As if you don’t have enough distractions, Microsoft by default notifies you whenever an emails arrives in your inbox by playing a sound, briefly changing your mouse-pointer, and popping up an “envelope” in the lower right corner of your screen. By default, the settings for all of these alerts are checked off in Outlook. But it’s a bad idea to leave these settings in place as is because they can be very distracting.
Most financial advisors receive scores of emails daily. If you’re trying to work on an important issue and one of these notification pops up, you can easily click on the notification and start answering your email even though it may not be that important. It's just too enticing.
These settings were put into Outlook years ago, perhaps during a time when people recieved fewer emails.
To rid yourself of this distraction in Outlook 2010 and 2013, in the main menu click on File, then Options and Mail. Below is a screen shot of the check boxes you will want to uncheck to remove these alerts.
Maximize Free SpaceFrom Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, And Other Cloud Storage Solutions With Tablet And Phone Apps That Consolidate Them All In One Interface
Friday, May 31, 2013 04:04
New apps that give you one interface for managing SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box, ShareFile and other cloud storage services are turning up. Knowing how frugal RIAs can be, this will probably be something you’ll want to check out.
All of the major cloud storage services give away free storage space in an effort to get you hooked on their system. Of course, you could pay for an account allowing you to store all your documents, photos, music, and video on one cloud solution. But why pay when you can easily use multiple cloud storage solutions to maximize free storage?
Dropbox nominally gives you 2GB of space but you can up to 16 GBs by recommending Dropbox to friends. Plus, if you enable uploads from your camera, you’ll get another 3GB. SkyDrive gives you 7 GBs of free space. Google recently went from five to 15 GBs of free storage, across Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive. Box, according to Engadget, offers 5GB of space for free, but occasionally has given away 50GB free. Flickr recently started offering a terabyte of free space for photos. Point is, using an app that puts all of these storage silos into one app is a good idea.
PC World recently reviewed Open Drive, Android users might want to check out Otixo, and Rainbow Drive is getting good reviews in the Windows App Store. iPhone and iPad users, look at Cloud Commander.
All of the app stores from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Android offer apps that consolidate storage services and this list of above is just a few of the names. I'm seeing more of these apps pop up on for all the different operating systems.
There are also apps for synching files across cloud services, allowing you to automatically back up your back up.
Of course, none of these systems are created for advisors, and they are not document management solutions.On Friday, May 7, one of the big cloud document management solutions will speak at an A4A webinar. If you don’t know the difference between a document storage solution like Dropbox and a document management software system, come to our webinar session. To attend webinars and get 24/7 replays and CE, please join A4A. ($60 annually).
The most popular alternative so far is Feedly, according to ReplaceReader.com, which is letting people vote for their favorite replacement. A favorable article in The New York Times last week gave a big boost to Feedly.
Yesterday, The Verge featured a story about NewsBlur, and says it is better for “power users.”
Please let A4A readers know if you’ve made a switch yet and how it’s going. Also, if you need a tutorial on how to switch, please let me know.
For a couple of years, we've been hearing about computers and devices being controlled by hand gestures. No touching the screen, no using a mouse--you just use the motion of your hands, face, or eyes to execute commands. To understand the impact this will have on the way we control our PCs, TVs and other devices, take a look at this video showing a new software that extends Windows 7 and 8's touch screen to physical gestures.
Financial advisors use a lot of the same documents all the time. Sure, you also create new documents, but you probably have a few Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher documents that you must refer to or update frequently. Here’s how to make them more easily accessible, assuming you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8.
First, some basics: At the bottom of the screen, your Taskbar displays which apps are open on your computer.
You may know that you can "pin" apps to make them always appear in your taskbar. Simply right click on an icon in the taskbar and choose "Pin this program to taskbar," as shown above, and that app will always appear in your taskbar.
You may also know that when you right click on any Office icon in your taskbar, a box like the one shown above pops up listing your most recently used documents in that Office application.
What you may not know, however, is that when you right click on any document in the recent documents list, you can pin it to the recent documents list. Just click on "Pin to this list" and the document will always show up atop of your recent documents list.
