Back in 2009 I wrote a blog article about staying nimble in a bleak economy.  It is sad to note that we are still in that environment.  That made me think it was time to revisit this post and see what had changed.  Interestingly, not much.  I've added a few new items, but here is my take on what we are doing to stay ahead of the grim business reaper. Staying in business is important to my staff and I and we are celebrating our 15th year anniversary in 2013 and I want to make

Once again, I turned to Excel for a data cleanup project. It occurred to me that this would make a good blog article. Here's some techniques I use to help me handle data cleanup. Keeping data together Occasionally, I want to remove blank or incomplete rows. Or, I need to sort by a specific field (for example CITY) so I can find data that are in the wrong columns. If I sort by City, without a particular key, I could potentially lose the correct order for my data. The solution is to add a column

If you are all of a sudden missing history items on the History tab in Sage ACT, make sure the filters have not been set to exclude dates or types of histories. The filter section is on the bar that separates the histories from the top Contact view. I myself have done this - clicked on the History Types to only show, for example, emails, and then forgot to set it back. Flummoxed me no end until I went, duh, slapped forehead, and set it back right again.

Boy, times are tough.  Companies are hurting and I’ve been working with a lot of clients recently who are looking for creative ways to find new or keep existing clients.  These clients all have customer databases and are trying to figure out ways to mine the data and go after any low hanging fruit.  They tell me “the phones aren't ringing” and they need to find ways to make that happen.  In the process of helping people run reports and figure out who to

Linkedin is becoming important in the business world.  If you are on Linkedin, you should have a link to your profile on your email signature.  However, the default URL link for a public profile can be rather ugly, with numbers instead of your name or your business name. It’s  easier to point people to your LinkedIn profile with a customized URL  I have tried to create a standard URL for all my social media locations, including Twitter, Linkedin and Wordpress. Here's how

If you use a custom template all the time in Sage ACT, you should add it to your menu dropdown so it's easier to find.  Here's a way to do that. Templates live in the Template folder that is under the database files associated with your master or remote database.  For remote or local databases, these are usually under My documents\ACT\ACT Data\ and then there is a folder called somename-database files. The somename is the name of your remote database. In that folder are other folders

Starting with version 14 of the Sage ACT diagnostics tool, ACTDIAG, you can now run some ACTDIAG commands via a command line interface. Using the server NT scheduler you can then have them set to run on a periodic basis. First off, here's a list of what you can run via command line. Note, you need to run these on the server hosting the database in question.  This data is also on the help file for ACTDIAG, something I don't thank a lot of people actually look at and should.  You can

Starting with ACT version 2012, you can now create some informative Excel pivot tables using what is called a Star schema.  The data goes after histories and opportunities. Two tables are created.  It’s a bit complicated to set up, but once done you can start to do some sophisticated drill downs in Excel to show history records.  Here’s a screen shot of one pivot table I just created. The one below is using the Opportunities table. Here’s what I was able to produce in