Voting Options with Microsoft Outlook 2010

This is a great tool to use if you need to track answers from a large group of people.  When you open a new email or email that you would like to forward, click on the Options tab, look in the Tracking group, and click Use Voting Buttons.  Then select which voting options you would like to use, or click Custom to customize your voting responses.  You will not see actual buttons on your email, it will show on the top information bar in your email that you have added this option.  Also, it is important to note that this tool works best if recipients open your email within Outlook, as the option to vote will also appear in the information bar of the email.  To see all the answers that you have received, you will open the email that you originally sent with the voting buttons and click the Message tab and look in the Show group and click Tracking so that you can see your results, but know that you will not see this option until at least one person has voted.  

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Hiding Rows and Columns in Microsoft Excel 2010

There are many reasons that we may need to hide different rows or columns especially for printing and distributing, but we also need to preserve the data that they contain.  It’s quite easy to do, just highlight the entire row(s) or column(s) that you would like to hide by clicking on the headings (1,2,3 or A,B,C). Now right click within the highlighted section and click Hide.  This will hide your selection until you Unhide it. To Unhide, look in the headings and place your cursor between the columns or rows that are hidden and right click, this time click Unhide.  

Social Media and Mobile Phone Usage Statistics

Here are some important statistics from a Constant Contact article about social media and mobile phone usage.

• According to a new report from eMarketer, 28 million Americans will use Twitter on their mobile phones at least monthly this year. That’s up 22 percent over 2012.
•  EMarketer also projected that nearly 100 million Americans will access Facebook via a mobile device at least monthly in 2013. That number is expected to increase 50 percent by 2017.
• Today, nearly all mobile social network users will use Facebook on their mobile device.
• 75 percent of smartphone owners are “highly likely” to delete emails they can’t read on their phone

A new Constant Contact survey, done in conjunction with  research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, provides further evidence for why brands need to be thinking about mobile when designing their marketing emails.

Possibly the most revealing piece of data collected from a survey which included responses from 1,497 smartphone users, is that 75 percent of users say they are “highly likely” to delete an email that does not display well on mobile.

It should come as no surprise that 80 percent of participants also reported it is extremely important to be able to read emails on their mobile device.

The survey also provides a closer look at the role of mobile for different age groups:

• For respondents ages 18 to 30 years, 88 percent open email  on a mobile device, with more than half confirming their smartphone is their primary device for opening emails.
• For respondents ages 30 to 39, 85 percent open emails on their mobile device with nearly half – 48 percent – claiming their smartphone is their primary device for email.
• For respondents ages 40 to 49,  74 percent confirmed they read emails on their devices, but only 35 percent of this age demographic said that their smartphone was their primary device for reading emails.

Regardless of the size of your business, the industry you work in, or the audience you serve — mobile is already influencing your email marketing and will have an even greater influence in the years to come.

That’s good news for small businesses and organizations, says Jim Garretson, mobile product manager at Constant Contact.

“The fact of the matter is that consumers are opening emails on their phones first with increasing regularity,” Jim explains. “The great thing about mobile emails is that shorter content and fewer calls to action actually perform better than complicated and dense messaging. By simplifying email marketing campaigns, marketers can take an essential and effective step towards becoming mobile-friendly.”

Shortcut to Viewing Your Selection in Microsoft Excel 2010

When working in an excel spreadsheet it can be rather frustrating when you have made a selection of cells and then accidentally scroll away from your selection.  I have done this many of times by accidentally touching the track pad on my laptop, then trying to carefully scroll back without undoing my selection.  This shortcut will make that mistake much easier to recover.  Simply press CTRL+BACKSPACE and your selection will be back in view! 

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Conversation Clean up in Microsoft Outlook 2010

When you have a long conversation going through email, you can right click on your email, click Clean up Conversation and then Ok.  This will delete any repetitive emails in your conversation that have been sent through replies.  Also, if you would prefer that the duplicate emails do not go into the trash, you can click on the File tab, then Options and scroll to Conversation Clean Up.  Here you can select a specific folder for these duplicate messages to go into until you are ready to delete them.