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If in Doubt, Press Enter

Right about the time I began to classify student questions, I realized that The Answer is Always “YES” I also pondered the issues I was asked to resolve at the desk-side.

I was teaching 6 days and 4 nights each week, and had plenty of time to smile and walk back to the student’s computer to inspect the problem.

In about 90% of the cases I recognized the dialog box that was holding up the student and could re-assure them to plough right ahead. It was a novel dialog box, not a malevolent one.

The remaining 10% of the cases required that I actually READ what was in/on the dialog box, and then offered a suitable course of action, which was inevitably to click the highlighted button.

Then I began examining the initial 90% closely. Same deal.

In all cases the safest, surest line of action was via the highlighted command button on the dialog box.

The alternative to “clicking” is of course to tap the Enter key.

  • Hence the maxim:

If in Doubt, Press Enter

Try it for Yourself

A great many users of spreadsheets are mystified by cHarts. The dialog boxes appear in a sequence of 5 or 6, each dialog box cluttered with options, buttons, boxes, drop-down lists, and so on.

In your favorite spreadsheet program (doesn’t have to be Excel) key in a small block of data and select that data, row-headings and column-headings too.

From the menu system choose Insert, cHart, glance at the confusing dialog box for 2 seconds, then tap the Enter key. Continue tapping the Enter key until a chart appears.

OK, so it’s not the chart you wanted, but you didn’t have to sit and stare at a hurdle for 20 minutes.

Repeat the process (Insert, cHart …) and spend just a little more time at each dialog; see if you can spot where you might make a change before proceeding.

The Point is this

Regular Windows Applications (1) are always designed to highlight the safest, best option for the user.

  • Tapping the Enter key will ALWAYS move you forwards.
  • It will SOMETIMES take you places you didn’t want to go.
  • It will NEVER take you places you didn’t ought to go!

How Confident Am I?

Around about this time (1994) I wrote a short article, a challenge, that the trade paper Computing Canada picked up and published, offering $50,000 ($US 50,000 on Fridays!) and a free lunch anywhere in Toronto to anyone who could find a regular Windows application that violated this trust.

I got a few arguments by email, but no winners.

Do You Really Want to Delete?

The most anxious question surrounded this prompt, which I always countered by repeating the title of this article “If in doubt, press Enter”, and asking “What is there to DOUBT about deleting files? If truly you are not sure, then don’t delete!”.

If in doubt, press Enter

(1)  “Sex Goddess of the Midnight Vampires” and stuff like that obviously excluded.

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By ChrisGreaves – January 23, 2012

When Better is Better Than Best

My howls of outrage were heard clear across the Atlantic Ocean. The second system melt-down in a month.

Another day in recovery. And it took too long.

Which made me think.

I backup my data drive to TWO external drives each night, so I was up-to-date as at the close of business yesterday, but I did lose one email that arrived after that backup, and losing the boot sector on my C: drive meant I had to go back to the post-installation system of three weeks ago.

Perhaps I should take a snapshot (called an ISO file) of my system drive each Saturday morning to a third drive. And immediately after that I should install any Windows Updates lurking in the wings. And then I should install any system enhancements I’d been planning.

It’s what Saturday mornings are good for.

It might also help to copy my mail boxes across to a spare networked computer every hour. Just in case.

There’s probably more I can do (“there’s always a better way”), but these changes would make my life easier the next time the system crashes.

And it will.

The Best?

The trouble with trying to achieve the best Right Now is that it’s usually unattainable, because once we have implemented a solution, we have learned more, and can see a better way.

  • If I wait until I’m sure I’ll get it absolutely, one hundred percent perfect, I’ll never get it out-the-door.
  • If I stockpile enough articles to be sure of having on ready each day for the next year, I’ll not publish my first blog post, whereas “this is my first blog post” tells the truth and gets me going.
  • If I wait for the perfect introductory tweet, I’ll lose six months compared to someone who tweets “I’m tweeting”.

My backup policy will never be perfect, because the world and I aren’t perfect, but instituting a better backup policy is a step along the way.

Same thing applies to our Windows skills. There’s more to the keyboard than Alt-Tab to switch between tasks, but that tip alone will save you hours of needlessly closing and opening applications and files.

It’s better than it was.

Same thing applies to losing weight. If I can shed just one pound this month, I’ll still not be at my goal. But I’ll be one pound closer.

And next month …

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By ChrisGreaves – January 16, 2012

The Answer is Always “YES”

I threw my bedroom slipper at the TV as the politician answered Mike Duffy’s question: “Well, you see, Mike, we have to remember that …”

  • Drone, drone, drone, push agenda, evade the issues.

The question required a simple answer, “Yes” or “No”, but the question was dismissed and a self-serving statement took its place.

The next morning, facing a class of end-users for a course in Advanced Excel I found myself droning, pushing my own agenda (“I’m really great, you see!”) and avoiding the issue.

I decided to be better than any politician, by listening to the question (Now there’s a concept!) and answering the question; elaborating only if the enquirer asked for elaboration.

Two weeks later I confided to Bess King that I’d discovered a shocking fact:-

  • I’d answered every question in class with “Yes”.

No “No’s”.

In two weeks, 5 days a week. Intelligent business types, Windows desktop applications.

How Could this Be?

It turned out that the ONLY question students asked were of the nature “Can I bold this?”, “Can I copy this?”, “Can I paste this?”, “Can I rotate this?”, and so on.

So at the start of the next class, 9 a.m., I announced that I was going to answer every question with “Yes”.

Stunned silence for ten seconds, and then “Really?”

  • Yes.

“All day?”

  • Yes.

“No matter what the question is?”

  • Yes.

Why is this?

It turns out that people attend classes to get answers, and the questions they pose are realistic, and all boil down to one type:

“Will this computer system help me get my job done?”

Now if the answer to that form of question is ever given as “No”, then the next question has to be “Then what is this lump of metal-and-plastic doing on my desk?”

Of Course!

We had a few interesting questions. Like the petite brunette who smiled at me from the front row and asked cheekily “Will you marry me?”.

  • Yes.

And why not? I could do worse than marry a woman who has courage to ask cheeky questions, who thinks outside the box, who enjoys mental tugs-of-war.

That September I ate in the Al Lago with Rick and made the comment that I’d driven in every mainland state of the United States except for Alaska.

“So, are you going to drive to Alaska?”.

  • Yes.

(Astonished) “When did you decide that?”.

Just now.

And the next May I drove my little Hyundai Excel to Prince Rupert, then through Terrace, Whitehorse, Fairbanks and Anchorage, back through Whitehorse, Terrace to Prince Rupert, and then back home to Toronto.

23,000 kilometers in 29 days.

Was it The Trip of a Lifetime?

Yes

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By ChrisGreaves – January 9, 2012

Super-Glue Your Finger

What are the most common operations you perform on your material?

  • Copying, Cutting and Pasting rank there on the list, for sure, as does Bolding text, Saving a file, and the ever-ready Edit-Undo to correct mistakes.
  • Do you ever want to change the font in your Microsoft Word document? I bet you do!
  • Find-and-replace? For Sure!
  • Closing the current document Window? Yeah!

For me, selecting the entire document, worksheet or folder is pretty high up on my list. I often want to copy all the text from a Microsoft Word document and paste it into Notepad, then copy it back again, to shed extraneous fluff that has accumulated.

So what do we have on our list?

Edit-Undo
Cut
Copy
Paste
Bold
Select All
File Save
Change Font
Find-Replace
Close Window

Take a look at the table I’ve made.

If you think that those operations make up about 90% of what you do with a word-processing document (or spreadsheet or email …), then read on.

Otherwise I don’t want to waste your time.

Now I’m going to reproduce that table with the Microsoft Word short-cut key combinations alongside each operation. The shortcut keys are about the same for Excel and your eMail program, although Excel doesn’t have a Font command as such.

Edit-Undo Ctrl-Z
Cut Ctrl-X
Copy Ctrl-C
Paste Ctrl-V
Bold Ctrl-B
Select All Ctrl-A
File Save Ctrl-S
Change Font Ctrl-D
Find-Replace Ctrl-F
Close Window Ctrl-W

Chances are strong that you recognize and use some of these shortcut key combinations.

If you’d like to take a moment to try them out on a Microsoft Word document, go right ahead.

I’ll wait.

Ah! You’re Back!

What did you notice?

That’s right!

All those keys are clustered at the extreme left of your keyboard.

That’s why I recommend you super-glue the little finger of your left hand to the Ctrl key of your keyboard.

You’ll save yourself hours of time, each week!

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By ChrisGreaves – January 2, 2012

Gearing Up

So I had this colleague who traveled to Ottawa and back, once a month, from Toronto.

About 450 Km each way.

On Foot.

Took him forever.

Walking.

About a week each way, longer if the weather was bad and he was forced to take shelter in a diner; small fortune in shoes. The works.

“Why not buy a small car?” I suggested, and after a few months of arm-twisting, a little 4-cylinder was purchased and off he set at great speed.

Six months later we met again for lunch. “So. How’s the car?” I asked.

“Absolutely marvelous” came the eager response. “You should have told me to buy one earlier” (It’s always the consultant’s fault). I never could have believed I could make the trip in a single day. Less than 15 hours if the weather’s not too bad.

15 hours?

Yep!

At the car dealership, the dealer had shown my colleague how to put the car in first gear and start forwards.

“But it’s true what they say about road-rage”, my colleague continued; “You wouldn’t believe the abuse heaped on me by people going past, and I lost count of the number of times I was almost rear-ended.”.

That’ll happen to you if you try to putter along Highway 401 at 30 Km/hour.

“PUT IT IN DRIVE”, I screamed. “You’ll get there in 5 hours instead of 15, won’t damage your engine, and have a better chance of staying alive”.

Oh no. You see, it’s already so much better doing the trip in 15 hours instead of seven days, what with all the savings in shoe-leather for the feet, shoe-leather in the diners, and motel costs. The ROI is already so great; why complain or risk upsetting the apple-cart?

OK, so I made this story up. Sort of.

It’s not about a car; it’s about a computer, and a client who finally went out and bought a computer, had the sales clerk show her how to double-click with the mouse and has been driving in first gear ever since.

Her spreadsheets are built not with formulas, but by calculating the results on a hand-held calculator (I’m NOT making this up) and then keying the numeric result into the adjoining cells.

“Why bother to spend time learning about formulas? This is already so much more professional than the old hand-written spreadsheets I used to produce”.

And we haven’t got into functions, or automated procedures with GUI input forms, let alone logging transactions into a database.

You know who you are.

Get into Drive.

Now.

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By ChrisGreaves – December 26, 2011

Computers Don’t Solve Problems

Gerry arrived mid-afternoon after a frantic drive across town.

Gerry arrived with a manila folder and a memory key and a worried look.

And a “Let’s Get Started!”

I led Gerry to the board-room table where sat a manila folder of my own, within it a single sheet which bore the word “Goal” and about ten numbered lines “Objective 1”, “Objective 2”, “Objective 3” and so on.

Against Gerry’s protestations that we go straight to the computer, with his memory key, to solve his problem, we sat at the table.

Because the computer ultimately spits out a result, because the computer can and does process our data to give us information, we tend to see the computer as the solution.

Reality: The computer is merely the vehicle for our solution.

Our solution is a process, devised by us, to transform our data into information.

Firing up a copy of Microsoft Excel is arguably the worst thing we can do when faced with a problem.

  • What’s the point of jumping into a car and driving off, if you don’t know where you want to go?
  • What’s the point of jumping into a spreadsheet and keying in formulas, if you don’t know what you need to calculate? Let alone HOW to calculate it.

As an experimental device to see if there is an ROI function, or whether rounding occurs, by all means. That’s the equivalent of testing the turning circle of a car.

But the solution is a process that will always be devised by the human mind, and as such there’s no substitute for human thought, cogitation by humans, specification by humans, clarification by humans, documentation by humans, propositions by humans, tests by humans.

And most of all, the setting of goals by humans and the serialization of objectives by humans, all with the thought of satisfying the needs of humans.

Give me the board-room table and a pile of paper and a pencil any day.

P.S. Also an eraser.

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By ChrisGreaves – December 19, 2011

Condo Cars

There’s a great promotional opportunity for some car manufacturer in Toronto right now.

It centers on Condominiums with high proportions of retired or semi-retired seniors and affluent workers.

Consider a condominium like The Masters in Central Etobicoke, with about 480 units.

A large proportion of residents no longer drive to work, teach in school, manage the branch office, or what have you, but lead a leisurely life punctuated by trips to see the grandkids, a weekly grocery-shopping trip, and an occasional doctor’s appointment or regular hair-dressing appointment.

Let’s guess that 6, or perhaps 10 at most cars provided by a car manufacturer would make a large enough pool to satisfy 50 to 100 car-less residents and see what happens.

In no particular order:

(1) Reduction in parking spaces required.

(2) Toronto has over 2,000 high-rise buildings, assume that one-quarter of them are condominiums. (Brian Persaud)

(3) Bookings made to registered condo owners only, and made through the condo management office.

(4) Gas, maintenance and repair costs included in the agreement.

(5) Manufacturer has 6 to 10 cars on the road, driven by 50 to 100 people who might not otherwise have tried the car. (Put-the-puppy-in-their-hands)

(6) Worst case and the car needs serious repairs, you still have cars available in the pool. (With your own car you do without, or rent a car)

(7) Residents have an option to buy a known car at the end of its 3(?) year life.

(8) Car-share has to be cheaper per resident than car ownership.

(9) Cleaning and detailing taken care of by management.

(10) Hourly or daily rates cater for long and short trips.

There are many more positive points, but those should get you started.

And as usual, it’s real easy to dream up negative aspects, but for starters think only of the positive factors to see if the dream is worth pursuing.

And finally please note that I suggest this for CONDOMINIUM OWNERS living in well-organized entities with stable populations and strict by-laws, enforceable by management.

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By ChrisGreaves – December 14, 2011

How to Spot the Genuine Article

Now this is too good not to share; there I am minding my own business when the phone rings. I recognize the name (Telemarketing is Crippling the Nation) as IT World Canada, so I pick up the phone. At the other end is a mild-well-mannered person who is, however, reading from a script. May as well be a robot.

Therefore, from my point of view, NOT the genuine article. A human would engage in dialogue, gathering information, rather than send out vast amounts of data. Especially for a first-time call.

Nice enough guy; love to meet him; but not as a broadcast agent, better as a human. More interesting too, I’m sure.

But I Digress

Why are they selling me a subscription to a PDF-format newspaper? Isn’t that something that would be freely available, download from their web site?

And if so, how did I miss it?

IT World Canada is prominent in my daily 4 a.m. perusal of newspapers called my "Daily Dose"

After all, IT World Canada is prominent in my daily 4 a.m. perusal of newspapers called my “Daily Dose”.

So I wander off to the IT World Canada site, search for “PDF files” in case there is a catalogue of PDF subscriptions, and notice a video Spotting Counterfeit Software.

About 1m 20s into the 2m 40s video, Chris Tortorice “Corporate Council, Microsoft Canada” comes on the screen and at the 1m 48s mark lets fly with “You can see this one says it’s MADE IN THE USA; the genuine product for North America is made in PUERTO RICO”.

So there you have it.

“Caveat Emptor”, as they say in ponky English universities.

If it’s made in the USA, chances are it’s a fake!

You Have Been Warned!

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By ChrisGreaves – December 13, 2011

Give Your Best Client a FREE Gift this Christmas

This year I’m repeating my Christmas offer to my all contacts:

You can offer your best or favorite client a sample one of my three current specialist courses:-

1 Essential Windows Skills for Professionals

2 Templates & Styles

3 How Excel REALLY works

Here’s how it works:-

  • You pick one of your clients who deserve a superb gift
  • You contact me to select one of the three courses above.
  • I supply you with a signed, numbered certificate that you pass on to your client.
  • Your client contacts me to arrange a date and time and location.

Your client thanks you for your gift of a high-class in-depth presentation based on nearly 20 years of developing Instructional and motivational techniques that really gets people going.

Here’s what Diane Blackburn had to say

There is always a lingering doubt upon signing up for a software training course. The field is so vast that one can never be assured of learning what one believes they most need to know. Yet so many of the daily tasks performed at the keyboard are functions of efficiency that never come to light in most training sessions.

Chris Greaves has definitely found the solution to those missing efficiencies with current course offering, Essentials of Microsoft Excel and Word Automation Skills.

Half an hour into the session, and a quarter of the way through a coffee, I had a eureka moment – followed immediately by the realization that I had wasted months of my life (perhaps years!) performing simple functions in an inefficient way – the result, no doubt, of:

1) Being self taught in a trial and error, last minute rush sort of fashion

2) Coming to the PC world as a mature adult, and

3) Learning from helpful others who were also poorly trained and mostly mouse-centric

Now that I have had my world view of keyboarding turned around, I am diligently trying to implement the new behaviors for my long term benefit – no easy task when your formation was not keyboard oriented.

I enjoyed the training so much that I would look forward to a refresher or whatever next skill level is in Chris’s master plan to make us all more efficient in our use of computer software.

Diane Blackburn; Gracie & Associates (Conference & Event Planning); 647-345-6675, Diane@GracieAssociates.CA

The Fine Print

There’s not a lot; this is an up-front offer with no strings, but lots of benefits attached.

I limit myself to FOUR gifts only, so it’s first-come-first-served. A gift is deemed to be served (reducing the number remaining) once your client has fixed a date, time and place.

If outside the Toronto/Mississauga area, client pays for travel costs, but let’s chat. (contact details at top of page)

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By ChrisGreaves – December 12, 2011

Telemarketing is Crippling the Nation

Our business affairs are being leached dry by telemarketers.

Without call-display, you are tired of picking up the phone to listen to a pre-recorded voice from Phoenix AZ telling you of the delights of an Alaskan Cruise.

With call-display you are getting a crick in your neck from twisting to see if that’s Beth calling back; it isn’t.

Here’s the true cost

Many large businesses and government organizations now show up as “Unknown Caller” or similar on your call-display.

What does that mean to you?

  • Your phone rings.
  • You glance at it.
  • You don’t recognize the number.
  • You ignore it.

And they don’t leave a message.

  • What if it was an agent of the CIRA?
  • What if it was an agent of the FRO?
  • What if it was a client of yours, a major hospital that shall remain nameless, out near the Credit River Valley.
  • What if it was your lawyer nearby at Six Points Plaza, just 2 miles east of you?

You are unlikely to land in court over a skipped phone call; something in writing generally has to be handed to you before that happens, but you are likely to miss an opportunity to engage in a revenue-generating conversation with your client, or to respond to a plea for urgent help from a colleague who is using an un-identified cell-phone at his end.

And your business will incur delays in the process. (Who hasn’t sat by the phone waiting for the client to respond to the proposal?).

This whole business of telemarketing calls with unlisted numbers leads the general population to ignore ALL unlisted numbers, and that incurs an absolutely unnecessary delay in business practices across the country.

That’s cooling the machinery of industry, commerce and personal relationships at a time when we have the best technology ever to facilitate human relationships.

What’s the answer?

It’s not an anti-spam measure such as we use for eMails; I add a Friend to my spam-filter during the first phone call, not after.

Devices exist that filter incoming numbers and suppress the ring (and in some cases the voice mail) if the number does not belong to a specified list, and no, they aren’t the gate-keeper who sits out at the reception desk.

Filtering out an unknown cell-phone number helps nobody when my colleague borrows a client’s cell phone to call me with an urgent problem.

I don’t know the perfect answer; but I know one.

Stop the telemarketing business.

Every telemarketing call is traceable by the phone company. Truly stiff personal fines for the perpetrators; enough to put them out of business, including their property and companies. Something like the vehicle-impounding under Ontario’s stunt-driving law. But more draconian.

The national economy suffers too much for this blight, blithely labeled “telemarketing”.

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By ChrisGreaves – December 8, 2011