All day, every day, I make notes in the Notepad++ application while I’m working. First thing in the morning, I open my Daily Notes file, using a desktop shortcut.
It’s quick and easy – right-click the desktop icon, point to the “Open with” command, and then click on Notepad++.
Is summer a quiet time for your small business? If so, it could be the perfect time to work on growing your business! And I’ve got a couple of free Excel workbooks to help you!
My Contextures site features Microsoft Excel tips, videos and tutorials, and things slow down in the summer. People are at the beach, instead of in their offices or classrooms!
Summer Business Task Challenge
I’ll take some time off too, but I also want to work on growing my business. It’s a never-ending job!
To make things more fun, I created a Business Task Challenge template in Excel (and you can get a copy).
In the file, I’ve listed about 90 tasks that I could do this summer, or have my summer intern work on.
We’ll each pick a target number of tasks to complete
Excel formulas will track our progress
This task challenge will help us focus on getting things done,:
Our goal tasks will be selected at the beginning of the summer season
We won’t waste any time, wondering what to do next!
Grow Your Small Business–Task Challenge – Summary
List Your Business Tasks
If you’d like to do a task challenge too, you can get the template on my Contextures site, on the Sample Files page.
In the Functions section, look for FN0079 – Business Task Tracker
To help you get started, I made a list of 89 business tasks. You can work with my list, or customize the list with your own tasks.
Formulas at the top of the worksheet show the total number of tasks, and how many are finished.
Check the “Done” box, for each task, when you’ve finished it.
Note: If you don’t have check boxes in your version of Excel, you can use TRUE and FALSE in the Done column.
Grow Your Small Business–Task List – Excel
Filter the Task List
To make it easier to choose your tasks, there are two Slicers on the Excel worksheet.
Category – click one of the category names, to see only those tasks in the list
Who – click one of the “Who” names, to see only the tasks for that person
Later, to see all the tasks again, click the “Clear Filter” button, at the top right of each Slicer.
Filter the Task List with Slicers
Vision Board Tasks
Another type of task challenge is based on a vision board bingo card.
Note: The vision board template uses the FILTER function, which is available in Excel 365
Video: Vision Board Demo
You can see a quick demo of my vision board in the video below. I show how the Vision Board bingo template works, and how you can customize it, to use your own goals and tasks.
Vision Board Example
The screen shot below shows some of the goals in my sample file.
I’ve put 92 goals in the file
You can mark any 24 of them, for the bingo card
Later, mark different tasks, for a fresh bingo card
You can also edit, delete or add goals and tasks in the list, to customize it for your own business tasks or personal goals!
One of our favourite fall vacations is a short trip to Rochester, New York, to do some shopping and sightseeing. We didn’t get there this year, so I dug out some photos from our visit in October 2016. The highlight that year was a forest trail filled with tiny fairy houses! Continue reading “Fairy Houses in Tinker Park Rochester New York”
On my Contextures Excel Tutorials website, there are a few pages with long lists. To make it easier to find information in those lists, I’ve used DataTables, so people can sort the columns, and search for specific text.
Broken DataTable Features
This week, I noticed that, on one page, the table wasn’t showing its interactive features. The Search Box, the column sorting arrows, and the items per page drop down, were all missing.
It took me a while to find and fix the problem, but it’s working correctly now. If you have a similar problem with DataTables, I hope the notes below help you fix the problem.
Yesterday, while I was working on monthly reports in Microsoft Access, I noticed that the standard warning messages weren’t appearing. Here’s how I fixed the problem, with an easy solution. And it’s not one of the 2 suggestions that you’ll see in most places!
Last week, when I tried to add a video in a Community post, a Google cookies pop-up message appeared. It would NOT close when I clicked the Accept button.
Here’s how I finally fixed the problem, to get ride of the Google cookies pop-up message in YouTube.
To make a Microsoft Access report easy to use, enter date range start and end dates on an Access form. Then, click a button to see all the sales orders in the selected date range.
Way back in 1985, I started working from home, using one of the original Apple Macintosh 128K computers. I’ve got a much faster computer and modem now, but was happy with that early computer equipment.