Databases – How We Love to Hate Them!Written by Cavyl Stewart
You’ve finally created databases that you can actually use to store and manipulate all your critical data. That’s great news and quite an accomplishment. But in your rush to get your employees to start entering information into these databases, you skipped training process and let them go at it alone. That was not such a good decision, but one you did not care about until you decided to tackle your first mail merge. Instead of getting what you expected to get, you got all variations of address and telephone number formats, an incredible and astounding assortment of confusingly mixed usage of upper and lower case characters and fields with unusual amounts of white space that you’ve finally figured out is due to excessive use of space bar. The data looks cluttered, inconsistent, and worst of all, unprofessional. You don’t have time to go back into every record and manually fix these annoying inconsistencies, nor do you want to pay your staff to do this when they have so many other things to do. But you’ve got to get your promotion going so money can start arriving in your business checking account. Now what do you do? There is a way you can go in and clean up these types of data messes and it won’t involve firing employees who caused problems in first place! Nor will you have to become proficient at database programming. As with any good business problem, there’s a software solution available that you can use instead. It’s called DataPipe and it will clean up these and other types of database errors faster and less expensively than you can do it manually or by using other software tools. It does not matter which standard ODBC or OLE DB you are using. Just use its drivers to connect to DataPipe. From there, it’s a matter of selecting database and query or table you need to work on. Then sit back and watch as it works its magic in record time.
| | Increase Office Efficiency With One Simple ToolWritten by Cavyl Stewart
When you need a phone number, you do a quick search on Internet and in a few seconds, you’ve got information you need. And you probably receive a lot of contact information right inside emails you receive every day. Both methods are by far more convenient than using those white or yellow-colored telephone directories. And as with every new trend that emerges, there soon comes a way to improve on an improvement. Even though you receive business addresses, phone and cell numbers, email addresses and appointment information quicker and easier than before, you still end up adding much of this information into your Outlook program or your PDA manually. This process takes time. Even though it’s just a couple of minutes here and there, that’s time you could spend doing other things. Remember, it doesn’t take long for minutes you spend on menial or repetitive tasks to add up to a sizeable chunk of time. Stop to think for a moment about volume of information you receive every day in your email. It’s mind-boggling and sometimes overwhelming. For a while you’re good about keeping track of what’s important to keep and what can be deleted. But soon, you end up printing out all your email, which only creates a paper mound on your desk – very thing that electronic era was meant to eliminate. You print out contact information for those with whom you are currently doing business. You print out appointment information and stick it into your day planner (and hope that these crucial pages don’t fall out before you have time to copy them onto proper date). You print out email from your boss with day’s list of tasks to accomplish – every day! Before you know it, you’ve used a ream of paper. This is not how life in electronic age was meant to be.
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