Introducing new tech tools to your organisation

Introducing a new tech tool into your organisation is not always easy. Differing skill levels and resistance from staff is not uncommon. The following checklist may help:

1. Decide on one tool to try
2. Among the staff who will be using the tool find out who has used it before
3. Find out from this group whether the tool you want to use is compatible with their computer
4. Invite a small group of staff to trial using the tool in an informal, relaxed way
5. Provide several opportunities after this initial trial to enable participants to get really comfortable with the tool
6. Get one or more of these people to teach others in the organisation how to use the tool

Have you introduced a new tech tool into your organisation? How did it go? What worked well? What didn’t?

Google calendar

Google calendar is a great free tool for organising your life. I don’t use it myself because I use another system but lots of people I know really like it. You will need a Google account to access it. If you already use any other Google service you will already have an account. 

These to me are the standout features of Google Calendar:

1. You can set up more than one calendar e.g. you could have one for home and one for work
2. You can share your calendar with others who also have a Google calendar
3. You can print out a copy of your calendar if you prefer to have a paper copy
4. You can get your calendar sent to your cell phone
5. Finally you can access you calendar when you are offline

There are many other features as well.

Do you use Google calendar? If you do what do you like about it? What do you dislike about it?

Organising your information

As you know we Not for Profit workers accumulate heaps of information e.g. networking details, events coming up, where to get resources etc. How do we keep a track of it all?

About 3 years ago I brought a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). This works wonders for me. As it costs money to buy a PDA next week I’ll talk about Google Calender which is free.

I find the following features  on my PDA the most useful:

• Contact list
• Notes – This is the section I use most often. In here I can organise my information into folders. I have a folder for example called “good websites” in which I store the names of good websites that I plan to check out at some point.
• A calender in which I can set up repeating appointments and set an alarm which reminds me 15 minutes before an appointment is due.
• Active tasks – I mainly put information I only need to keep short-term in here

Learn more about PDA’s

How do you organise your information? I would love to hear any innovative ideas you have.

Easy way to create cool graphics

You don’t necessarily need a fancy graphic design programme to create cool graphics. One of the most useful graphic tools I use is web and wingdings fonts . You can find these in any Office programme e.g. Microsoft Word.

• Go to insert symbol and click on the down arrow beside the word ‘font’.
• Click on a symbol you like and then click insert to put it into your document.
• Now the real fun begins! Make it bigger and colour it. If you have some basic graphic skills try creating a coloured square and placing the symbol (coloured white on top of it). Looks pretty good doesn’t it?

The telephone and mail symbols can be great to use instead of the words phone and mail when you are putting contact details in a pamphlet.

Have fun and let us know what you achieved!

Feedback on Meeting Wizard

Last week I talked about a new online tool I am using called Meeting Wizard. This week I used it for the first time. Here is my feedback:

• I couldn’t import email addresses from my Gmail contact list into Meeting Wizard and had to add them manually. There may be a way to do it but it would take some work I think
• Otherwise the whole process once I had added the email addresses into Meeting Wizard was very easy
•  The recipients of the meeting request I sent from Meeting Wizard have replied very quickly! Much quicker than usual. Maybe they like the system. I will let you know their feedback.

If you use Meeting Wizard and can offer any good tips for using it let us know.

Organising meetings using technology

Coordinating times to meet can be a real drag. Recently I signed up for a free online scheduling service called Meeting Wizard. It took me less than half an hour to look through the site and sign up for an account. The process was easy and there were no tears!

Meeting Wizard enables you to:

• Suggest a range of times
• It then sends to email addresses that you specify a range of times and days to meet
•  Recipients of the email receive a message that allows them to check boxes beside the times and days that work for them
•  You then receive a report showing what works for everyone

Currently I have no meetings to schedule but I will be trying this soon. I will let you know how it goes.

How do you schedule your meetings? Have you come across a scheduling tool that works well for you? Tell us about it.

Pros and Cons of Google Docs

As promised last week here are some tips from my colleague and I who are experimenting with Google Docs.

1. Take some time to learn how Google Docs works (Experienced users of Word should find this takes about half an hour)
2. Don’t use Google Docs for first time when you are busy, it’s just too stressful!
3. Create your document in Word or Open Office first. Do this for 2 reasons. One it gives you a back up of your work if your internet connection dies. Two, Google Docs saves your work automatically which leads to multiple versions of your document (I ended up with around 50 versions!).
4. If you are reviewing someone elses document in Google Docs do the same thing. Put it into Word, make your changes and then take it back into Google Docs. There you can save it or wait for it to automatically save (my computer seems to save in Google Docs every 5 minutes)

Have fun and good luck. Would love to hear of your experiences.

Google Docs

Recently a group I volunteer with has looked at how to better collaborate online. Currently we use the web mainly to keep in touch, organise projects and work on documents together. Until now we have used email for this but it isn’t ideal. Many of our projects last for several weeks and involve large amounts of emailing. This tends to create the following:

• Difficulty finding information from early stages of the project
• People forgetting whether they contacted a particular person
• People being unsure whether they have done what they said they would do
• People becoming overwhelmed with the numbers of emails

Recognising these issues, we are looking at tools which will enable all project information to live in one place. This place would be easily accessible by all in the group and project information would be easy to find.

However changing to a different way of doing things involves challenges:

• People are used to email.
• It takes time and energy to learn new ways of working.
• We all have different levels of computer experience and have different software on our computers

We have decided therefore to start in a small way with just two members of the team trialing the options. We have started with Google Docs as it is easily accessible by all and is similar in feel to Microsoft Word.

Next week I will fill you in on our experiences with it so far.

Do you use Google Docs? If so what do you think are its benefits and limitations? Anything else you can recommend?

Customising Word 2007

Learnt a great tip this morning.

In Word 2007 Click on home, then word options, proofing and finally auto correct options. The replace command here is very useful. You could add words specific to your field of work that you frequently misspell. You can enter an abbreviation and your computer replaces it with the full word or visa versa. For example I could specify that every time I typed  LSA my computer would replace it with Living Streets Aotearoa.

I wonder whether you could use any abbreviation and link it to a long phrase that you type regularly. That would be handy!

If any of you try this let the rest of us know whether it works.

No more posts until 15th January

Hi everyone

I am having a holiday break so there will be no more posts until the 15th January.

Have a lovely Christmas and New Year everyone. See you in 2010!