Years and years ago, I presented a session at a conference and called it My Nirvana model.  The drawing to the left is what I presented at the time.  Basically the premise was having a model to find the proper platform for your business application.  The arrows on the chart meant the price went up based on various parameters. The key point I was making with the presentation though was to not only worry about the platform but to ensure you were asking the right questions in

Patricia Egen Consulting is pleased to announce all our ACT addons are certified and tested to work with ACT V16.  Check out our eStore for more details.  eStore

Recently, two of my customers suffered huge business losses because their applications were unaccessbile on their cloud solutions.  I am not a proponent of putting everything in the cloud for just this reason.  These clients were ones who went down this path because someone else suggested that putting every business process in the Cloud was a “good thing.”  Well, yes, until the cloud is not available. For one customer, it cost them over $50,000 to be down for a day.  A

Here's another Excel tip. Just helped a client resolve a situation and thought it would make a good Blog article.  This client had links to external references that were not resolving and Excel would immediately crash and close whenever they tried to open the spreadsheet in question.  Needless to say they were freaking out.  Here's what I did to resolve it. 1. If Excel is still open, click on Task Manager and close the application. 2. Restart Excel and go to a new spreadsheet

One of my favorite features added to ACT CRM is Universal search.  This capability allows you search anything inside of ACT, including attachments.  You can filter the results as well.  But, hidden, tucked away in help manuals no one ever reads, are some tricks to further define your searching. This blog article will show you those tricks. Using Special Characters and Operators You can use special characters and operators with your search term. Special characters are a symbol

Ever wanted to put together a dog and pony show to demonstrate your services and products? Of course.  Did you think it would take lots of time and money?  You would think that setting this up would probably be a major undertaking that would be a huge time-drain.  I thought so as well.  The first time I had an opportunity to put on a roadshow, I only had a 3 week  advance notice.  At the time, I was very busy and needed to come up with ways to make this happen

Today after my Rotary meeting I witnessed something quite interesting.  One of the members had locked his keys in his car.  He got on his cell phone and called his wife who then clicked on the remote device she had on her key chain, and I'll be darned, it opened his car.  Oh my gosh. So today's nifty lesson is this.  if your car allows remote key-less entry - i.e. you have a clicker to open the door, then you can do the following. When/if  you lock your keys in the car

It's time for another Fast Tip article. This tip I will show today has been around a while. I just learned of it as part of my ongoing research on all things Google. Ever need to provide your email and know for a fact you are going to be spammed in return? Of course. We all have. Well, it turns out there is a way to give out your Gmail email with a little modification that you can then filter out of your incoming mail. All you have to do is add a + sign and some text after your name and before