Projects Possible

I don’t have my Microsoft Certification but I have often wondered how I could accomplish certification training while still working.  Online leaning opportunities seem to be the answer.  QuickCert is one of the online companies that offers Microsoft Training.   For an adult learning like me that likes to learn in many different ways their program seems to include not only instructor led sessions but demonstrations, labs, practice exams and simulations all designed to achieve success and obtain your certification.   Combine all that with a money-back guarantee if you do not obtain your certification after using their training materials and you have a winning solution to Microsoft certification.

By my own admission I am NOT a Microsoft Excel expert.  I know enough about the application to make me dangerous. 

I use Excel pretty extensively in my day to day work activities, and in my continuing effort to streamline my day I decided that I needed to add some functionality to my project management spreadsheet.  This spreadsheet has really become my single point of information for all of the projects that I work on and I wanted to enhance it even further by integrating it with Outlook.

The integration that I had in mind was to read through the TASKs that I have detailed in my Excel worksheet and IF there was a due date to create a task for me in Outlook using this date as the due date and various other information from the spreadsheet as my subject.   I certainly didn’t have the expertise needed to complete this task on my own so I headed out on the Internet to find a solution.

Google is a great thing! Within a matter of minutes I had any number of resources available to me from my search terms about Creating Outlook Tasks from Excel.   Many of them included quoted scripts that gave me a head-start on what I wanted to do but ultimately none of them quite met my specific criteria.  I decided what I should probably do is simply pose the question to the experts in some of the forums that Google was pointing me to.

Now keep in mind that your mileage may vary at these sites.  I’m simply telling you of my experience.  I’m sure with the thousands and thousands of posts that each of these sites have that either would be a good place to get solutions.

I went to http://www.excelforum.com/to start with.    This particular site had helped me a number of months prior with a question I had about populating a cell with a date when I clicked on a check-box.  Within a matter of hours I was up and running with the script that I needed to perform this task.  My Outlook task on the other hand did not get the same type of response.   I was provided with virtually the same code that I had found doing Google searches and when it came to customizing that code my post sat unanswered.

A few weeks later I decided that I would try to reinvigorate the project and again get on my trek to higher productivity.  I Googled again and this time I found a post at http://www.ozgrid.com/forums-  It actually had a few Google hits that led me to believe there were people there that knew exactly what I was wanting to do.  I can tell you that on this site you need to heed the warnings of reading the RULES. And that the rules are Strictly enforced.  You have plenty of opportunity because they are part of the main page, you hear about it in the registration, and even when you are ready to post.

Read more »

In my job it is not uncommon for me to visit with customers and need to be able to access the functionality of Microsoft Office Word or Excel only to find that my customer does not own the Office Suite.   To handle this situation I can either get what I need and email it to myself so that I can use it on my laptop,  connect my laptop to their network and try to get it configured correctly, OR I can go to OpenOffice.org and download their open source (free) suite of applications that are compatible with virtually all that I would ever need.

 The suite of tools include:

• Writer - This is a Word Processor compatible with Word
• Calc - The spreadsheet compatible with Excel
• Impress- Presentation software that is like Powerpoint
• Draw - Draw diagrams with this one
• Base - Database application similar to Access
• Math - Equation/Formula solver

I can highly recommend them and for all but the most complicated of “OFFICE” documents or spreadsheets.  Compatability for me has never been an issue.