Speed up data entry in MYOB

Having recently returned to Melbourne after 1 ½ months in New Zealand managing a smart metering RFP response (an attempt to excuse the long delay since my last post) I came back to a stack of paperwork. Groaning my way through a 100 item bank statement import in MYOB I said the magic words – ‘there must be an easier way’. A quick Google search pointed me to www.macro-expert.com which i downloaded and had the trial version running in 5 mins.  

I went about recording three macros for my most common accounts scenario’s. The wizard makes this easy to do, although i recommend you edit the macro once saved as I’ve shown below and reduce the execution time down to 100ms for each of your actions otherwise when you hit play your mouse delays are mimicked unnecessarily.

 

 

Then it’s just a matter of hitting play or setting a shortcut key and selecting the repeat frequency, i managed to update 10 items sequentially in some cases saving over an hour all up. 

The program did cause my CPU and memory to jump up but i figured out if you stop the Macro Expert service in Control Panel| Administrative Tools| Services and set it to manual start the problem disappeared. I logged a support call and amazingly they responded within 5 mins with a new version which improved the situation but didn’t completely eliminate the 25% CPU jump  however I see a new version for download so it may be fixed now.

It’s not rocket science but it can certainly make life easier.

Tigers Jumping and Climbing

I just returned from a 3 day smart metering conference in the Gold Coast and while talking about smart meters for three days may not rattle your cage the private tiger show we attended at Dream World will.  

I took a couple of videos on my on my Dopod whilst holding a drink in one hand and uploaded them to YouTube directly from my mobile so they’re a little shaky due to a mixture of fear, wine and general lack of coordination. You can watch the tigers running through some ‘actions’ in my video list to the right.  

Remind me not to climb a tree to escape a tiger!

World’s Best Presentation Contest Winners Announced

 Slideshare.net announced the winners of the World’s Best Presentation Contest:

Top Winner (chose by judges)

Book Review – Winners Take All by Tony Seba

The 9 Fundamental Rules of High Tech Strategy

My rating – 5 out of 5

Regardless of whether you’re a garage entrepreneur, medium sized business or large national provider this book is packed with valuable concepts that you can apply to every day business, backed by real life examples written in an easy to digest style.

You’re left thinking each rule should be common sense but all too often you only say that confidently after Mr. Harry Hindsight has dropped by for a visit. Applying and communicating common sense consistently, at the right time, in the right way for the right reason takes skill. That’s why i value books that provide a ‘paint by numbers’ approach you can reuse and apply to your everyday life.

Rule 1 – Feel the Pain. Then Develop Your Product.

Rule 2 – Focus, Win, Grow Repeat.

Rule 3 – Add Value Not Features.

Rule 4 – Have a Story. Communicate Clearly.

Rule 5 – It’s a Risky World. Sell confidence!

Rule 6 – Convert Champions Not Deals.

Rule 7 – Choose the Right Partners. Manage Them With Clarity.

Rule 8 – Design Products and Services That Are Easy to Adopt.

Rule 9 – You’re Doing Well. congratulation. Now change or Die.

It’s one of those books that you need to read a second time and consciously look for scenarios where you can apply the key messages. You can listen to a radio interview with Tony Sebe here Entrepreneur Radio PWC Startup Show.

The Power of Feedback

Given that your reading this blog then chances are you understand the power of feedback in relation to the emerging ‘Web 2.0’ world, where user designed content and interactive collaboration are becoming ‘so last week’. The speed at which new social networks are reviewed on www.mashable.com is enough to make your head spin, most of which understand that generating user feedback is crucial to success.  

So it amazes me that traditional businesses such as the home service providers or gourmet take away restaurants don’t open up communication channels so they can be educated by their customers on how to grow their business.  

For example – A menu was delivered to our apartment building last week which is no small feat as building management are pretty strict on who can supply services to this particular captive market of busy affluent professionals (me excluded). From a boys point of view, it was a well designed menu offering a good range of food at realistic prices all delivered in 20mins. My wife took one look at it and said – “That’s a shame they look like boys meals, there are no salads and they don’t have any low fat options”. Of course I replied “That’s just what I was thinking…”.  

From my perspective this was a reusable convenient service that I was willing to submit feedback on, essentially to try and personalize the menu. Unfortunately there was no website listed or even a suggestion that feedback was welcome. I wasn’t going to call, then ask for the manager who probably wouldn’t be there, but I would have jumped onto their website and provided a few suggestions which may have opened up a completely new market for them – girls.

Given that we are all experts on what we like to eat, what a missed opportunity especially with the word of mouth that would had followed if they had then implemented my (wife’s) suggestion. 

These days it’s a reasonably simple process to setup a content management website like www.dotnetnuke.com at the push of a button through one of the many DNN webhost’s such as www.websecurestores.com. Simply add a feedback module to your landing page or go one step further and create a simple survey like i have done above.

A small prominent link to your website on your menu, receipt or business card encouraging feedback could go a long way refining your business model much faster than trying to figure out what works by yourself. If a customer makes the journey to your website and leaves feedback then chances are you have another opportunity to subscribe them to your monthly newsletter promoting new recipes or specials.    

We are all moving (or have moved) into a world where a personalized experience is expected. Can you afford to miss that one idea from a random stranger which might double profits?

CoPilot Live 6 – I love it…i hate it…i love it!

Having recently moved to Melbourne from a little place with great weather called Wellington (NZ) i prepared myself for getting lost and to my credit, i achieved my goal and some. Once the fun wore off i decided it was time to invest in a GPS but having never used the technology before i wasn’t sure how it would work for me.

I didn’t want to commit to a top end model just yet, especially as SIM cards are starting to be integrated for live traffic feeds and with the price of mobile broadband plummeting, so i settled on a cheaper more portable option – CoPilot Live 6 for about A$490 including a GPS receiver.

The CoPilot windows installer offered to install Copilot onto my Pocket PC (Dopod 838 pro) but unfortunately that didn’t work so i ended up copying across the install files to my mini SD along with all of the map files in the data directory and installed directly from there.

The ‘I love it’ Part

The first couple of drives were great, i entered the destination directly on my Dopod, put the Melways in the boot and ended up at my destination stress free. In an instant, navigating in Melbourne became easy and i had found my new best friend. (OK…probably my only best friend)

The ‘I hate it’ Part

As i became to rely more heavily on CoPilot for getting me from A to B then back to A the relationship started to go a bit pear shaped. I’d be rushing out for a meeting, reach for the Doped to enter an address but instead of a welcome message, I received the dreaded “Cannot open ‘CoPilot…’” error. In fact trying to start copilot just now produced the error:

This left me pretty frustrated on a number of occasions and the only way to fix the problem was to perform one or more soft resets. I figured it must be a memory issiue but the user manual advised that you only need 5-7 Meg of storage RAM and 6-15 MB of program RAM. I had 30 Meg of storage and 20 Meg of program. Closing the SPB today plug-ins seemed to provide a more reliable experience but this was less than ideal.

I’ve used various memory optimizations programs like MemMaid to try and tune the system but so far no luck, i’m just living with it.

The ‘I Love It’ Part again

On a recent trip to Brisbane Copilot reliably took me from Brisbane-Gold Coast-Noosa-Gold Coast-Brisbane in four days and it would have been a mission to navigate my way around without it. Once CoPilot starts, it is reliable and hasn’t let me down once while driving.  The freedom to drive around in new cities like you live there placed CoPilot back in my ‘I love it’ books.

Would i recommend it?

Yes, just prepare yourself for the ocasional soft reset. I havn’t tried the ‘Live’ features but this review provides a good overview of what you can expect.

Sync Google Calender and Outlook 2007 for $10

 

My wife is much better at organising our social events than me and keeps a meticulous diary so she always knows exactly what, when and where. In an attempt to better sycronise our lives i set her up with a Google Calendar which i shared with my own calendar and things were going alone fine. However she didn’t want to re-enter appointments at home in Outlook so asked me to ‘fix’ it. 

I found two solutions that looked reasonable - gSyncit and SyncMyCal. Both offer bi-directional synchronization between Google and Outlook calendars.

gSyncit was only $10 as opposed to SyncMyCal at $25 so i tried that first. Installation went smoothly and adding or deleting events from either calendar appear to be flowing through correctly. There’s an annoying countdown timer on the unregistered version so it’s worth spending the 10 bucks sooner rather than later.

I’ve only been using it a week so providing it plays ball i won’t bother installing SyncMyCal. More importantly i’m adhereing to the following words of wisdom – “Happy wife, happy life”

Are we all becoming Information Architect’s?

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us – A thought provoking video on how we are all helping to structure information…but is the structure sustainable?

If your looking for more ahh.. information on information architecture then i can recommend this book:

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Third Edition