How to Choose the BEST Charting Software
July 23, 2007
I suggest that you do not spend a lot of money on charting software as most perform very similar functions. Often the price is inflated to capitalize on the mentality that expensive is better. A software package under $1000 will perform all of the tasks required by even the most advanced traders.
The perfect charting software needs to be the most powerful technical analysis tool no matter what you are trading ….. stocks, futures or currencies.
Unfortunately, of the thousands of people why buy charting software, only a handful ever put it’s true technical analysis potential to good use.
Imagine being able to quickly and easily find high potential, lowest risk trading opportunities each day. What would it mean to your lifestyle if you could uncover what are potentially the most lucrative stock, futures or currency trades easily and quickly and then profit from this information?
Do you think your trading (and your life) would be more fun?
Increase Office Efficiency With One Simple Tool
July 22, 2007
When you need a phone number, you do a quick search on the Internet and in a few seconds, you’ve got the information you need. And you probably receive a lot of contact information right inside the emails you receive every day. Both methods are by far more convenient than using those white or yellow-colored telephone directories.
And as with every new trend that emerges, there soon comes a way to improve on an improvement. Even though you receive business addresses, phone and cell numbers, email addresses and appointment information quicker and easier than before, you still end up adding much of this information into your Outlook program or your PDA manually.
This process takes time. Even though it’s just a couple of minutes here and there, that’s time you could spend doing other things. Remember, it doesn’t take long for the minutes you spend on menial or repetitive tasks to add up to a sizeable chunk of time.
Stop to think for a moment about the volume of information you receive every day in your email. It’s mind-boggling and sometimes overwhelming. For a while you’re good about keeping track of what’s important to keep and what can be deleted. But soon, you end up printing out all your email, which only creates a paper mound on your desk ? the very thing that the electronic era was meant to eliminate.
Databases ? How We Love to Hate Them!
July 21, 2007
You’ve finally created databases that you can actually use to store and manipulate all your critical data. That’s great news and quite an accomplishment. But in your rush to get your employees to start entering information into these databases, you skipped the training process and let them go at it alone.
That was not such a good decision, but one you did not care about until you decided to tackle your first mail merge. Instead of getting what you expected to get, you got all variations of address and telephone number formats, an incredible and astounding assortment of confusingly mixed usage of upper and lower case characters and fields with unusual amounts of white space that you’ve finally figured out is due to excessive use of the space bar. The data looks cluttered, inconsistent, and worst of all, unprofessional.
You don’t have time to go back into every record and manually fix these annoying inconsistencies, nor do you want to pay your staff to do this when they have so many other things to do. But you’ve got to get your promotion going so money can start arriving in your business checking account. Now what do you do?
Change Your Word Docs in Record Time!
July 20, 2007
Anyone who has ever used Microsoft Word knows that it is a powerful word processing package. It’s loaded with dozens of features designed to make creating documents a breeze. And anyone who has used Word’s Find and Replace feature knows that this is one handy feature. It makes changing words or phrases throughout your documents fast and painless.
And that’s great when you’re working on just one document. But suppose you need to find and then replace a word or phrase throughout all of your Microsoft documents or throughout all documents located within a particular directory? You know, like when there’s been a change to your business address or telephone number? Or when there’s been a change of ownership, or upper management, or to the board of directors?
You could use the Find and Replace feature to change your documents one by one. Using this feature will make changes faster than not using it. But if you’re changing lots of documents and you need to make the changes rapidly, you need something more.
The Top 5 Wrong Reasons For Not Hiring Testers
July 19, 2007
Considering whether or not your software company should hire a dedicated team of testers? Here are the Top 5 Wrong Reasons why you shouldn’t.
We Have a Beta Program Some people feel that the best way to debug a system is to ship it to your customers and wait for trouble tickets. I don’t know how things work in your industry, but as far as I’m concerned, finding new customers is hard enough. I definitely don’t want to make matters worse by shipping them buggy software.
I’ve spent the last 5 years in the telecommunications industry where the standard for reliability is 5-9. If I even suggested to my customers that my software was in its Beta phase, they’d hang up on me immediately. I’m positive the same is true in any industry.
Imagine if I published articles that were not only full of grammatical errors but also missed a complete sentence here and there. Would you bother sending me an email to inform me that my articles are defective? Would you recommend my newsletter to your peers? I didn’t think so! So imagine how your customers feel when mission critical software breaks and crashes on them.
The Importance of Timely Timesheets
July 19, 2007
Whether you are a small consultancy firm, a medium sized accountancy practice, or a code warrior for hire in a back room of your house then you have at least one thing in common: you are in business to get paid quickly, and for the work you have done. Timesheets are the usual method for tracking time you spent working and thus are the key to timely invoice generation. Timely invoice generation and despatch is important for two reasons:
1. You are more likely to get paid for your services the closer you present the invoice for payment to the time you did the work.
2. Poor cash flow kills more businesses than poor profitability.
Timesheets used to be monthly, then weekly, daily, and now can be updated to the minute. A timesheet software package like Timesheets MTS or Timesheets Lite is simple to administer, is simple for the casual user to enter time, and most importantly is simple for the accounts department to use and generate the reports they need for prompt invoicing.
Two Reasons to Use Timesheet Software
July 18, 2007
This short paper will expand on two key reasons to move to a computerized timesheet system at your company. There are more than two reasons of course, but these will be expanded on at a later date. The two key reasons to be discussed here are Timesheet Efficiency, and Timesheet Automation.
Timesheet Efficiency is the concept of a single data entry exercise done accurately and quickly. Timesheet Automation is the simple concept of managing timesheet information electronically rather than on paper. When taken individually both these concepts make a compelling argument to move to electronic timesheets, taken together you should be asking yourself why you aren’t kicking off the process today.
Timesheet Efficiency
When I started out my working career in consulting we had paper timesheets. These were (supposedly) to be filled in daily, submitted weekly, and data from them entered into the accounting system monthly. However, people being people, the accountant only checked them once a month, so they were generally only submitted once a month, and thus usually only filled in once a month when prompted by project managers. This resulted in inaccurate and late timesheet information.
International Support - Microsoft Great Plains VAR/Partner Selection ? Overview for V.P. IT
July 17, 2007
Looks like Microsoft Great Plains becomes more and more popular, partly because of Microsoft muscles behind it. It seems to be goof solution for mid-size and even large multinational corporation with Headquarters in US and branches Worldwide. You, as V.P. IT can deploy the strategy, when you host your Great Plains in headquarter and have international offices connect via remote support. Or, you can have regional offices work of their own Great Plains installations and then consolidate information via FRx or other reporting tools
The challenging thing here is to get local Great Plains support for your regional offices. Ideally you should have Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains Partner - who serves your headquarter and has consultants/technicians close to your overseas operations. It is not always possible, due to multiple reasons:
Europe - in Europe Microsoft Business Solutions has Navision and Axapta lines - so you can not find (with some minor exceptions) local European Great Plains VAR - you have to appeal to remote support.
Multicurrency issue - US-based partners do not usually have this expertise. You have to appeal to ones, operated by former immigrants - there are partners present in two countries with balanced operations in both: like US-Brazil, US-Mexico, US-South Africa
Microsoft Navision and Crystal Reports - An Overview
July 16, 2007
Microsoft Business Solutions ? Navision is an integrated solution for small and midsize companies looking to expand their business operations without much interruption to its existing processes. Microsoft Navision enables businesses to alter as much or as little of its existing system, integrate add-ons and vertical segments of its development. It integrates every aspect of your organization, from customers to suppliers, from accounting to supply chain, increasing your productivity and competitive edge. Microsoft Navision has an open environment architecture making it fully customizable and easy to use and maintain. It can also be implemented rapidly so that there is only a minimal disruption to business operations.
Microsoft Navision was originally written by Denmark-based Navision Software in its own proprietary language C/SIDE (Client/Server Integrated Development Environment). Both European and North American markets have benefited from its use. Its launch in the global market will help organizations scale up their development and add value to their business.
One of the primary reporting tools used today is Crystal Reports. With its ability to call up information from SQL commands, using Crystal Reports adds extensive functionality in your reporting procedure. The following is an overview of Crystal Reports as it relates to Microsoft Navision:
Explore the Internet in a Whole New Way
July 15, 2007
For a long time now Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has ruled as ‘King of Internet browsers’. Like many of Microsoft’s products an initially brutal marketing campaign pushed Internet Explorer into the mainstream’s consciousness and from then on it was the logical, default choice. It’s free with the operating system, works well, loads any page and is easy to use. Other web browsers soon faded into obscurity and sometimes even died in the shadow of the new king of the pack. Netscape Navigator, the former ‘King of the browsers’, has now ceased commercial operations and has been taken over by the fan base. Opera is fading into obscurity and Mozilla was facing a similar fate, until recently.
Mozilla Firefox (formerly known as Firebird) is probably the largest threat that IE has faced in recent times. Currently, according to http://www.w3schools.com, IE is the browser used by 69.9% of Internet users and Firefox is used by 19.1%. This might not seem like much, but according to http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/ an educated guess at the number of people that use the Internet is somewhere around 605,600,000 users (or was in 2002, the number will have increased substantially by now). That means that (after some erroneous math) a rough stab at guessing the number of people using Firefox is probably over 115,064,000, which isn’t a bad user base at all.
