One of the cool things you can do with ACT! is pull in data into Excel for nice pivot charts and tables.  However, every once in a while Excel and ACT get a "divorce."  By that I mean they stop talking to each other and you get an error when you attempt to connect to a table in ACT.  Here's our tip to fix this. I just ran into this on my own ACT database and stumbled on a known fix that is actually quite simple.  You remove your ACT password.  Yep.  That simple. &

It's Fast Tip time.

Are you out of town and having a problem doing an Internet sync with ACT? Some routers will get grumpy with DNS settings or proxies, especially hotels. This will cause the sync to not work. Here's something that might help.

Open a Command prompt - make sure you right click on the Command Prompt and choose Run as Administrator. Then, on the prompt, type in the following:

ipconfig /flushdns

This will clear out your computers "brain" and what it remembers as DNS settings.

While practicing for my upcoming Virtual Roadshow, I noticed that when I went into Remote Desktop to access my virtual machine, it was not truly going full screen. Well, that was a bummer. I closed the remote desktop session and when I clicked on the Remote Desktop icon to restart it, I decided to click on the Options button to see if I could resolve this issue.  Sure enough, when I clicked on the DISPLAY tab, there was a slider bar that was not all the way to the right.  Once I

We're starting a weekly "Friday Did you Know?" blog  that we hope you find helpful.  Sometimes a quick tip that we "assume" everyone knows is not so well known.  It's the classic don't assume action.  Here's this week's post. A really nice trick that has been part of the ACT CRM forever is the ability to search a special group of fields that start with ANY.  What this means is you don't have to remember where the phone number is shown - cell or home or business.  

Having issues with some functions when using ACT Premium for the Web from Google Chrome? It's probably because your Chrome was updated to Version 37. In the process of removing some functions inside Chrome, they also disabled one used by ACT Premium for the web. Here's the workaround.

Right click on the icon you use to start Chrome.  You need to add the following paramert to the start line:  --enable-show-modal-dialog

The image below shows how this should look.

Yet again, I met with a new client to discuss their current business "problem" or like I call them - "challenge."  The client called me looking for a silver bullet or tool.  By the end of the discussion, I believe I had them headed down the right path - that of better defining the process and problem and coming up with an appropriate solution that may or may not be based on a specific tool. This happens all the time.  That made me realize it would make a good blog article.  

So you have a copy of our Duplicate Remover Wizard Expert for Act! and have set out to manage/reduce the duplicate contacts or companies in your Act! data base.  You run the program and it finds a good set of duplicates and you set the program to merging the records.  All indications are progress is being made.  Then, the next thing you see is this: The screen that then comes up appears to be filled with messages like this. Working on Fred Flintstone 8/31/2012

CRM. We have all heard that term by now. To many it means having a process in place to manage customer relationships. To others it is a tool. To me, it's all of the above. But before you can define what CRM means to you, you need to have an end goal in mind. What is the end result you want to accomplish. Are you small business trying to get new customers? Are you a large organization wanting to reach out to existing clients to improve the relationship you have with them? Are you suffering from