In keeping with last week's theme of shortcuts, have you ever been in a Skype meeting and had to mute your mic real quick. Or maybe you had to unmute your mic, because you have been talking for the last five minutes and no one is answering your questions. Well luckily there is shortcut key for this - win + F4. It will unmute and mute your mic. Also try out win + F5 to turn on and off your camera. (FYI on some keyboard turn on the function (Fn) lock to use the Function keys). We should all try to use our camera as often as possible as the majority of communication is nonverbal (55% to 93% depending on the source). When we don't use our camera, we are missing half the story. Another way to think about it is, it will take twice as long to get your point across. In addition to shortcuts for muting and turning on the camera, Skype has many other shortcuts. I have listed my favorites below. For additional tips check out these links: Keep Communicating,
Ralph
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This one's nice and simple but windows shortcuts have saved countless hours. To learn even more shortcuts i created a desktop background with them all classics. Pay attention to the windows key shortcuts. My favorite has always been win + left and win + right. But lately I have really been into win + E. Try them all out and let me know your favorite. Keep Advancing, Ralph
If you are like me and share website or Box links all the time, you may get annoyed by how long and random those link seem. How many of you have seen something like:
I don't even know what all that junk means. Wouldn't it be nicer if all you saw was: So how is this done? With a simple right-click of the mouse. This tip works almost all Microsoft products including Word, OneNote, and most of all Outlook. Note this also is great to help someone get to a location on a server. Keep Advancing, Ralph Now that we are well into the new year, it is time to track and check off those New Year's resolutions. If you remember from my first presentation, I was the sticky note guy. It was a large part of my motivation for going paperless. One of the first things I needed to do to become paperless is find a way to replace all of those sticky notes and a solution to help me manage my to do list. Over the years I have tried everything from Outlook tasks to google tasks, to remember the milk, to whatever other app of the month I came across. Nothing seemed on stick until I came across Trello. I think Trello stuck because it works the way my mind worked. Trello uses board and lists with tasks flowing from list to list as the progress. Other great apps include Wunderlist, Any.DO, Todoist and Microsoft ToDo. You can also just use OneNote taking apps too. The key for me is that every app needs to keep the same list on ever device. Below is a brief are links to the resources for each option along with a little more detail on my favorite Trello. How do you manage your to do list? Keep Advancing, Ralph Best to Do List Apps
hile I have stopped producing paper, I still receive paper from others throughout the day. One of the biggest culprits are receipts. My old process was just to shove the receipts in my wallet until I got back to the office and then tape them to a sheet of paper, and scan the receipts using the copier. To save some time, I started to take pictures of the receipts with my phone, but they always seemed blurry. So after a little digging, I came across two scanner apps that process the pictures taken from the phone's camera.
Keep advancing, Ralph As you markup your PDFs more and more, it seems that your digital page gets covered. This makes it difficult to read after some time. You can select each text box and manually resize the box to get rid of extra space or you can use the auto-size function to save a little time. Simply select the text box and press "Alt+Z". Better yet, press "Ctrl+A" to select all markup and then press "Alt+Z" to auto-size the text boxes. See below for an example. Also, remember that you can auto-size the font of a text box by checking the "auto" box next to the font size in the properties tab.
Keep Advancing, Ralph There are numerous forms and templates out there that we use on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. Forms such as daily reports, RFIs, and submittals. We often populate these forms using Word or excel and then convert to PDF before we send. But if they are standard enough, why not just fill them out right in PDF. Below are a few instructions for how to use Bluebeam to create a form, save the form as a template, fill out the form and publish it flattened.
Keep Advancing, Ralph One of the myths I hear all the time is that "wet" signatures are more valid than digital signatures. It's simply not true. The American Bar Association has had guidelines in place for digital signatures since 1996. They state "A verified digital signature… generally equals or surpasses the comparable assurance provided by writing on paper." Using digital signatures rather than "wet" signatures has helped me to optimize my paperless workflows removing the need to print a document only to sign it and scan it back in. See below for instruction for how to make your digital signature in Bluebeam.
Be Digital, Ralph The StoryIn 2015, I committed myself to being completely paperless. I did so because I got tired of the constant clutter of paper in my life. I used paper for everything, from document storage to my to do list. Sticky notes. It actually got to the point where I spent more time managing my sticky notes than accomplishing my to dos. Yeah, that bad. In fact it got so bad that my colleagues decided to sticky note my entire office. As seen below,
If you are like me, after you are finished marking up a set of drawings, it's difficult to tell which side is up because page is just covered. What I have found though is using the Note (N) markup tool with its collapsible comments really helps. And so that every single markup doesn't look the same, I recommend changing the icon and color. I encourage you to come up with a standard legend for what each icon means for your team. This standard icon list can then be saved as tool set to be shared with other team members. Find out more details on the Note (N) markup tool below.
Be Iconic, Ralph |
AuthorRalph Kreider strives to help make the construction industry more effective. Archives
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