Spring is in the air and it's time for some spring cleaning.  How often do your scrub your contact lists? How often do you check for duplicates and merge them? If you are like most people, not often enough. That's not surprising.  We all get caught up in our day to day work schedules so data cleansing is not high on the priority list.  But it should be.  Bad data costs money - in efficiency, lost revenue, wasted marketing expenditures, and a variety of other ways. And you

An Act! CRM data base contains lots of information and getting it out is frequently the problem you have.  So we tend to look at using different reporting tools, or Microsoft Excel, for the extracting or reporting task.  And the way the data is stored in Act! can sometimes make extracting the information the way you want a bit more difficult than it should be.  But if you understand the data base structure and your SQL Select statements you can do it easily. Here is an example. &

This is another in one of my information ninja articles.  Information Ninja is what one of my customers calls me. I told him, no, it is my job to make him one.  He laughed and said he wasn't quite sure that was the case. But indeed it is.  I know how to find data and report on it - which is what this article is all about. But he knows his business. He knows the numbers he wants to see or, in many cases, what numbers he is not seeing - ie sales calls not being made.  I

ACT is a complex CRM and as such it will periodically have issues with the backend database, SQL.  There is a great knowledgebase article which lists the most recent DBFIXERS - little small executibles that will correct the issue once it's been found.  These are great because often you just run the DBFIXER on the database and don't have to update all computers.  Love it when it's that simple. Here's the link to the article: http://kb.swiftpage.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/24753/

Recently we worked with a client who upgraded their Office to 2013 and ran into this error with editing a template in ACT.  The full error was: "Unable to cast COM object of type 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.ApplicationClass' to interface type 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word._Application'. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID '{00020970-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}' failed due to the following error: The RPC server is

As I sit here tagging names in my ACT database to add to a Christmas Email Wish List, I realized this may not be something other people know about.  It's our Friday did you know. What I do is bring up a list of my contacts and then click the Tag Mode button. This way, when I put my cursor on a contact line it "selects" that contact.  This way I can eyeball search for names of people I want to add to a particular Christmas mailing - you know what I mean.  There are clients we

You can use a product for years and still find something new. It happened to me today - totally by accident.  I find reading lists gets harder on my eyes as the years advance so adding grid lines makes them so much easier to read. Today, while showing a client how to set this using Tools - Preferences in ACT, I accidentally highlighted all the views showing on the left panel and clicked Add Grid Lines - and it did - to all the lists - which is what I wanted but was totally prepared to do

ACT! v17 is here.  And we're bringing it to Memphis.  We're holding a roadshow to highlight the new features, fixes and enhancements as well as showcasing existing capabilities added in the last few releases.  This is not simply a "show you the new stuff" roadshow.   This is a day in the life of Acme Manufacturing. We'll show you how to take your prospect from lead to customer, keep track of equipment, update purchases from your Quickbooks back into ACT and generate amazing