Today, a friend and I were lamenting about getting people to do things and finish projects.  She said didn't I write an article once about this and I said, yes, it was a while ago.  In fact it was 2009. It was on another blog forum so it belongs here as well, based on recent events. This article is a departure from topics I normally write about.  By the way, this topic has been a speech, a magazine article and a discussion group topic.  It's about managing

Worked with a client today about getting their contacts out of Outlook and into ACT. I asked them how many contacts were we talking about. She said she couldn't tell and did I know how to know how many contacts there were when you had many folders? Many of you already know we are IBM Notes users so I use Outlook only under duress so I told her "I think I know, but I will find out for sure." I sort of thought you just opened Outlook and the number showed up. Well it doesn't. So, once again

Patricia Egen Consulting Acquires CRMAddons Product Suite from Northwoods Software. Press release date: June 30, 2015 Chattanooga, TN, and Nashua, NH, June 30, 2015 – Patricia Egen Consulting (PEC) today announced the acquisition of CRMAddons from Northwoods Software Corporation.  CRMAddons is a suite of automation tools compatible with the Act! Contact Manager, owned by Swiftpage Act! LLC. The CRMaddons suite includes Sales Automation Manager, Mail Merge and Web Prospect. Every

Traveling for pleasure is an adventure - traveling for work, well, not always as much of an adventure.  I don't keep a  paper calendar anymore.  It's all on the computer or on my smart phone.  Yet, when I head out on a several day trip, I like to keep a paper copy of my details.  When you are on the road and once again either the GPS or your mapping program on the phone has steered you to a dead end, it is nice to have addresses near by.  Even more so it's good to

The following document is useful if you are setting up ACT and ACT for the Web and need to know how to tell your firewall to show ACT as an exception.  It also documents ports that need to be available. Adding Program Exceptions to Windows Firewall for ACT! and SQL Server Click the Windows Start button, click Control Panel Click Administrative Tools, select Windows Firewall with Advanced Features. Note: You will have to complete the following steps for

If you have an ACT! eMarketing account you know you can send out nice looking email blasts.  But, did you know you can also include attachments such as PDFs. You can upload, edit and store images and documents to use within your edited templates in the Media section.  Items to note are: Upload multiple images and documents at once Store up to 100 images in .jpg, .gif and .png formats Browse the free Stock image library for several provided images Edit images quickly and easily

I was building a report for a client in Excel using an OLEDB connection to the back end data base.  Pretty standard stuff, do it all the time.  From my favorite SQL Query editor tool all was well.  Snap the SQL Select statement into Excel and all I can get is "Initialization failed" and no data. In fact, attempting to get any data (even just from a single table) from this data base gave the same error message. After some fumbling around I realized that we were connecting to the

We do a lot of spreadsheet reporting against a variety of data environments - for example ACT, Quickbooks, and other SQL vertical applications.  By default, Excel does not automatically refresh the data connections when you open the file.  You need to "turn on" this option.  Note, if the data being imported is a large amount, this will mean it will take longer to open your Excel file - which is why it is turned off by default. Here's what you do to turn it on.