Business Computing Tips

By K&K Fainges kfainges@...

In the past, K-tips has spoken about doing things like sending
birthday emails to clients. Remembering It is an important part of
keeping your business in their mind as "good people to deal with."

So how to do this. It depends on numbers. If you just have a
few, "gold glass" customers you want to give special service to, one
simple way might be to add them to your diary. Microsoft Outlook has
this function built in. Its very handy for those of us who *must*
check their email at least once a day.

If you go to VIEW - GO TO - CALENDER, you can bring up a calendar
that can be viewed as day, a week or a month. To add new
appointments in, simply go to FILE- NEW - APPOINTMENT (or there is an
icon for new appointment that looks like a small calendar.)

Then type in the Subject, say Fred Smith's birthday, click on the
date to select the correct date and set the time to when you are
normally on the computer to remind you.

Then click in the box labelled Reminder. This can be set to give an
alarm or flash up a box with the subject in over the top of whatever
work you are doing. You must have Outlook open for it to work though.

There is also a space for notes. this is very important as birthdays,
by definition, only come around once a year and it can be hard to
remember who Fred is.

You can also set this appointment to pop up again next year by
clicking on the reoccurrence button and setting it to yearly.

Cheap tip:-

If you want to remind a group of people every 3 weeks to top up their
paper etc (whatever you are selling), then set the reoccurrence to
every 3 weeks and add a list of all their emails to the notes
section. Or better yet, set up a group with their emails in (go to
FILE- NEW- DISTRIBUTION LIST). Remember to add the group to BCC and
your own address in the To section on the email. This way, people's
private emails are not available to others, and you get a copy of the
email to prove it went through.

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Please feel free to pass it on to your friends, just let them know I
wrote it.

Karen Fainges holds a Bachelor of Business, and a Grad. Cert of
Vocational and Educational Training. All this is nice but it's the 14
years of having to make sales or starve that makes her think she has
really learnt what does and doesn't work. A tutor for all ages, she
specialises in helping people get started on the long road to
technology.

"It has to be practical, it has to be cheap, and it has to work."