Monday, April 30, 2012

Education Day 1: Make More Money with Automation, Chris Greaves


By Sian Waterfield

Chris Greaves
The first session of the STC-SOC's Education Days began with an entertaining step-by-step guide for how to make "homebrew" coffee in a jam jar (you know for the next time you are missing your travel mug!). This was just the start of a very captivating demonstration of Chris Greaves' automated indexing tool and numerous macros that he has developed for MS Word. The indexer, along with being able to quickly (literally seconds) build an index within your document, is also able "to locate all the interesting words in your document." After we carefully followed the instructions in the ReadMeWd.txt, we adjusted our PC's macro security settings in Word (please note the "PC" part of that, as it was not compatible with my Mac) and were ready to run the setup. Once everyone had run the set up, we were able to view the Indexer in our Word Add-Ins tab and with one click of a button…create an index! After viewing the ins and outs of the Indexer tool which included concordance tables, leaders and KWIC phrases, Chris also demonstrated a selection of his multiple (800 plus!) time saving Word macros. These included: a pre-emptive spellchecker, task time tracker/reporter, triangulated tables, automated version control and stale dating and much, much more! It was easy to see how these tools could save us time, money and countless headaches. So "if the work you are doing is boring and repetitive - build (or borrow) a macro!" To view the free macros and tools that have been mentioned here check out the following resources: www.chrisgreaves.com and http://macrosinminutes.blogspot.ca/