. He worked well with other teams, and with our team members. He took direction well, and sought out guidance on his career. He was communicative, and years after I left the company where we worked together, he continued to advance his career and moved in the direction he had wanted to go, into management.
I hired Dominic twice. The first time it was a recommendation, the second I dragged him across 2 states to get him to work for me. Dominic was always dedicated, constantly working to improve his skills and knowledge. He would ask for help when he needed it, and pushed me to be a better leader by always challenging me.
Read MoreTrello recently added a new ‘Power-Up’ giving users the ability to add ‘custom fields’ to cards. This means you can add at-a-glance detail and context to your whole board.
Let’s say you’ve got a whole raft of things to get done in the day. How can you see which is most important, without going into each card? Trello now solves your problem by enabling you to surface custom fields such as importance:
If you’ve ever missed an important message in Slack because you don’t have the time to read every line of text in each conversation, there’s a simple hack that can help keep you informed without wasting your time wading through rivers of text: the keyword highlighting tool.
For example, say you wanted to stay up-to-date on new changes in the Walter account. You can set up the highlighting feature to alert you whenever “Walter” is mentioned in a conversation. Not only will you get a notification, but the word will also be highlighted in the conversation so the relevant information is easy to find.
Here’s how to set it up:
There are still thousands of people who use Microsoft Word to create and edit documents. I’m doing so right now, but I love having those documents in the cloud to review them from any location and any device. Well, there’s a stellar little plug-in for Microsoft Office users who want the best of both worlds.
Note: this plugin only works on Windows computers.
Head to Google’s “Drive for Office” page to download and install this helpful tool. After install, you are almost done. When you next start Microsoft Word, Excel, or Powerpoint, the pop-up screen below opens and requires just a few more steps to authenticate your Google account credentials. To start, click the “Get Started” button:
The IF statement surely is among the most commonly-used formulas in Google Sheets. It’s used for looking up data or making calculations under specific conditions. But did you know that the IF statement can help you keep your sheets looking clean and more readable?
That can be important, or at least a time-saver. When setting up a spreadsheet into which you import, add, or copy and paste data frequently, it can be a pain to drag or copy formulas down to your new data.
For example: We created a spreadsheet in which to track inventory for our gift shop. We have a tab for when we purchase inventory, and another for when we sell inventory. Instead of looking up the inventory number, we use a SUMIF statement that looks for the inventory name matching the item we sold, and then fills in the inventory number for that item.
Google Forms is an extremely handy application in the Google Drive suite. You can use Forms to collaborate on documents, transfer files to other users, and create web forms that submit the data right into a Google Spreadsheet. But Google Forms are even more powerful when you integrate them with Google Sheets.
For example, you can create a Google Form that automatically saves the data collected into a Google Spreadsheet. The obvious benefit is collecting the results into a single spreadsheet for your own analysis or what-have-you. However, the form/spreadsheet integration can help you create a dynamic chart that updates each time with every new form entry.
Let’s say, for example, we are managing a charity fundraising website that includes a request for the site visitor to make a pledge for a donation. Each sponsor can fill out the fields in the Google Form, pledging the amount of money to donate. So far, so good. However, in addition to a list of sponsors and their contact information, we would like to track how much money has been donated, and what regional location is raising the most — ideally with some sort of visual to show progress.
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Trello may be one of the the best platforms for organizing your tasks, but it has one glaring flaw: no baked-in “priority” indicator for task cards.
While this is an oversight I hope the team fixes in the future, there is a simple workaround — Trello’s “Labels” feature. With labels, you can color code each task and assign unique names to each color. Each board can even have an entirely different set of labels if you want to get that specific. Here’s how:
Read MoreYou may already know that Google Sheets can insert images into the document using the “Insert Image” option, but it has limitations. In particular, you cannot control the display very well, and the image shows above the cells in the document.
Instead, by using the =IMAGE formula in Google Sheets, you easily can add images within the cell and managing how the image sizes.
Let’s say we have a series of photographs from a recent trip that we’d like to manage. We want to capture each image’s unique date, where the photo was taken, and notes about its purpose. By using the =IMAGE spreadsheet formula, we can display each image in a cell, as well as organize the other information in the rest of the row.
This is a tip I wish I’d known back when one of my clients needed everything in Word 97 format: you can configure Word 365 to save all of your files in something other than Word’s default .docx format — automatically.
Here’s how:
Go to File > Options > Save.