Excel tips for handling rows and rows of data

Managing huge amounts of data in Excel can be painful if you don’t know how to handle it properly. These tips* will boost your effectiveness and make you feel more confident with hundreds of rows and columns.
 1. PivotTables
PivotTables are probably the most overlooked yet most powerful feature in Excel. They are great if you need to quickly analyse, sort and summarise large amounts of data in a worksheet or database file. And all this with simple drag and drop.

Let’s say you have a list of products and categories in an unsorted table where you want to know the total price of all the products in one category. Sure you could do the usual stuff and sort

62 Tips to Get Unstuck in 2013

62 Tips to Get Unstuck in 2013

1. Believe in your vision and gifts when no one else believes in your vision and gifts.
2. Start your day with 20 minutes of exercise.
3. Make excellence your way of being (versus a once in a while event).
4. Be on time (bonus points: be early).
5. Be a celebrator of other’s talents versus a critic.
   

Beware the humble office printer

When you think about protecting your business from security risks, what comes to mind? Most likely, you’re not thinking about your office printers. But you should.
Printers found in many businesses these days do more than just print. Many of them also scan, copy, fax and receive print jobs through a network connection. Like a computer, printers are equipped with processors, hard drives and operating systems—and are thus susceptible to the same threats that commonly plague PCs.

Selling Is Persuasion, Not Force

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Your client’s contract is up. You need the renewal. But your client is dragging their feet. So you decide to ratchet up the pressure and start withholding. You withhold support. You withhold some orders. You believe that by withholding, you can ratchet up the pressure on your client and get your contract signed. They need you, and you have the upper hand. Or so you think.

Or maybe you want to create a sense of urgency, so you make your dream client a time-sensitive offer. If they don’t place their order by the deadline, “poof,” the offer disappears. Now they have a compelling offer; scarcity works. Or does it?

These are both tactics. They both sometimes work. But they’re force, not persuasion. And selling is persuasion, not force.