Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

Nitro PDF: Saves me money and time

October 19, 2005

For the past few weeks, I've been using a product called Nitro PDF Professional to create and manipulate PDF's. I was considering Adobe's Acrobat Professional but didn't relish the idea of paying almost $400 for it, particularly since a lot of the PDF manipulation I do is simple stuff.

Nitro has been very easy to use, was a breeze to install, and has been well worth its purchase price (I had a special offer to get it for $49 - the normal price via Amazon is $79). Here are some of the things I use it for:

I print articles from the web to archive and share. This lets me send articles without fear the links will quit working (some articles roll off after some period of time).
I combine PDF's. Sometimes I want to combine information from multiple sources into one document (such as part of a Word doc, some Excel data, and some PowerPoint data, perhaps intermingled with things off of our internal Wiki collaboration tool). I simply print them to the Nitro PDF "printer" and use Nitro to combine them.
In an earlier post, I mentioned that I do a lot with Microsoft Project - Nitro makes it easy for me to print project plans, resource plans, etc. to PDF and combine them with other documents and data sources to provide a "one stop" project summary.
I download bank statements and credit card statements, then use Ntro's "highlight" capability to highlight and annotate items for documentation for expense reporting. Since I travel a lot, I do this all electronically and send the statement via email as a PDF.
Nitro allows me to convert PDF's to Word documents, which is handy when I want to incorporate product descriptions, etc. into summary documents I often create.
I print presentations to PDF so I can distribute them. Where necessary, this keeps people from reusing copyrighted material (I can "lock" the PDF to prevent cutting and pasting from the document), but a big thing if you are presenting financial data is that this prevents people from drilling into the "hidden" data behind graphs in PowerPoint.
- You see, if you create a graph in Excel and paste it into PowerPoint, anyone with the PowerPoint file can open the underlying data sheet and see any data in the spreadsheet - including things on other tabs that you don't want them to see. This approach prevents that.

If all you want to do is read PDF's then use the Acrobat Reader available for free from Adobe. If, however, you want to do more manipulation of PDF's I recommend you check out Nitro PDF Professional as a cost-effective option.

Lifehack Reloaded: An ounce of prevention

October 7, 2005

As we move into the "cold and flu" season, I am re-running a "lifehack" post that I believe has done wonders in keeping me healthy. If you haven't done something like this already, please consider it - I see these sanitizer gadgets all the time at stores like Target for about $2 US for the holder and two bottles of sanitizer.

From June 2005:

As a very frequent flyer, I wanted to share a best practice I picked up from a friend of mine, John Palazza. After noticing that John always had a bottle of hand sanitizer with him, I realized this small idea would be handy to get rid of traveler germs as I made my way through airports and other places where the unwashed masses may gather.

I have seen the following things on planes and in airports:

very grungy airline tray tables that haven't been wiped in who-knows-how-long
people leaving public restrooms without washing their hands (not me, I assure you)
people of all ages coughing and sneezing all over the place
other things I'd rather not mention

I then see people eat off those airline tray tables.

I believe this is why I have always had at least one good bout of flu or something more exotic every year. For example, I caught German measles (aka Rubella) after a flight full of coughers about 3 years ago - apparently my childhood vaccine didn't work the way it should've.

But that didn't happen this year! I've been using John's little trick since last summer, and I've now officially made it through a season of heavy winter travel without getting the flu, or even a cold. I attribute it to the wondrous anti-germ powers of my travel-size Purell hand sanitizer, complete with its own handy little rubber harness that allows me to attach it to my briefcase.

I then sanitize my hands before and after meal and beverage service on the flight, and when I get off the plane.

If you travel a lot, why not give it a try? John puts the "Pal" in Palazza.

Coordinate schedules with a whiteboard

September 25, 2005

Now that school is going again, the challenges of communication regarding schedules is a challenge for our family. With my travel; the scouting involvement of me, my wife, and all the kids; school commitments; sports commitments; and all sorts of other things it can get crazy very quickly.

My wife started something a few years ago that seems to work pretty well for us. Fridgecal She bought two dry-erase calendars that we attach to our refrigerator magnetically. The top one always represents the current month, the bottom one is next month.

At the beginning of each month, we:

Move the new month to the top
Erase last month's calendar
Fill in the dates for next month
Fill in any commitments we know about
Put next month's calendar at the bottom on the fridge

As we go through the month, we can easily deal with adds, removes, and changes to our schedules.
While not perfect, this has been a very effective means of doing a sort of air traffic control over our busy schedules.
By the way - we have another dry-erase board on the front of the fridge which is a sort of "inbox" for what we need at the grocery store. When you notice we're low on milk, it's your job to write "Milk" on the grocery board.

----------

A couple of comments from the old site:

by Bren:

It's so weird how alike we are...we've been doing pretty much the same thing for a little over a year. We only use one whiteboard, but the idea is the same. Schedules (ours is only a week out), grocery lists...we also keep a half dozen frequently called phone numbers there, both for us (well, me and my lousy memory) and for babysitters.

-----

by Rosa Say:

Bren, I was thinking the same thing :-) Dwayne, in our case we use good old fashioned paper calendars with huge blocks to write in, so we can jump months ahead if need be, but also because I like to rip off the pages and keep the record. They're helpful for all sorts of things in estimating future trace dates/recurrences that I should make digital reminders of in Outlook, and at tax time they really help for the mileage stuff I missed ... need every deduction we can get with the absurdity of Hawaii's taxes.
A hui hou, Rosa

-----

by memorykeeper:

I have a similar system, but not whiteboard based. I work week to week using Mozilla's Calendar application - Sunbird, which color codes entries for each 'user'. Since the events are entered into the calendar, printing out this week and the next week is not a problem.

Any changes are then 'markered' or 'pencilled in'.

Whiteboard scores over my method there.

A great share. Thanks

Memorykeeper

LifeHack: Knowing whether you've got good airline seats

September 5, 2005

Gadget alert: I use a web site called "Seat Guru" to see how good or bad my airline seats are before I fly. As part of the itinerary I get from my travel agent, I can see what type of plane I'll be flying on, then I can look up my seat and see if it's a "problem seat" or not.

For example, later this week I'm flying to London on United Airlines. I'm waiting for an upgrade to Business Class but since that's never guaranteed, I want to make sure my Coach seat is OK. I fire up SeatGuru.com, select United Airlines from the navigation menu, select the Boeing 777-200 from the list, and I see a seat map of the plane.

SeatGuru color codes the seats. The green ones are the ones you want, the red ones are the ones you don't, the yellow ones are the ones to watch out for. Hover over the seat on the diagram and you'll see a popup that tells you why it's colored that way.

On this next flight, my seat is 22H - not colored at all, so it's a "normal" Economy Plus seat. Tomorrow, I'll call and see if I can get moved to a green one...

Oh - and did I mention SeatGuru is free? Very sweet.

Outlook and GTD - Filing and Archiving Tips

August 31, 2005

Now that you are processing your email instead of nesting on it, you’ll need to consider a sustainable strategy for archiving and storage of your message. You also need to figure out how you’ll find what you need (a common source of anxiety for those of us who are unaccustomed to filing).

Philosophy:

File everything you think you might need.
Don’t be concerned about hanging on to something, as long as you have a good place to put it where you can get to it if you need it. Disk space is more abundant than ever these days, and there are plenty of free, readily-available searching and indexing tools to help with retrieval (more about that later).
Don’t be afraid to delete things
- I know I said you can file anything you want, but try to develop a more mercenary attitude about what you file. Your tolerance for this, your personal document retention requirements, etc. may vary, but anything you delete is something you no longer have to take care of.
Name your folders something meaningful
- You won’t always remember what you called the file, but you should be able to find it in a couple of tries (for example, info about General Motors will be under Inbox/Customers/General Motors or Inbox/Customers/GM in my system.
Decide on a naming convention when you save files to your hard drive
- This will help you find things, and will help you purge things systematically.
  - For example, you may want to archive old, complete projects, things from a previous role in the company, and what not.
- I have developed a habit of including the date within the name of lots of the files I create, particularly if they are things that are likely to be replaced by updated versions later on. For example, if I receive or create a copy of a corporate presentation today, I will save the file as “2005 08 25 Corporate Presentation.ppt.”
  - This way, when I search for “corporate presentation” I can easily find the latest one.
  - This method allows me to find all files that start with “2005” so I can easily archive them to off-line storage and get them off my system when the appropriate time as passed.

Storage: setting up an archive strategy

In corporate environments, there is typically a limit to how much data you’re allowed to store on your company’s mail server. That’s certainly true for me.

To make it easy for me to find things, I did the following (note that this is Outlook-specific, but similar concepts should apply with other email systems).

Create an archive file that is stored in My Documents

One of the issues I’ve had with Outlook is that it doesn’t put its archive files in the My Documents folder by default. When I do system backups, I’d like to be able to back up My Documents and get as much of my user-specific data as possible, so I create an archive file that is stored within a “My Documents\Outlook Offline” folder.

To create a new archive folder, use the File / New / Outlook Data File… command within Outlook, and navigate to a folder within your “My Documents” folder on your PC. My current Archive folder is called “1ArchiveForGTD” but you can name it anything you want.

Next, from within Outlook, select Tools / Options, then click on the “Other” tab. On the “Other” tab, click the AutoArchive button, and you’ll see something like the dialog below. Archivedlg

As you may be able to see, I have changed my default AutoArchive settings so that my old messages are moved to this Archive file every 14 days, and I move items over 2 months old.

This creates a replica of my folder structure within the Archive folder so I can easily find items that have been archived.

So how do I find items? I use a program called LookOut to index and search all of my mail folders, and have scheduled re-indexes daily so LookOut’s data stays current. Similarly, you can use one of the many free desktop search products available now from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and others.

Some other things I’ve learned along the way:

I don’t want things in my “context folders” like @Office, @computer – web, and other folders to be archived, so I excluded them from my scheduled autoarchive by right clicking on each of these folders and changed their AutoArchive setting to “Do not archive items in this folder.”
I don’t autoarchive my tasks or contacts – you can use the same approach to exclude them from the autoarchive process.

This is a very high level overview of my process – I’ll share some other tips in the future that may help with these actions, as well.