One of my favorite features added to ACT CRM is Universal search.  This capability allows you search anything inside of ACT, including attachments.  You can filter the results as well.  But, hidden, tucked away in help manuals no one ever reads, are some tricks to further define your searching. This blog article will show you those tricks. Using Special Characters and Operators You can use special characters and operators with your search term. Special characters are a symbol

Ever wanted to put together a dog and pony show to demonstrate your services and products? Of course.  Did you think it would take lots of time and money?  You would think that setting this up would probably be a major undertaking that would be a huge time-drain.  I thought so as well.  The first time I had an opportunity to put on a roadshow, I only had a 3 week  advance notice.  At the time, I was very busy and needed to come up with ways to make this happen

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="