Today after my Rotary meeting I witnessed something quite interesting.  One of the members had locked his keys in his car.  He got on his cell phone and called his wife who then clicked on the remote device she had on her key chain, and I'll be darned, it opened his car.  Oh my gosh. So today's nifty lesson is this.  if your car allows remote key-less entry - i.e. you have a clicker to open the door, then you can do the following. When/if  you lock your keys in the car

It's time for another Fast Tip article. This tip I will show today has been around a while. I just learned of it as part of my ongoing research on all things Google. Ever need to provide your email and know for a fact you are going to be spammed in return? Of course. We all have. Well, it turns out there is a way to give out your Gmail email with a little modification that you can then filter out of your incoming mail. All you have to do is add a + sign and some text after your name and before

Today's quick blog article will talk about a favorite formula string I use time and time again.  If you read my blog, you know I use Excel as my tool of choice for data manipulation. My challenge today was to find and match emails in two columns.  What I wanted to do was weed out emails that were duplicated in both columns.   I used a formula and will explain it below. Let's use the following list as my example: Column A Column B Column C This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  

A client called and asked me about Twitter ads. He wanted to know if they were worth the investment.  I told him I hadn't looked into it yet and set out to find out what I could for my own benefit as well.  Along the way, I discovered something nifty and free.  But really really hidden from plain view.  Which is true of a lot of things.  What I found is the topic of this blog article - Twitter Analytics. Here's what you need to do to find these little gems.  Logon

This week I had an interesting conversation with a client. They know we, as a business, are active on social media and are seeing benefits.  My customer has been dabbling in the space for a while but is finding it too hard to keep up with the effort and is considering allowing their employees to also participate in helping with social media.  They asked me what is the right approach to take and after our discussion I realized it would make a good blog article. Social media and the

This image is a screenshot of all of us during a video staff meeting. We're using Google Hangouts and headsets.  All of us have webcams - which pretty much come with newer laptops. Seeing each other in person is SO MUCH MORE effective than just participating on a phone call. The participants are in Chattanooga, Pikeville and Phoenix - but in reality we are all together in the same moment - and that's priceless.  We may never go back to just phone call meetings.   [caption id="

[caption id="attachment_1525" align="alignleft" width="300"] When planning a company strategy be prepared for nothing or extremes.[/caption] If you read my blog, you know we work with and support act!, a CRM tool that is going on 26 years old. It's a great product and one I believe in strongly. I can't imagine a company, particularly a small one, trying to survive without a tool like act! Recently, act! was purchased by Swiftpage. Note that I am showing act with a lower case letter - that's by

[caption id="attachment_1516" align="alignleft" width="300"] The skiils of an architect and consultant make a perfect marriage of styles and ideas for helping a business grow.[/caption] My youngest son is an architect. We, including my oldest son, are computer and business consultants. Sitting in the living room one night we started talking about what he does and how it compliments what we do. We ask a lot of questions when working with clients. The questions are to help us understand the