Let me plant the seed of an idea:  if you think networking is good for your business (you’d be right!), I urge you to consider volunteering your time for a good cause.  I hear you protest that you already have too few hours in the day to do the things you need to do.  I counter that you just haven’t found a cause that spins your wheels yet.

Imagine if one of your children developed an incurable disease.  That would change your priorities a bit, right?  Or what if a friend went tramping and never returned… perhaps you might get involved in search and rescue?

Volunteering your time is a great way to feel good about giving something back to the community, and meeting people with similar interests and values to your own.  And what do you know, those people might also have businesses that are complimentary to yours, or need your services, or provide something you need.

Trust me, the benefits can not be counted in dollars!

A couple of weeks later I searched for free alternatives to Microsoft Onenote, and found a really cool program called Evernote, which has online and downloadable versions, and syncs to my iPod Touch.  It gives me an email address which I send notes to and they automatically appear in my Evernote notebook.  And anything I post on Twitter also gets into Evernote just by re-tweeting to @myEn.

Funnily enough that search also uncovered PersonalBrain.  Having a play around with this new program, I got the feeling it was much bigger and more powerful than I could work out for myself, and that it would be worth my while to RTFM (read the manual!), which I did.

Indeed, PersonalBrain combines notebooking and mindmapping in one really cool application.  You can organise your thoughts in many ways, add attachments, tags and inter-relationships, and … well lots of really cool stuff!

How do you normally remember all the things you need to remember?  What’s your favourite organisation tool?

Wikipedia’s entry on “cloud” was entirely meteorological, so if you don’t know what I’m on about check out the one I use:  www.syncplicity.com.  This has saved my bacon more than once, and it means I can access clients’ files from home or other offices without having to copy them to a memory stick each time.  Brilliant!

Of course, converts to Google apps will say these problems have all been solved.  But I reckon Syncplicity is better- no need to learn how to drive new software, apart from Syncplicity itself.  What could be easier?  You can get a 2gb account for free, so you can see how it works and decide whether you like it before committing to a payment.  And they’re not even paying me to recommend it!  But I could get an extra gig on my account if you follow my referral…  https://my.syncplicity.com/Signup/?token=WCHX0JOR

Do let me know how you get on

Well, putting aside the design features, you may be delighted to know that the practical aspects are available in the form of a bag organiser.

You just put all your stuff into this organiser and then when you change handbags you have it all together so you don’t forget anything, and you know where it all is…  Brilliant!

Check it out here:  www.bagorganiser.com.au

And if you insert 3 dashes then enter, you get a line across the page.

Press the equals symbol = 3 times and you get a double line.  Cool eh!

I heard another person say he was on Facebook with some mates from work, and they were sharing photos and stories of fun times… until their boss requested to be friends with one of them.  To make a long story short, it turned ugly and disciplinary action was taken by the boss.

What happened to keeping Facebook for friends and family?  Should I feel obliged to make friends out of purely business contacts?  Do I want them to know what I do in the weekend?  Is it any of their business?  Would bosses and clients be offended if I declined their friend request?

There are plenty of other forums for business networking.  LinkedIn.com is a great one for international contacts.  Vbiznz.co.nz an excellent New Zealand site.  Where do you go for business networking online?

When working with numbers in Excel, I like to see the negative amounts in brackets to make it more obvious they are negative – sometimes the minus sign can be easy to miss.  Here’s how:

Highlight the characters after the colon (after the space, actually):   _(* #,##0.00_);_(* (#,##0.00);_(* -??_);_(@_)

Copy them:  while the characters are highlighted, press Ctrl and C together

In Excel, have your cursor in a cell with the numbers you want to format (or highlight a selection)

Press Ctrl and 1 together (or Format, Cells) to bring up the Format Cells dialogue box.

See the tabs across the top, select the Number tab.  In the Category list at the left of the dialogue box, highlight Custom.  It’s probably last on the list, you may need to scroll down.

Now you will see more items in the right hand side of the dialogue box.  See the word Type, then a box underneath that, then a list.  You want to paste the characters copied above into the box (not the list).

To do this, highlight everything in the box, and then press Delete.

Then, press Ctrl and V together to paste the characters.

If you had your cursor on some numbers, you should see the sample now showing them in the desired format.

Press OK

Of course you can use this format with positive numbers too, which will help to align them together when you have a mixture.  And you can then use the buttons on your toolbar to change the number of decimals.

Have a great week!

Do you think we should stick to doing what we are best at?

Did you go into business to do filing, reconcile bank statements and prepare GST returns?  Well I did!

If you are getting bogged down in the administration of your business, perhaps I can help to free up your time so you can look after your customers.