On Thursday I brought in my work computer to get the external backup software looked at. Luckily for me, the gentleman working on it was extremely helpful. He realized almost right away that my duocore laptop was somehow set to only work on one processor! To be honest, I had no idea that could even be done... I knew that software may not take advantage of the duocore, but the processor was literally working at half capacity. I was annoyed that i didn't know to look for this myself, but frankly I was ecstatic that my poor little HP had hope of running faster than molasses on a cold day in Quebec... and this was just the beginning!
Friday I did manage to upgrade to Office 2007 which is a VERY welcome change to my work technology experience. I'm still waiting on my license for OneNote 2007, but that should be ready to go when I get in tomorrow morning. These new software packages alone are going to make my life substantially better and easier to keep myself organized. As to why I'm upgrading to 2007 software in mid 2010, I think I've already covered the issues with large corporate systems in a previous post.
As I sit here now, its a dreary Sunday afternoon, so it's not so bad that I've let my work week creep into my weekend. I'm sure my weekend has creeped into my work week someone, hence the backlog situation I'm in now. My current task is to organized a multi-tiered project across a number of organizations. For this I wanted to create a fancy timeline I could share with people, but honestly after some searching I couldn't find something that suited my needs. I found tons of templates based in Excel or Word, but frankly, I can put one of those together easily. I also found some really awesome looking web-based timelines like this (but this would not allow me to include sensitive information in the timeline as its outside the company firewall), as well as some software based packages, both free and paid (I almost shelled out the 50 bucks!). To be honest, I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, so maybe it doesn't exist!
After wasting a couple hours doing that, I realized that I really just needed a simple project management package similar to Microsoft project, but without all of the bells/whistles/costs. Creating/managing a simple task chart was all I needed. I'll save the whole story, but I looked through a bunch of options including Gantt Project, but after downloading and trying it out, I realized its export features were too limited for my liking. I eventually settled with Openproj, which is probably way to powerful/complex for what I need, but it seems fairly intuitive, and its license allows anyone to use it for personal or business use so it's safe from any "not for commercial use" warnings. It still doesn't have perfect Excel export features, but I can at least get the task list and key dates copied over to Excel to share with colleagues.
Most importantly though, it should help me keep all of my various project tasks organized.
I'm hoping that by this upcoming weekend I'll have my work life fully organized via OneNote, so I'll likely have some opinions to share on that. :)
Friday I did manage to upgrade to Office 2007 which is a VERY welcome change to my work technology experience. I'm still waiting on my license for OneNote 2007, but that should be ready to go when I get in tomorrow morning. These new software packages alone are going to make my life substantially better and easier to keep myself organized. As to why I'm upgrading to 2007 software in mid 2010, I think I've already covered the issues with large corporate systems in a previous post.
As I sit here now, its a dreary Sunday afternoon, so it's not so bad that I've let my work week creep into my weekend. I'm sure my weekend has creeped into my work week someone, hence the backlog situation I'm in now. My current task is to organized a multi-tiered project across a number of organizations. For this I wanted to create a fancy timeline I could share with people, but honestly after some searching I couldn't find something that suited my needs. I found tons of templates based in Excel or Word, but frankly, I can put one of those together easily. I also found some really awesome looking web-based timelines like this (but this would not allow me to include sensitive information in the timeline as its outside the company firewall), as well as some software based packages, both free and paid (I almost shelled out the 50 bucks!). To be honest, I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, so maybe it doesn't exist!
After wasting a couple hours doing that, I realized that I really just needed a simple project management package similar to Microsoft project, but without all of the bells/whistles/costs. Creating/managing a simple task chart was all I needed. I'll save the whole story, but I looked through a bunch of options including Gantt Project, but after downloading and trying it out, I realized its export features were too limited for my liking. I eventually settled with Openproj, which is probably way to powerful/complex for what I need, but it seems fairly intuitive, and its license allows anyone to use it for personal or business use so it's safe from any "not for commercial use" warnings. It still doesn't have perfect Excel export features, but I can at least get the task list and key dates copied over to Excel to share with colleagues.
Most importantly though, it should help me keep all of my various project tasks organized.
I'm hoping that by this upcoming weekend I'll have my work life fully organized via OneNote, so I'll likely have some opinions to share on that. :)
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