Business Development Productivity KPI Operations Administration Management

The Black Spot.

Feb 07 2012

Every tried to paste text from a website to a Microsoft document and all that appears is a Black Spot?  It is most annoying and quite simple to fix.  Follow the steps below and have your text appear.

This will work for Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

The problem appears to be as a result of a defective Bluetooth add-in for these applications.

(Similar process for Excel and PowerPoint, just use excel.exe, and powerpnt.exe instead of ‘Winword’ in the following)

  1. Click Start button –> Type Winword into the search box
  2. Right click on Winword –> Run as administrator –> Click yes
  3. Click the Microsoft Office Button at the Top Left
  4. Click ‘Word options’ at the bottom
  5. Click the ‘Add-ins’ Tab
  6. Dropdown box at the bottom –> Manage: “COM Add-ins”
  7. Click Go…
  8. Uncheck “Send to Bluetooth”
  9. Press OK

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Social Media – read all about it

Jul 12 2011

Social BubblesI received this from the nice people over at Business Link and thought that you may find it of interest:  Complete social media business guide (pdf 212KB) .

Just click on each one of the links below, and the corresponding articles will appear.

Enjoy the reading!

How to use social media to benefit your business

Find ideas, tips and tricks to help you use social media to really benefit your business (pdf 120KB).

(N)etiquette and what NOT to do
Avoid the pitfalls of social media with our handy tips (pdf 116KB).

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – what’s the difference?
Take a look at our introduction to some of the major platforms and how they differ (pdf 116 KB).

Social media guides and tools
Access a wealth of social media guides and tools from across the internet (pdf 104KB).

 Integrate social media in your overall marketing strategy
Once you get started in the world of social media make sure you integrate the new tools into your overall marketing strategy (pdf 104KB), our handy factsheet shows you how

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Management Information

Jun 02 2011

How difficult do you think it would be to reach an objective given the following facts?

  • You know where you want to go (sort of) you have never been before and you are not sure of how to get there.Maybe
  • You have no idea of how long it is going to take you to get there.
  • How much will it cost you – do you have enough cash?
  • You are almost certain you have a tank of petrol (because you filled up on Wednesday, or was it Tuesday?) – but the petrol gauge in your car has never worked.
  • You are needed at home all day to look after the family.
  • You need to get there before others in order to gain an important advantage which could make a huge positive impact to your life and that of others.

 

You want to get started as soon as possible.  No time to lose.  How do you do it?  It seems like an impossible task!  No petrol gauge, never been before.  Are you stark raving mad?

This is the type of task that Business Managers face when they don’t have Management Information; in the above example, the information needed would be:

  • A plan or strategy
  • A map or GPS
  • Identify a list of possible risks
  • A budget or forecast
  • A working petrol gauge
  • A structure for resolving daily issues at home
  • Awareness of the objectives of others

Management Information is essential for any decision process within the Business.  How to take “informed decisions” without the information?  You may actually reach your destination without it, as some SMEs do.  However, in what condition and how effective, remains to be seen.

Some companies produce MI as a sub-set of numbers during the production of the Accounting practice of the organisation.  Accounts however are produced as a result of the daily activities of the Business and generally occurs after-the-fact.  Missing a target all together is bad enough; but to discover only when you have run out of arrows, makes it even worse.  You could have been much more effective if, after each arrow, you would be told: “left a little” – or even: “right a little” – in order to hit the target.

It is the intelligent Managers that setup additional checks and balances, to help them hit their targets.  They do not need to be as official as the accounts; “left a little” would make a significant difference – enough to get closer to your target – or actually hit it!

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ISO – IOS???

May 16 2011

ISO Logo International Organisation for Standardisation is what the organisation is called in English which would translate to IOS!  However back in the day its founders gave it a shorter name that would make sense in any language and as a result came up with ISO – Greek for isos which means “equal”.  So the  language  doesn’t really matter – the name is always ISO

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Why Standards Matter

We use standards to ensure amongst other things quality of products and services.  We mainly realise that standards are not met when we see a product or service of poor quality.  The international body that concerns itself with this quality standards, be it safety, environment friendliness, reliability or efficiency, and of course, its cost, is the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). Located in Geneve, Switzerland, ISO employs approximately 154 full time staff who help coordinate the already published 18,536 written standard documents which are made up of over three quarters of a million pages in French and English. There are currently nine sectors :

  • Infrastructure and Science
  • Health, Safety and Environment
  • Engineering Technologies
  • Electronics, Information Technology and Telecommunication
  • Transport and Distribution of Goods
  • Agriculture and Food Technology
  • Materials Technologies
  • Construction
  • Special Technologies

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Most popular names

May 02 2011

Most Popular NamesSince I am soon to become a Grandmother for a second time I decided to look into names.  I found a number of interesting articles that show all kinds of statistics and information – really interesting stuff.

For example Olivia (for girls) and Oliver (for boys) are the most popular names in England and Wales in 2009.  Jack had been at the number one spot for over 14 years.

From a total of 706,248 live births in England and Wales in 2009 The Office for National Statistics tells us that the top ten names are as shown below:

Rank Boys Girls
1 Oliver (up one) Olivia (non-mover)
2 Jack (down one) Ruby (non-mover)
3 Harry (up one) Chloe (up three)
4 Alfie (up two) Emily (down one)
5 Joshua (non-mover) Sophie (up two)
6 Thomas (down three) Jessica (down one)
7 Charlie (non-mover) Grace (down three)
8 William (up two) Lily (non-mover)
9 James (non-mover) Amelia (non-mover)
10 Daniel (down two) Evie (non-mover)

 

Although somewhat unrelated to the rest of my articles I felt an interest to this data and wanted to share.  A simple way to relate the article to “productivity” would be to mention that according to the same source Fertility rates have fallen!

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