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After I got bored playing Angry Birds on my Christmas-gift-to-myself Android tablet, I had to get down to business. After all, I didn’t drop over $400 to play games. I bought it so I could extract some productivity from my daily bus commute and my lunch hour.
The biggest productivity challenge was getting my Microsoft Outlook data synchronized. I needed away-from-Office access to my to-do list, contacts, and calendar. I’d had previous experience with PDA-to-PC sync, so I knew how dreadful such apps can be. The few good ones were usually pricey.
The good news is, I found something that (mostly) fits the bill. The bad news is that this is no $2.99 app. But, really, should it be?
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Microsoft would love for you to upgrade your copy of Microsoft Office every single time there’s an update. And frankly, being the geek I am, I usually agree.
But there are situations in which even I admit moving to the latest version of Office (or any other software, for that matter) doesn’t make sense. While you never want to be too far behind the current version, here are a few situations it’s better not to upgrade.
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I’ve been around lawyers long enough to observe one thing: you people love to cut-and-paste. Rare is the first draft that either doesn’t contain text lifted from another document or isn’t an out-and-out copy of a similar document done for a prior client. (Hey, it’s efficient.)
Don’t worry, I’m not here to browbeat you about the dangers of such an approach or suggest you do something different. (I’ll leave that to others.) Instead, knowing as I do that you’re going to cut-and-paste, I’m going to teach you how to do it with the fewest formatting snafus possible.
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If you spend a lot of your time at your computer (or even within earshot of it), you probably get some sort of “you’ve got mail” notification, like Microsoft Outlook’s Desktop Alerts. And if you’re trying to work on something else besides email, that’s distracting.
But you don’t want to miss anything important, either. How can you strike an effective balance between being accessible and getting stuff done?
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You’ve probably already stumbled across one date-related field code: that Date field in Microsoft Word. And it’s a handy thing to have around when you want that letter you’re working on to always have today’s date on it.
But what if today’s date isn’t exactly what you need for, say, a pleading or other document? Here are some other date field tricks you probably don’t know about.
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With all the options out there for storing things in the “cloud”—Dropbox, Evernote, and the like—and with as many apps as you’ve probably seen for working remotely, your head probably hurts from all the technology being thrown at you. Who’s got time to learn a bunch of new software, when you’re still trying to figure out how to get a Table of Authorities in Microsoft Word?
But what if I told you that one of the most lawyer-friendly apps was a Microsoft creation that you probably already have installed on your desktop or laptop? Would you at least give it a try?
If you’ve got Microsoft Office 2010 or later, you’ve got OneNote. Here are five reasons you should try it.
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There it is, attached to an e-mail in your inbox: a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It doesn’t matter who sent it to you — a client, opposing counsel, an expert witness, whoever. You’ve got to open that bad boy up and (gasp!) maybe even print it. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as printing a Microsoft Word document. You don’t just press the Print button and wait for it to come out. Unless the sender was kind enough to format it for printing for you (doesn’t happen often, in my experience), you’ll need to set it up so that it prints in a way that’s actually readable.
Here’s how, step-by-step.
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In all the speculation that preceded Microsoft’s recent release of Office 2013, one of the most hotly debated rumors was that Microsoft would be announcing a version of Office for the iPad. Even with the debut of Microsoft’s Surface tablet, analysts said Microsoft couldn’t possibly afford to ignore the massive iOS user base.
They were wrong.
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If you’re one of the millions of people who made 2012 the Year of the Tablet, your decision wasn’t just which tablet to buy. You had to figure out how you were going to connect your tablet to the internet.
Maybe you just tethered it to your smartphone via Bluetooth and used your existing carrier data plan to get internet access. Or you bought your tablet and a data plan together for a seamless (albeit somewhat expensive) solution.
But if your situation (like mine) doesn’t allow either of those options, you may start looking at an external mifi device. Here’s how one such service stacks up.
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