Today's tip is something I do all the time. You can run commands from the Windows Explorer address bar. This is very handy if you want to create a file or open a command box in a specific directory. An example of this is launching the ACT Logviewer - a tool I use all the time. It's in the ACT\act for windows folder. I open Explorer and find the folder noted above. I then type "cmd" in the address bar and it opens a DOS box directly in the folder. I can then just type in Logviewer or even

Over the past year, I have been reading a lot of articles about how social media is changing the world of sales. What has been happening recently is I'm actually seeing this in action. A couple of my clients decided to survey their customers to ask them how they preferred to be contacted for sales and if they searched social media for product information. In both cases, the customers responded that they wanted to be more "in charge" of the process of researching products and choosing how they

There are so many social media choices for marketing, that it can be challenging to know which is the best avenue for your product. What's the answer? Well it depends. If your market is 18 to 29 year olds, with average annual incomes of less than $50k, then Instagram is the place to market your products. Higher priced products or services won't do well on that platorm. If you are a B2B, Linkedin and Linkedin Groups are a good choice, along with Twitter, particularly if you are a service or

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

Recently, I was playing around with Don's Samsung phone and stumbled on a neat feature.  Maybe the younger crowd already knew this, but we old keyboarder types forget we can now use our Voice instead of our fingers.  Case in point - you can use voice recognition doing searches and launch it even quicker with a command. Cut down on the time it takes to manually search for things by doing it with your voice. To activate vocal control over Google searches, go to the apps screen and

Ok, I'm mad.  This weekend I am getting to spend time, which I didn't have much of, fixing an issue on my mom's computer.  It's not the fixing my mom's computer that has me mad - it's why we have to do it in the first place.  What happened to her is happening to lots of people and that vulnerability is the real topic of this blog article. Here's what happened. We, as I am sure a lot of you are as well, are the tech support for our parents and their computer usage.