Windows Vista’s Windows Explorer displays certain columns depending on the contents of a particular folder. It sounds great in theory–if you have pictures, it shows thumbnails and allows you to sort by when they were taken…if you have music, it lists the Artist, Album, and Track Number. Unfortunately, Vista, you fail me in three ways:

1. You frequently guess wrong
2. Until researching for this article I hadn’t realized a reliable way to correct the display when you guess wrong (and I’d been trying for months)
3. You do really stupid things like changing the view when searching a folder

The purpose of this article is to both point out an issue and also to provide a thorough step by step for how to fix Windows Explorer Folder views for those who are running into a similar frustration.

As to be expected, there are times when Windows Explorer guesses wrong with folder views. For instance, in a folder with some images and many files it doesn’t know which view to select. Personally I think that if there are many different types of items in a folder that it would make sense to use the more general “All Items” view (the view we’ve become familiar with for the last twelve years in Windows), but so be it. Here’s what happens: Continue reading…

I’ve been attempting to stick with the less-email approach for the last two weeks and it’s been generally helpful. However, I’ve had to violate the number of times I check email and ran into some surprises. I’m also not sure whether it’s a good idea to restrict yourself in certain circumstances or just to go with the spirit of the idea. Anyhow, here are some realizations after checking email mostly-twice during the work day for a couple weeks.

Lesson 1: Email is always a distraction. If you’re working on something it’s never a good idea to check your email and get distracted.

Challenge: Some tasks merit fast-paced email exchange or require a response via email. Sometimes an email message in the morning relates to an appointment in the afternoon. But looking for one email typically results in receiving more than you wanted.

When I initially communicate with a prospect or a client, I want to impress them with responsiveness…and I feel I can achieve that (to some degree) with quick email back-and-forth. I’m also not yet in a position to explain to them my new “philosophy of email” and thus why our email exchange may take a while. And, as for project-related emails, as deadlines are coming I feel that it’s of crucial importance that I receive them.

Possible Solutions:

1. OUT OF OFFICE RESPONSE: I could, as Tim Ferriss suggested, create an “Out of Office Response” that tells people my email strategy. That would solve the “appointment confirmation” problem but it could still weird-out a new prospect and I’m not sure how well it’d help in a project-based situation–the sender might not be aware of the significance of their input into my work.
2. COMMUNICATION: For starters, telling people about your process is a good thing. Especially your co-workers. Right now I’ve only told a few people about my approach because I wasn’t sure that I was going to stick with it. But now I realize that checking email twice (or at least not until around lunchtime) is magnificently liberating (I actually get stuff done in the morning!)…and I’m going to tell a lot of coworkers and clients. Though it doesn’t solve the “new clients” problem, it’ll resolve 80% of the communications issues, as those are with the same small group.
3. FUDGING WITH DISCIPLINE: There are going to be times when you need to check your email. Just try not to pay attention to anything else when you’re looking for that one message.
4. THE IMPORTANT DUDE: Have someone else check your email (frequently) who is familiar with your process. If a really important message comes in (they’d have to fully understand what really important means!) then they’d let you know. I look forward to that day…

Lesson 2: Breaking the system for seemingly logical reasons is risky.

Challenge: It seems that when you’re in transit or in between tasks that email won’t take away from something else and thus it’d be perfectly fine to check it now. However, when you do check your email you may be surprised by something that changes your mood or makes you realize you really had to do something. Unfortunately when we’re between things we don’t have the luxury to respond to pressing or emotional issues.

This week I was working with a client in a conference room and things were moving very slowly–they hadn’t prepared for the meeting and had to do a few things on their laptops before we could actually get to work. So I figured, why not check my email?

In Outlook I found a message about a project I’d recently won with a major client, though they had placed all of the Terms and Conditions into their own language. They had added a “Work for Hire” clause, indicating that our training material was “Work For Hire” and, as such, that they could rebrand and reuse it. Now I’m cool with people having issues with some of my terms, and I recognize that the contracting officer probably just plopped our contract into his template which already had that clause…but it still royally irked me. When I communicated (somewhat strongly) with the CO about why our work was not Work for Hire they just removed the clause without a question (our material is usually treated like a book–you get a certain number of copies)…but, again, it really changed my mood and I felt the need to respond then and there.

This kind of stuff happens all the time when we check our email: things surprise us and change our mode of thought.

Possible Solutions:

1. BE PRODUCTIVE NOT RISKY: The goal of checking email when you have free time is to use that time wisely. So be wise–have a book or other task ready for you. Maybe file some things, clean up, work on a task that’s not super thought intensive but needs to get done. But whatever it is, don’t check your email because there will often be surprises that change your current state.
2. CREATE A BARRIER: Don’t turn on automatic download of email messages in any of your portable devices. Put a password on your email application. Don’t carry your cellphone when you go into a client’s. Whatever it is that makes it just a little more difficult to check your email–that’ll make it much less likely to happen.

I have many more lessons to share and some specific practices I’ve tried…but at 9:30am I’d really best be getting some work done. Stay tuned…and don’t check your email.

We should receive all forms of mail once per day.

Can you imagine a world where the mailman would show up a bunch of times each day?  Where weekend activities were interrupted by bills and packages at various times?

Sounds foreign…and kind of annoying.  But that’s email.  And that’s what’s wrong with it.
Continue reading…

I used to hear people talk about cash flow as being “the biggest challenge” for small businesses. I always understood that billing in March might translate to payment in May or June and that, depending on the amount due, borrowing might be necessary. But a lot of things in the last year have offered a better understanding of cash flow:

• The better organized your books and reporting, the more you realize that cash flow is an issue
• Positive cash flow can be much worse than negative cash flow
• Smaller revenue from many clients may be easier to stabilize, but it’s much less predictable and more time-consuming to manage. And big checks are a whole different story.

The better organized your books, the more you realize that cash is an issue

When invoices go out, checks will start to come in. But not all of them. We’ve always kept pretty organized books, but this year my books have become somewhat of a work of art. I want to grow SET Consulting and strengthening SET’s reporting capabilities has seriously improved my picture of what’s going on . With regard to cash flow especially, I realize much more lucidly what to expect, and when a phone call or letter is in order. Sadly I realize that my “wonderful clients” can be a royal pain.

Positive cash flow can be much worse than negative cash flow

The concept of cash flow is essentially that the money in your pocket is not an accurate picture of your financial condition. This is especially important to realize when you have a lot of money.

In the past, the amount of money I perceived as having was in line with the transactions I’d entered in QuickBooks–so I always felt pretty good that I was basing my ideas off the assumption that all the checks I’d written had been cashed (when they hadn’t yet). But that’s such a small part of the story.

You may have $50k in the bank. Payroll may only be $10k. But what about the other expenses each month? What about the projects that are being worked on right now but the contractors? What about quarterly taxes? How long will it be before you’ve got $10k? Or 0?

If you’re smart, you know your monthly burn (when I found out mine I was not particularly happy…though it did convince me that a few nice meals really didn’t make a difference). But the question is how much do you pay attention to it, while factoring in your A/R aging, when you’ve got a bunch of money in the bank?

When cash flow is not so hot, you pay closer attention to what’s going on in your business. But you need to pay just as much attention when things seem good because cash comes in waves…and cash goes away as quickly as it comes onto the scene.

Smaller revenue from many clients may be easier to stabilize, but it’s much less predictable and more time-consuming to manage. And big checks are a whole different story.

The more variables and the bigger the check the more things get to be a pain. When we were receiving a few small checks per month, we didn’t have as much trouble collecting. But everything gets to be more of a pain when there are more clients and bigger checks. Of course this isn’t always the case, but more variables never really makes anything easier. And cash flow is harder to predict when there are more bits and pieces involved.

I sometimes let Kathy Sierra’s writing accumulate in my blog-reader, because I don’t want to just skim her entries. She’s my favorite writer online, and a huge inspiration both to my work and what difference a passionate individual can make. Reading what she’s been through, the way she’s been abused (serious death and sexual threats) as a blogger and as a woman, is just plain awful. Hurtful. Disgusting. While nothing could justify such treatment, the fact that she’s been subjected to it is just unfathomable to me. She’s making such a difference for so many people, in a field that’s not even personal (people have opinions about usability…but it’s not personal). This just hurts.

I thank people like Kate who are continually bringing attention to the continual violence against women, time and again. For raising issues to the light that are often glanced past. This sort of news needs to be in the media. And it needs to change people’s behavior.

I applaud Scoble’s stance on this and hope others will protest as well. If I had a way to, I would. Reading the comments on Kathy’s page shows that people are listening today. I just hope this can make a lasting difference.

I checked on the known issues list and didn’t see these little annoying gems. Here are two things I’ve run into with PowerPoint 2007:

1. The slide footer functionality from PowerPoint Presentation templates doesn’t work in PowerPoint 2007. Thus for the many clients where we used formal footers (so that they could update them in one place for the whole document), those footers will not work at all in PowerPoint 2007. Even worse, when someone opens a file in PowerPoint 2007 with footers that were created in PowerPoint 2003, the footer fields immediately become text fields–which means that if you save them in PowerPoint 2007 (even in compatibility mode!!) you permanently lose the ability to edit all footers at once–even when you open that file in PowerPoint 2003. No warning–just zap, and the footer fields (date, too!) are gone!
2. The Custom Animation tool is quite forgetful. Often I had to select “Start with Previous” when Start with previous was already selected–in order to get the event to take place right away in the sequence. This came up when I previously had delays set at other places that pushed the timeline on my animation back. The easy workaround for this is to look at the Advanced Timeline view and then just re-set the setting you’re trying to get to work–just right-click and again choose “Start with Previous” for instance.

I’m really enjoying PowerPoint 2007′s aesthetics and drawing tools–but I do wish Microsoft could address these couple issues.

Well, I did manage to get Vista installed. The advice here worked like a charm, and I was able to install Vista clean with an upgrade product key. No, Microsoft never did follow-up with a solution…but at least it worked.

I’m really enjoying Windows Vista. Sure, a few programs don’t work (I don’t want to upgrade QuickBooks and iTunes isn’t even upgraded) but the visual improvements are stunning. Sure, Mac may have had similar features for a while…but it’s great for us PC users to finally get a break.

Some of my favorites: the integrated search, the new Windows Media Player, the lovely Aero interface, the massively improved wireless and network connection management, the better display options, the weather gadget… I really dig it.

On the other hand, I’ve been seriously disappointed with Apple. The majority of my gripe is that I purchased a lemon of a MacBook. I’ve spent about 5 or 6 hours on the phone in the last week with a unit that is now officially considered DOA. Now I have to run between a few places to get it repaired. And I’m going to think twice before purchasing from MacMall again. When business is so busy, as it is now, this is a horrible waste of time.

But, for the record, when this MacBook was working it was no panacea, no magnificent wonderful machine. It wasn’t necessarily more intuitive to work with, and I’m not in any way sold. Some of my least favorites: error messages that are immensely unhelpful, no manual way to eject a CD (and no eject button that works without software), a remarkably sparse online support, no visual or audio indication when important statuses changed (like connecting to a network or disconnecting from a network), and about a million compatibility issues with Office. But I’m going to take a deep breath and get this machine (for SET’s designer; it’s running Vista, as well) repaired…

So this week has seen a great deal of upgrades. A MacBook. A Vista install on my primary machine. A gorgeous new notebook (Dell XPS M1210) with all the bells & whistles. Now it’s time to update the infrastructure a little bit–redo the server, clean up a dedicated XP box for use as a computer-to-be-dialed-into, and figure out some more features in OneNote 2007 and Groove Server…

Update: I’m going to try the hack suggested here for how to install an update without installing an old OS first. Sure, it requires two installs, but it may be an easier option than trying to get XP running again. I’ll keep you posted. IT WORKED!

Well I’m not in much better of a position than when I started. I called Microsoft the next morning (2/2) and they offered a number of good ideas. The most likely idea they mentioned was that by attempting to install Vista I had overwritten the master boot record with one that the XP installer couldn’t use…and thus I could no longer install Vista. The solution was to restore the boot record to the XP one. I followed the steps listed on a few websites and discussed it with the Microsoft tech, but had no luck reinstalling XP.

I was on the phone with Microsoft for about 2 hours, being juggled around between different people, all of whom were very friendly. Unfortunately, they all said that the solution for me was a product key that they couldn’t provide. Funny how much time Microsoft is willing to spend to avoid the potential of giving out a license to someone who already legally purchased their software.

So, in short, purchasing an upgrade can be a real waste of time. You have to have the previous OS running, and if you don’t, you’re SOL.

I guess I’m going to purchase another copy of the software. Buying it OEM is still cheaper than using their online purchase. Something just doesn’t sit right with me about the whole experience.

I’ve had Vista Beta RC2 running on another box for a while, but I thought it was time to take the real plunge and put it on my primary computer. But I’m not completely insane–I did what any logical person would do–set it up on a clean partition (so I could dual boot unless until programs like iTunes and who-knows-what-other utilites are supported by Vista…).

So I whipped out the ‘ole PartitionMagic, created 25gb of NTFS space. And got ready for whatever Microsoft was going to throw at me.

Pop the CD/DVD in. Change the boot order. No more nasty blue screen–the setup engages. It didn’t even want my RAID drivers–Vista’s cool like that.

Then the Product Key Screen appears. So I enter my Vista Business Upgrade product key. Naa-aah. Microsoft pleasantly lets you know that you can’t perform an upgrade unless you’re in the operating system you intend to upgrade. No longer can you just stick in some old CD from Win98, Win2000, or WinXP to prove that you own it–WTF?

But it gets worse. Continue reading…

Word geeks have long loved impressing our audience during demos by typing “=rand(x,y)” where x is the number of paragraphs and y is the number of sentences per paragraph. What it would do in version of Word through Word 2003 is repeat the sentence “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”

Not so in Word 2007. Now it uses this mundane and “helpful” set of Word instructions–boo. You’d think they’d just go with lorem ipsum if they wanted to use different sentences. Anyhow, the new result repeats the following paragraph over and over:

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look. You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly. To change the overall look of your document, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab. To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command. Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template.

I understand that this offers better demo text than repeating a single sentence, but I wish it could’ve been a little more creative. This is just begging me to write a new random generator that takes lines from Stairway to Heaven or The 9/11 Report or something like that…