Office Professionals, Administrative Professionals, Administrative Assistants, Virtual Assistants and Executive Assistants supported by Deskdemon with tools and information to help empower them in their careers.

Miscellaneous

Business card scanners

Don’t have time to type information from business cards into a contacts list?

I use the CardScan 600cx - www.cardscan.com. It's great fun!

caroleanne (from The Hub)

CardScan is the only one I've used but I was very happy with it and the way it read all sorts of fonts, crazy business cards, and even some handwriting.

gingertea (from The Hub)

e-cards

The boss has decided to send e-cards instead of traditional Christmas cards – how do you keep them both professional and personal?

Why not create a card using Word and set it up as a mail merge? You could set up a data source in Excel with fields for the recipients' names, e-mail address and notes. In the notes field your boss could insert a personal message. The card could then be sent as a mail merge to e-mail (the document could be an attachment or in the e-mail message). This would be more original and less impersonal than sending cards from a service. It would also look like your firm took the time to actually prepare something rather than going to a web site to send the cards. If you wanted to get fancier and someone in your firm works with Flash, a really dynamic card could be created and sent by email.

I use mail merging to email all the time when I have to contact a large group of people, but provide different information for each individual. I find it to be a very useful tool for time management; you can prepare one letter and have it customized using the data source for each individual.

jwooster (from The Hub)

Hardware

Reformatting Mac hard drives – how to…

Have a look at http://software-robotics.com/docs/Re_Format_OS9.html

Bethalize (from The Hub)

Training courses

Just been on a training course and need to write up a report?

I don't have a report template, but I generally include:

Date, time, location, name of course;
Course deliverer;
A summary of what was covered;
A list of objectives (personal objectives and what the course aimed to provide);
A note of whether these objectives were achieved, what I got out of the course, whether I liked it, if there were any problems etc;
A copy of course information, if appropriate;
A copy of any certificate I have received.