Last week, during my 3rd Act! Deep Dive, I talked about finding "gems" of data in your database and then taking actions on them.  It reminded me that I had written an article years ago about this topic. When I went and found it I realized it's still relevant and I've resurrected for a blog post today. This is the article with a few modifications to bring it current. In the past I have written articles and blog posts talking about drilling down into your customer data.  No matter

I work with Excel so often that I forget that things I do all the time and take for granted may not be widely known or used.  Today is yet another example.  While working on a client spreadsheet I did something that made my client exclaim and stop me mid-stream to show him what I had done. We were working on multiple sheets in a workbook - actually it was his Paypal transactions and we were preparing sheets for each month.  He had already started the sheets and I was putting in

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.  

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

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. &