Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

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I Heart Adriana

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I love Adriana Linares‘ blog I Heart Tech. Her posts often contain the best tips. Her tips are so good becaue they are often very simple to perform, plus they are practical. Her latest tip is a tip for Outlook that I love. In her tip, she explains how to simulaneously view nonsequential days in Outlook. As she explains:

  1. Start by going to the Calendar view in Outlook, you’ll see (hopefully) a thumbnail view of the current month on the left hand side of Outlook .
  2. Press and hold the Control (Ctrl) key down as you click on the dates you want to view.
  3. The big Calendar pane to the right will change to show you only those dates.
  4. You can even select dates in other months by going to those months (see red arrow on graphic) and still Ctrl + Clicking.

This is so simple to do, yet it is something that never occured to me.

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Ways to Beat Stress

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In a recent post, Dumb Little Man gave some good tips for beating stress when working at home. Although aimed at people who work from home, you can apply most of the tips, regardless of where you work. This is especially true if you take your work home with you.

My two favorite tips are:

It’s all about the time

Really, it is. When you decide to work from home, it is you who would decides your working hours and how you can get the maximum the time. I know time-management is cliche now and you are tired of hearing it again and again, still the fact remains that you can’t get yourself out of the 24/7 schedule. If you set your priorities right and allot time to different parts of your work, in the end you’ll work less hours and gain more out of it. In other words you’ll be more productive.

Disrupt the continuity

Sitting at your desk for 5-6 hours continuously isn’t a good thing for your eyes or your health. I mean, it’s common sense right. So whether you take 3-4 short 5 minute breaks or 1-2 long breaks, you gotta take them.

If you work from home any, you should check out the entire post. Also, if you are not reading Dumb Little Man, you should be. In their own words, the purpose of their blog is as follows:

Welcome to Dumb Little Man. Each week we provide a handful of tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.

They certainly have an eclectic mix of topics that they cover. However, during the week I almost always find some useful information there.

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Excel Tips

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Nerino Petro has identified a great article revealing some hidden gems in Microsoft Excel 2007. I believe that Excel is one of the most under used programs in a law office. There are so many things that you can do in Excel must easier than you can do in any other manner.

I use it daily to keep track of my expense report. I also use it quite frequently to calcuate amounts due for preparing a judgment or a affidavit for collection proceedings. The program is quite powerful.

I owe a tip of the hat to my wife, because without her, I would likely have never understood the true power of Excel. Like many attorneys, I am not a math person. Because of this, I simply avoided Excel. Once I saw how it easy it was to calcuate postjudgment amounts due, however, I was hooked.

If you are looking for some great tips on using Excel, I urge you to check out this article. If you are not using Excel, I encourage you to try it out. On my Files page, I have several Excel templates that I talked about when I did a presentation on Excel for the Chicago Bar Association. These template predate my new computer. Thus they are in Excel 2003 format.

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Another Word Tip: Squeezing Text on a Page

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I love tips that help us use MS Word more effectively. Nerino Petro at Compujurist has a great little post detailing how to take the last bit of text that appears by itself on the last page and squeeze it into the previous page. Not only does Nerino share this tip, but he also tells us how to do it in both Word 2003 and Word 2007.

I would note that you should be wary of trying this on briefs that are filed with courts that enforce strict page limits and font sizes. Word adjusts the font sizes to repaginate the document.

If you need to solve this problem, jump over to the post and see the details. I will give you a hint. The Print Preview feature plays an important role.

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Crossing Borders with your Laptop

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The fact that agents can search your computer when you cross international borders presents special problems for attorneys, given that our computers likely contain information we are ethically bound to keep confidential. If you are considering international travel with your laptop, I recommend that you check out Bruce Schneier’s column on crossing boarders with your laptop.

Bruce’s advice for your best defense:

So your best defence is to clean up your laptop. A customs agent can’t read what you don’t have. You don’t need five years’ worth of email and client data. You don’t need your old love letters and those photos (you know the ones I’m talking about). Delete everything you don’t absolutely need. And use a secure file erasure program to do it. While you’re at it, delete your browser’s cookies, cache and browsing history. It’s nobody’s business what websites you’ve visited. And turn your computer off – don’t just put it to sleep – before you go through customs; that deletes other things. Think of all this as the last thing to do before you stow your electronic devices for landing. Some companies now give their employees forensically clean laptops for travel, and have them download any sensitive data over a virtual private network once they’ve entered the country. They send any work back the same way, and delete everything again before crossing the border to go home. This is a good idea if you can do it.

I urge you to check out his entire post. Also remember that they can search your phone/PDA in the same way that they can search your laptop.

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Rick Borstein Does it Again!

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AdobeI am not sure how he does it, but Rick is able to figure out what problems I am encountering in Acrobat and tell me the solutions. All without me having to bug him by email. Earlier this week, Rick posted on his blog an answer to the question of how to extract nonsequential pages from a document.

Acrobat allows you to easily extract sequential pages, however, there was no easy way to extract nonsequential pages. Or at least I thought there wasn’t. Rick, however, comes to the rescue with his explanation of how to do so. He explains:

Yes, it’s true that you cannot select and extract a discontinuous range of pages using the Extract Pages option and the Pages Panel.

However, you can drag and drop a non-sequential bunch of pages between two PDFs using the Pages Panel:

Go read the entire post, however, because not only does he give you step by step instructions on how to do is, he also includes a video showing it being done.

This is another excellent post from Rick and another example of why his blog’s feed should be in your RSS reader.

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Answering Simple Questions

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I just read a great article by Jim Calloway. He points people to an article that he recently wrote for the Oklahoma Bar Association explaining how to answer simple questions by searching the internet. I can think of several people off the top of my head who would benefit from reading this article.

Jim explains that the genesis of his article is the fact that he often sees people publish questions to list serves that they could easily answer themselves. As Jim explains:

So today I propose an answer to a question that has troubled me for years. Why would that person send that question to hundreds of people via e-mail when they could simply find the answer online themselves?

The irony is that they probably find it themselves as quickly as they can type the question and send the e-mail. So why bother hundreds of others? I have determined that part of the answer to my question is narcissism and laziness. It doesn’t bother some people to force hundreds of others to reach for the delete key if they can get what they need.

But, I now believe that most people simply don’t know they can now get instant answers to almost anything online or they don’t know how.

Many lawyers who can do superb digital legal research for their clients seem to not know how to do other online research. They can easily find precedents and cases, but cannot easily find the flash point of kerosene. (Oh, wait, that’s in 25 Oklahoma Statutes § 34 and the Oklahoma Constitution; bad example.)

I recommend that you read the article and pass it around to “those people” who never bother to answer their own questions.

If you are curious, as I was, about why the flashpoint of kerosene is in the Oklahoma constitution, a Goggle search will lead you to the answer.

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Multiple Monitors Increase Productivity

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To the surprise of no one who has ever used multiple monitors, recent studies show that multiple monitors increase a user’s productivity 20%-30%. As the Slashdot article notes:

For those of us who use multi-monitors, this is not shocking.

The Microsoft article states:

Give someone a second monitor, let them use it for while, and then try to take it away. It just isn’t going to happen. They’ll never go back to a mono display. Researchers in the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment group (VIBE), found that increasing a computer user’s display space made it easier for them to complete their tasks.

I haveMultiple Monitors used multiple monitors for more than four years now and wholeheartedly agree that using multiple monitors improves my productivity by the 30% shown in the study. The only drawback that I have ever encountered in using a multiple monitor set up is that I have multiple monitors only when I am in my office. When I am away from the office I find myself often wishing that I had a second monitor to use. In fact, I have used MaxiVista to co opt a second monitor get to get the extra desktop space.

I wrote a short column on using multiple monitors. This can be found on my Files page.

If you have never used multiple monitors before, I strongly encourage you to try it out. I have never met anyone who used multiple monitors that ever wanted to go back to a single monitor.

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Use TripIt to Organize Your Travel

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When I schedule trips, I often end up with reservation confirmations from airlines, hotels, and car rental companies. I then have to put all of that information together to keep track of when I am supposed to be and how I am getting there.

TripIt is a website that offers you a way to organize your travel plans. You simply forward your reservation emails to your account at TripIt and TripIt automatically organizes your travel plans. In organizing your plan, TripIt also automatically adds common maps that people use. Additionally, TripIt shows you typical weather based upon historical patterns. It also includes a cool feature to give you one button access to flight check in and flight status on your airline’s website.

As long as you don’t mind uploading your travel information to the website, TripIt looks like a useful tool for traveling.

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Have You Ever Forgotten to Send Someone a Gift on a Special Occasion?

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I have a terrible time coming up with gifts to send to people. The main reason for this is that I might think of a gift for someone for Christmas or their birthday, but I will think of it months before the occasion. By the time the date rolls around I have forgotten what I wanted to send. I am also in the bad habit of not remembering other people’s birthdays or anniversaries until the day of the event.

Fortunately, Amazon.com has come to my rescue with their new feature Amazon Gift Central.  Amazon’s gift organizer gives you a great place to keep track of both gifts that you have given to people as well as gifts that you would like to give to people in the future.

Setting up the organizer was a piece of cake. I simply went to the site and clicked on add recipients. Amazon then looked at the people to whom I had already shipped items from Amazon and offered them as the first choices as possible recipients. I could then add additional recipients and, if I wished, I could add all or part of their birthday. This is so Amazon can remind you to buy something to send to them.

Once you have this set up, if you are browsing through Amazon and you see something you would like to give as a present, you simply click on the drop down arrow beside wishlist and chose which recipient’s list to add it to.

I live far away from all but my immediate family. Thus, any gifts I send, I would have to ship anyway. Because of this, I have used Amazon for years to send gifts to friends and relatives. Also, I have found shopping at Amazon much more convenient, and generally cheaper, than shopping at brick and mortar stores. Thus, this a great option for me.

Even if you do not shop at Amazon, however, this organizer could still be a great thing for you. As the post at 43 Folders explains,

Now, the cool part of all this — even if you don’t use Amazon very much — is that Amazon.com is friggin huge. Which means that they (or their “Marketplace” partners) carry a ridiculously high percentage of the purchasable, shippable items available in the consumer universe. So, if you start using the Gift Organizer today — even for stuff you have no intention of buying from Amazon — your life is going to be much easier the next time a gift-giving occasion rolls around; you’ve capitalized on several months of passive, half-assed attention to actually do something useful.

Thus, relieve the stress of gift giving from your life and set up your Amazon gift organizer today.

Disclaimer: I know that there may be privacy issues related to this, especially if you are entering your recipient’s full birthdays. Whether this convenience is worth the privacy risk is up to you. In my case, I am sure that Amazon already knows more about me than I do.