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Don’t Lose Another Caller – Critical Communication Skills for the Phone
Have you ever called a business and your first impression was your last impression of that business? Just the other day I called a computer repair company to schedule an appointment (and hopefully fix) a computer that went crazy. The person answered my call with, “Yeah.” Hmm, I thought to…
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How to Manage Time (Especially When You Don’t Have Any)!
“The phone rings, my list of unread email grows, someone is standing at my desk, and I’m trying to finish the report due by 10:00. Of course I want to manage my time, but look at my day! I have so much going on between organizing my schedule, dealing with…
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Excel Offset Formula
How do you find a single value in a table? How do you find, say, the number in the fifth column of the third row? Try out the Excel offset formula! The OFFSET function finds a cell (or range of cells) that is a specific number of cells away from…
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Excel Formula Count
Are you trying to count values in your worksheet and don’t understand why the result is too high? Or are you looking for a method that excludes blank cells? Maybe you want to count only values which are greater than 1,000. Excel gives you the power to count only the…
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How to Create a Report in Excel: The PivotTable
Excel is a powerful reporting tool, providing options for both basic and advanced users. One of the easiest ways to create a report in Excel is by using the PivotTable feature, which allows you to sort, group, and summarize your data simply by dragging and dropping fields. First, Organize Your…
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Constructive Conflict: Chaos to Collaboration
Conflict, at its heart, is the clash of viewpoints. Conflict is not inherently bad. Good clash leads to innovation and progress. Bad conflict can nosedive into negativity and undermine productivity. An environment that fosters good conflict provides opportunities to find common ground while one that fuels negativity tends to eliminate…
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Dealing with Conflict: Keeping an Open Mind to Understand Other Points of View
Put a group of people into a closed system, add a dollop of diversity and a dash of deadlines, sprinkle in some stress, and voila – you have a perfect recipe for conflict. In the workplace, conflict is practically an inevitability. That’s unfortunate, because conflict is destructive and counter-productive to…
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Excel Dynamic Charts: A Great Time Saving Tool
If you use Excel for reporting on results each month, you have probably needed to adjust your charts automatically to add a new month, state, or sales rep. Typically, that means clicking on each chart and adding a new data series or expanding the range of the current series. Unfortunately,…
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Automatically Stop Duplicate Values on Input
Preventing duplicate values from being entered in a range of cells may be a requirement in some of your worksheets. Although not obvious, enabling this capability in Excel is very easy. You can prevent duplicate values from being entered in a range of cells through Data Validation. 1) Select the…
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Basic Formula Series: The Excel® Average Formula
Let’s say that you’ve been given a new set of projects to work on, and you’re being asked to calculate how long you think your team will need to complete various pieces of each project. The best way to obtain those numbers is probably to look at other projects you’ve…
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