They say March Madness is the great workplace productivity killer. There’s a worse one: corrupted files. Often, when our callers reach us, they are just about to begin the onerous task of recreating damaged files from scratch. To that we say: “Hold on a minute!”

Here are some of the methods our tech support folks recommend before you retype:

They say March Madness is the great workplace productivity killer. There’s a worse one: corrupted files.

Using Open and Repair in Excel (2002, 2003, 2007, 2010)

If you open a file and notice something is amiss, or you simply cannot open the file at all, there might be a problem with the structure of the file itself. This is known as “corruption.” It is a generic term used to describe files that are no longer working correctly. If you think your file is shot, give the Open and Repair utility a try. It might save you from having to recreate the entire file.

Starting the process is slightly different depending on your version of Excel. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney How To Access, corruption, Excel, open and repair, PowerPoint, Project, Word

If there’s one thing to be said about Microsoft Office 2010, it’s that it’s poised to be a success. The year 2010 isn’t even over and corporations already are upgrading to the new version. (History has shown that a new version usually takes a few years to catch on, especially in business.)

In reality, business cannot be put on hold while users adjust to a new software version.

At PC Helps, the Office 2010 calls have quickly increased from a trickle to a stream. Most are coming from customers whose IT departments skipped an Office 2007 migration and were holding out for 2010. As with 2003-to-2007 migrations, 2003-to-2010 promises to throw a few challenges the way of end users and IT departments. Adjusting to the new ribbon interface is often the first obstacle. Once users adjust, plenty more follow.

Below we present the top five end user challenges so your IT department knows what to expect during the migration crunch. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney migration, Mobile Devices, Office 2010 Access, computerworld, Excel, Gartner, IT department, NetworkWorld, Outlook, pitfalls, PowerPoint, the Ribbon, user interface, Word

We see it all the time. Customers call for help after they’ve wrestled with a software snag for an hour or sometimes more. They preface the call with “I should know how to do this” and “sorry for the stupid question.”

The reports and surveys tell a compelling story. Actual customer feedback is even more powerful.

They are usually exasperated, and often embarrassed. Who wants to admit lack of knowledge, especially if they believe their job is on the line?

The employers themselves, the ones chanting “do more with less, do more with less” at every all-hands and in every company-wide e-memo, are partially to blame. If a corporation doesn’t offer software support, workers must find their own solutions — which usually cost dearly in downtime and lost productivity. If a company does offer how-to support, it’s considered a luxury and its use may be frowned upon. (This recent Dilbert cartoon, sent to me by a colleague, captures it precisely.)

In sour financial times, desktop application support usually is the first to go when budgets are cut. It’s hard to tally its return on investment, and the demand for such support is often hidden.

But the need is there, and even more so now when many companies are operating with fewer employees and the same workload. (See a post I wrote in October titled “Basic Training: Why Workers Need Software Support.”) Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Worker Productivity Access, Dilbert, downtime, How To, software support

About a decade ago, when I worked for a once-prosperous ISP, I signed up for a Microsoft Access class provided by the company’s training department. I daydreamed of the databases I would create and the data I could mine.

The three-day class was taught at company headquarters in Northern Virginia, so I flew from LaGuardia to Dulles. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Training Access, Chief Learning Officer magazine, Office 2007, software support