Mail merge and Office 2011 revisited

Mail merge and Office 2011 revisited

                                      

Twitter follower Toby Sax is anxious for me to revisit an old Mac 911 column that lays out the steps for creating mail merged documents in Microsoft Word. In a series of tweets Toby writes:Thanks for allowing me the chance to revisit this topic, particularly as it lets me answer some outstanding questions that followed it. For the sake of convenience I’ll pull portions of that column (in italics) into this one and answer as I go.The first step to creating a successful form-letter is understanding that Outlook has nothing to do with designing the thing. Rather, you create mail merge documents within Microsoft Word. And you do it this way in Word 2011.

                                         

Choose Tools > Mail Merge Manager. A small Mail Merge Manager window will appear. This window contains six steps, all of which you march through in order to create your document.

Answer to Question 1: If you want to pull information from Outlook’s contacts, choose Office Address Book instead.

Now start constructing your form letter, leaving spaces where you want to merge your data. Return to the Mail Merge Manager window and click the third step. Here you’ll find common data types including first name, last name, address, phone number, and email address. Drag the appropriate data types to their proper place in your form letter.

In step four you determine which of your recipients are merged into the letter. Click Options and a Query Options window appears. In this specific case you choose groups of Address Book (or Outlook) recipients. Once you’ve selected the groups you want to include, click OK.

If you like, you can preview your form letter to make sure it’s constructed properly. You do this in step five by clicking on the View Merged Data icon and clicking the right or left arrow buttons to move through the forms. As you click, new records are injected into your document.

Finally, in step six you produce your merged email messages. You have three options: Merge to Printer, Merge to New Document, and Generate Email Message.

Answer to unasked question: Some people commented that the Generate Email Message option is grayed out for them. It is because your Mac must be configured to use Outlook as the default email client rather than Mail. To make it the default, launch Apple’s Mail, choose Mail > Preferences > General and from the Default Email Reader pop-up menu select Microsoft Outlook. If you don’t, you can’t send mail merged email. (So, in short, this feature is incompatible with Mail.)

That last option is the one you want. Click it and in the Mail Recipient window that appears enter a subject for your message in the Subject field and click Mail Merge to Outbox.

Choose HTML Message to maintain much of your original document's formatting.

Answer to Question 2: If you’d like to maintain the format of your original Word document, within this Mail Recipient window choose HTML Message from the Send As pop-up menu rather than Text.

Word should now generate customized versions of your message and place them in Outlook’s Outbox.

Answer to Question 3: If your messages appear in the Drafts folder instead of Outlook’s Outbox choose Outlook > Preferences > Composing and be sure that theWhen Sending Message, Automatically CC/BCC Myself option is switched off. Although I haven’t had the problem myself, some people have reported that when this option is enabled, mail merged documents will go to the Drafts folder instead of the Outbox.

In the second step click on Get List and choose the source for the data that will be inserted into your form letter—names, addresses, and phone numbers, for example. Your options include New Data Source, Open Data Source, Office Address Book (the one found in Outlook), Apple Address Book (Apple’s Contacts application), and FileMaker Pro. For our purposes, choose Apple Address Book.To begin, create a new blank document. Click Create New in the first step and you’ll see that you have the option to create a form letter, label, envelope, or catalog. For our purposes we’ll choose Form Letters.

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Wireless Charging In 2 Minutes for Samsung Mobiles

Wireless Charging In 2 Minutes for Samsung Mobiles

                                

worst part of using a smartphone is dealing with the damn battery! If you actually use your phone it'll be lucky to make it through the day. So we're left plugging and unplugging andplugging again. This is t bright promise of wireless charging; if you plug your phone in at the same place (like your home or office), you can just set your phone down on a little pad, and it'll top off the battery.While the ever-popular Galaxy S4 doesn't come equipped with wireless charging out of the box, it's a snap to add it. Seriously; if you can snap off the back cover, you can do this. It might even take you longer to read about doing it than to actually perform the surgery. Just follow these simple steps.

1.WIRELESS CHARGING RECIEVER;

                                       

Amazon is chock full of wireless charging receivers and kits for the Galaxy S4. They range from about $10 to $40, maybe more if they come with a charging pad. Samsung is in bed with the Qi charging standard, so there are lots of compatible charging pads. With LG, Nokia, Asus, HTC, Huawei, and Motorola, and Sony also supporting Qi, there are lots of great options, and they're basically all cross-compatible.

You'll want to pay attention to the thickness of the receiver you buy, though. I chosethis model because it's especially thin, and wouldn't cause the rear plastic case on my GS4 to bulge. Samsung sells an official upgrade that is integrated into a new plastic back for your phone, adding a bit of overall thickness.

2.POP OF YOUR COVER;

                                     

Turn off your phone, then remove the back cover. Just pry your fingernail in there and pull that sucker off.

3.LINE UP THE RECIEVER TO THE LITTLE HOLES;

See these little holes here?

                              

You're going to line them up with the little metal prongs on the receiver, here.

                                    

4.LAY IT OUT OVER THE BATTERY;

The receiver lays out flat down over the battery. It looks like this.

                                    

                                     Here's another view. See how easy that was? 

                                      

5.PUT THE COVER BACK ON;

starting to get silly, isn't it? You were all but done back on step 3, and you know it. Your phone can now sit on any Qi wireless phone charger and it'll work. Honest! Just like recent Nexus devices, HTC and LG phones, and Nokia Lumia phones. 

                                   

How To Get A Job AT Google

How To Get A Job AT Google

Google's Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e, the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world's most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don't predict anything He also noted that the "proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time" — now as high as 14% on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, "How's my kid gonna get a job?" I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.

Don't get him wrong, Bock begins, "Good grades certainly don't hurt." Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.

"There are five hiring attributes we have across the company," explained Bock. "If it's a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they're predictive."

The second, he added, "is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don't care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power."

What else? Humility and ownership.

"It's feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in," he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. "Your end goal," explained Bock, "is what can we do together to problem-solve. I've contributed my piece, and then I step back."

And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it's "intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn." It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure," Bock said.

"They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot or I didn't get the resources or the market moved. ... What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.'" You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.

The least important attribute they look for is "expertise." Said Bock: "If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an HR person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.'" Most of the time the non-expert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, "because most of the time it's not that hard." Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.

To sum up Bock's approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one - besides brand-name colleges. Because "when you look at people who don't go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people." Too many colleges, he added, "don't deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don't learn the most useful things for your life. It's [just] an extended adolescence."

Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like GPA. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn't care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.