Technology Tips

Smartphones and tablets have already revolutionized our lives – allowing us to shop on the go, apply for jobs, take and send photos and video clips, email from the beach, and instantly access maps as and when we need them.

A recent British survey found that we spend roughly 23 days a year looking at our phones. They really are a part of our lives, so it makes sense to try to use them to improve our productivity – rather than letting them hold us back from getting things done.

New apps are being developed all the time, and many of them can be used to make everyday life more manageable. Here are a few that could make your working day run more smoothly:

In a previous article I mentioned that Google Docs has a marketplace for third-party add-ons. These five add-ons will improve your workflow dramatically. To install any of these add-ons, you simply click “Add-ons” from within your Docs editor. Find the add-on and click the blue box with a plus sign in it.

1.    EasyBib Citation and Bibliography Generator

EasyBib makes bibliographies and citations even easier than using Docs’ handy referencing side bar. You can search the web and academic journals and even drill down to content on a specific website. EasyBib lets you format your citations using three popular standards.

http://easybib.com

2.    Vertex Template Gallery

Following on from my last article about collaborating using Google Docs, I have put together a list of four helpful things you can do with Google Docs to improve your workflow.

1) Create a PDF file

Creating a PDF file used to require all sorts of cumbersome software and add-ons for word processors. These days anyone can create a PDF document without pulling a single hair out. All you need to do is create a standard document in Google Docs and click File>Download As and select PDF Document.

You can also download the document in various other formats, including HTML.

2) Do your research from Google Docs

If you are a virtual assistant or you find yourself working with multiple clients remotely, you may find that sometimes emailing documents back and forth becomes confusing and tiresome. Additionally, it is difficult to keep track of different versions of documents or to work on the same document while someone else does.

Luckily there are some good tools that make this sort of work easier to deal with. Google Docs and Google Drive are my favourites. Not only are they free with a Google account, but if you pay a small yearly sum for a Google apps subscription you can brand them with your own domain name and custom email address.

Online research can take a lot of time, especially if you do not take care to manage your bookmarks properly. There are many tools available for keeping your bookmarked pages ordered properly so that you always know where to find that interesting snippet of information you found last night at 1 a.m.

Firefox Sync

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/sync/

This is a web application which can sync all your bookmarks across your devices. Firefox Sync allows you to access a bookmark you found at work on your iPad, phone or laptop.

Xmarks

http://xmarks.com/

For many working in legal departments, using Microsoft Excel is a daily necessity, from producing invoices to taking stock of how much stationery is in the storeroom. As with most essential office software, there are many things you can do to make daily use more easy and pleasurable. Here are five useful tips:

Entering Text over Several Lines

If you have a lot of text to enter into a cell and you want it to appear, hit ALT+ENTER and your cursor will be taken to a new line.

Navigating Worksheets with Shortcut Keys

Shortcut keys are always good to know. If you have a lot of worksheets, you can navigate them by pressing CTRL+PAGE DOWN to move right and CTRL+PAGE UP to move left.

Hiding Data in Printouts

Most of our readers will spend a lot of time working with Microsoft Outlook as it is probably the most widely used mail and calendar client in organisations today. Here are some helpful keyboard shortcuts to lessen the time you spend in your Outlook in-box.

1. Open the address book with the ‘to’ field selected: ALT + .

2. Open the address book with the ‘bcc’ field selected: ALT + B

3. Move to the subject field: ALT + J

4. Check names in ‘to’ and ‘cc’ fields against the address book: ALT + K

5. Reply all: ALT + L

6. Reply: ALT + R

7. Send: ALT + S

8. Forward an item: ALT + W (will open a weekly calendar view if you are in the calendar)

9. Activate the find toolbar: F3

10. Spellcheck: F7

11. Select all: CTRL + A

12. Forward a message: CTRL + F

As a Legal Secretary, you will sometimes find yourself needing to compile well-researched documents. The hallmark of any respectable reference document is its citations. Without citations to the sources of your information, your research is quickly rendered useless, as it is not verifiable in any way. 

Fortunately MS Office makes it easy to add citations to documents quickly and easily.

You can add your citations by following these steps:

This month I thought I would share a few tips for MS Word that will save you time and hopefully stop you from pulling your hair out on those days when you just can’t make Word do what you want it to.

Comparing documents in MS Word

Sometimes you may need to compare two documents and track any differences. This comes in handy when you are trying to see which version of a document was created first or even if you have two copies of a large document and you wish to see, without reading the whole thing, if it has been tampered with.

 “King’s letters could be musings of a mad man” read the headline in Monday’s Metro (19 November 2012). 

What followed was a story describing how scientists at the University of London will attempt to analyse the letters of King George III using technology to look for patterns of words that might give some indication as to his state of mind at the time of writing. The idea of looking for relationships between words struck me as a familiar one.