There is a nice list of some of the top tips for MS Word on Tech Radar that is worth checking out. You can find it here.

Among the topics covered:

• Copy and Paste settings
• Showing and hiding the ribbon menu
• Numbering pages
• How to compare documents

Having things set up as you need them to be will save you both time and frustration down the road as you can skip the manual tasks that are no longer needed.

You’ve likely used Excel’s autofill functionality to fill in rows or columns with the names of months or days of the week. You do it by typing in the first few manually and then selecting the cells and dragging the “fill handle” (the “+” at the lower right hand corner of the selection). But did you know that you can do this with custom lists too? If you have a list of values that you find yourself frequently typing in manually this will be very helpful for you.

To create a custom autofill list follow these steps:

1. Click on File
2. Click on Options
3. Click on Advanced
4. Scroll down to nearly the bottom of the Advanced menu.
5. In the General Heading, click Edit Custom Lists
6. Click New List and enter your values

You can now autofill rows and columns in Excel sheets using your new custom list. Give it a try and eliminate some of the repetitive manual work.

1. Alert you to emerging crises – Not only can BI tools keep you up to date on the business and how it is running with regularly scheduled reports, but they can also be set up to alert you when certain criteria thresholds are exceeded. This will allow you to react immediately.
2. Eliminate Waste – By viewing the key performance indicators and metrics that your business relies on, you will be able to identify areas of waste and reduce them.
3. Keep up with the competition – In a competitive environment, BI tools can help you keep an eye on your competitors and react to market trends accordingly through benchmarking.
4. Forecasting – Historical data can be used to forecast future quarters and make decisions based on where it appears the business is heading.
5. Highlight trends you did not know existed – Dashboards and data mining can display data in wasy you might not have otherwise thought about it, revealing trends that you need to respond to.
6. Identify opportunities – By knowing, for example, which marketing campaigns are most successful, or which customers are most profitable your company can act quickly and correctly in response to opportunities.
7. Metrics are available when and where you need them – Business intelligence tools today are available not only at your computer but on your phone or tablet, making it easier to have access to your data.
8. Remove the need for guesswork – You have the answers now so there is no need to guess at what might work. You have the data to back up your decisions.
9. Improve efficiency – You can work on the things that matter and that provide the most value. You can also be more efficient in your reporting structure because the data is now at your fingertips and you no longer need to dig for it.
10. Set goals – By seeing where your company has been and where it currently is, you can set goals for future growth.

Take the example of customer loyalty cards. You probably have a couple in your wallet right now – to ice cream shops, coffee shops, bookstores, and on and on. Those can be incredibly useful for businesses looking to increase customer loyalty. Take a look at this example of two different loyalty card scenarios.

Card A – The card has slots for 10 stamps or hole punches, each of them blank since you have not yet purchased anything. When all 10 slots have been filled, you receive your reward.

Card B – The card has 12 slots to be filled, but comes with 2 already stamped. Same as Card A, you receive your reward when all 12 slots have been filled.

In each case you have to fill 10 slots before you receive your reward. But are you more likely to Card A or Card B first? They should be the same, you might say. There are 10 slots to fill, so why would they be different?

The “goal-gradient” effect, initially studied and hypothesized by Clark L. Hull, an American Psychologist, says that Card A will be filled faster than Card B will be. Hull studied this effect in rats, noting that rats running a maze would run faster as they got to the end of the maze. Dr. Susan Weinschenk, a Psychologist, says, “The goal-gradient effect says that you will accelerate your behavior as you progress closer to your goal.”

Derek Halpern, on his blog Social Triggers, made note of this goal-gradient effect in a customer loyalty focused study at a car wash.

On two consecutive Saturdays, they gave out a total of 300 customer loyalty cards. Half of those required 8 purchases to earn a free car wash. The other half required 10, but instead of requiring the full 10, the car wash gave 2 car wash head-start as a free bonus.

This means, in both scenarios, customers still needed to make 8 additional purchases before they could redeem a free car wash. The only difference was varying degrees of completeness. On one hand, customers were 0% complete, and on the other, they were 20% complete.

Now the question is, would this “artificial” progress increase customer loyalty?

During the next 9 months, 28 out of 150 people without a head-start earned a free car wash, but 51 out of 150 people with the head-start earned a free car wash. That’s an increase of 82%!

This same concept can be very powerful in your business. Some things to keep in mind about this goal-gradient effect:

• People are more motivated to reach the goal as they get closer to it.
• This motivation to reach the goal can be increased even with the illusion of progress (think of Card B with 12 slots to fill but 2 already completed)
• People respond to reward programs

One additional thing to keep in mind is what happens after your customer reaches the goal set before them. When those loyalty cards get filled up and the customer receives their reward is when you are at the biggest risk of losing them. That is why you need a 2nd level reward to keep them interested.

This does not just have to apply to brick and mortar retail stores. Think outside the box a bit and come up with ways that you can use this loyalty card example in your own business to generate more sales.

Simply navigate here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/guides-to-the-ribbon-use-office-2003-menus-to-learn-the-office-2007-user-interface-HA010229584.aspx

From there, you can either launch the guide right from the webpage or you can download it onto your own computer. It makes finding those old menu items so easy. The guides allow you to click through an old MS Office menu (such as Word, PowerPoint, or Excel) and as you do so it gives you an on screen guide to where you can find that command in the ribbon now in use in newer versions.

Bookmark the page and give it a try. It makes finding those old, forgotten tools so much easier.

The idea that something can so clearly be right in front of us without us seeing it is crazy. But it happens. All the time. If you do a quick Google search for “inattention blindness” you’ll see all sorts of results pop up. Most talk about our tendency not to see change or not to see something in our surrounding environment. However, I want to extend that a bit further and apply it to business.

Data is very popular right now. As we dvelop better systems to track and store data, the implications of it are huge. People track data in places you would never imagine and that dta can prove to be extremely valuable. Seeing business insights such as sales trends and ad response rates can help a business make decisions as to how to operate and create the best return on their investment. But what if you’re missing something in that data? We often go in looking for an answer to a specific question. Of course, that can be a very good thing – we just want to make sure we don’t miss something else that is right in front of us.

This is where data mining comes in. Data mining is the process of looking for and finding patterns in data that are not necessarily obvious at first glance. Many times, these patterns can provide insights into our sales or operations that we were not even looking for. Data mining can help provide answers to questions that we did not even know existed. This is part of the reason that storing your data in a way that you can visualize it is so important in the world of business today. Dynamic dashboards allow you the opportunity to move your data around and to create new reports and data views all the time. They can help you find answers, both to questions you are asking and to ones you didn’t know you needed to ask.

Take a look at another video here that shows a similar study to this idea of innattention blindness:

Don’t let your focus on one area blind you to another in your business. Make sure you are open to seeing the whole picture and set yourself up to succeed by putting in place the tools necessary to make the most of your data. Talk to us today to see how we can help paint a picture of your entire business by using the data you have at hand. We want to help you mitigate the “inattention blindness” that can sap the strength and efficiency of your business.

First, what is the VLOOKUP formula? It stands for Vertical Lookup and is a formula that looks up a specified value, finds it’s match in the first column of a separate table, and returns a value on the same row as the matching value. It can sound a bit confusing but examples always make it easier, so we’ll get to those in just a couple of minutes. Let’s take a quick look at the syntax of the formula first.

=vlookup(lookup_value,table_array,col_index_num,range_lookup)

• lookup_value is the value – be it a word, number, or value of a cell – that you want to look up.
• table_array is the range of data you want to look in to find your value. The lookup_value must be found in the first column of the table_array.
• col_index is the column number within the table_array that you want your corresponding result to come from.
• range_lookup can be either true or false. ‘False’ is much more common, as it means you are looking for an exact match. If you want to find the closest possible match, should an exact match not be present, use ‘true’.

Like I said earlier, examples will make this much clearer and should help you make sense of the VLOOKUP formula. Let’s say you have a list of customers in one range, and that there is s unique ID number for each customer. Your records might look something like below. This might be a list of customers who signed up for special offers – so it doesn’t include every customer you have.

And in another table (for ease of explanation we have kept this table in the same Excel worksheet, though this formula works across sheets and even workbooks) you have the customer’s preferred mode of communication (be it email, home phone, or cell phone).

You want to send a list of customers and their preferred mode of communication to the sales team but you certainly don’t want to look them up individually. That might not be bad for a list of 10 customers but when you have thousands, it’s just not feasible. That’s where VLOOKUP comes into play. In the image below, you can see we have our list of customers on the left and the communication table on the right. We want to populate the column ??? with the preferred method of communication. To do that we’ll use the following formula:

=VLOOKUP(A2,$F$2:$G$13,2,FALSE)

In this example, here is what each of these variables means:

• Look up the value in cell A2 (in this case, customer ID 1001)
• Look in the table contained in the cell range F2:G13 (the dollar signs tell Excel to keep this range the same even as you copy the formula to other cells)
• When the formula finds ’1001′ in column F, return the value in the second column of the table_array, on the same row – ‘email’
• False signifies that we want only to return an exact match.

*A word of caution: if you use a VLOOKUP across different workbooks, you will need to open both again if you wish to refresh the data later on down the road. It is usually safest, after looking the values up with your formula, to copy and paste special as values so that you do not lose your data when emailing the workbook to someone else, for instance.

Welcome to the new Korbul.com! We’re glad you’re here and we’re excited for you to check out our new home.

There were several reasons behind the redesign of the site, actually. While the old site served it’s purpose, we wanted to create a place that provided a better picture of Korbul and what we do. So with that in mind, we set off to do some construction. The new site contains a portfolio page for you to better see what we’ve done in the past, an expanded testimonials page, and an updated services page.

As Korbul has grown, so too have the services we offer. Whereas we had been an Excel driven company before, we’ve now moved into the larger IT arena. From web apps, to databases, to reporting dashboards, Korbul is providing customers with much more than just Excel based solutions these days. Of course, we’re still doing a lot of work in Excel too, don’t get us wrong. But we just wanted to make sure you could see all of the other things we’ve been working on as well.

So take a look around and get to know us a little bit better. We’re excited about the launch of the new site and would love to hear any feedback you might have. As you read through it, let us know if there is something we can do for you. And please pass along our information to anyone you know that might benefit from some of the IT work we can provide. We are looking forward to continuing to expand and to meet new customers.