Does It Compute?

Ribbonizer for Word 2007

Yesterday I talked about the Addintools program which lets you revert to the Office 2003 menu and button bars.

If you want to stick with the Ribbon, but you want to customize it, check out the RibbonCustomizer from www.pschmid.net for $29.95. This lets you easily gain access to features on the top-line menu in Office 2003 but are not included in the Ribbon.  You can also restore the entire Office 2003 menu and default toolbars, which can be assigned to a new tab and can be accessed using the keyboard.

Microsoft has driven developers crazy with the new format - one or the other of these tools can help you take control of Office 2007.

Addintools for Word 2007

Well, I finally got all (or almost all) my old programs set up on my new PC (except for bizarre problems with the Palm sync), so I started playing around with Word 2007.

This presents a classic case of dumbing down a program: yes, if all you use is the functions that Bill expects or wants you to use, it is pretty easy. But if what you want to do is customize it, make it work the way you want it to work, that is more difficult. 

Also, those giant buttons assume that you have a giant screen with huge resolution. If you are still running at 800x600 (and I have a lot of clients who have diehard users of that resolution), then you have hardly any room left for text.

Any firm that has substantially customized their Word 2003 or early menus will have a major learning curve. This will be complicated by the fact that in smaller firms especially, Word 2007 will be purchased only with new computers, so that part of the office will be using the newer version and part the older version.

The first and most important step is to make sure that Word 2007 is set to save as *.doc (NOT *.docx) format. This will simply make everyone’s live easier. Furthermore, since when you are working in Word itself, you are still using the old format, there is really no percentage in going to the new format, which is only invoked when you save a document.

For training issues, help is at hand!  I downloaded “Classic Menu for Office 2007” from addintools.com. For a mere $29.99 for the entire Office suite or $15.99 for just Word, you can restore your Word 2003 menus. Even better, the new menus can also be listed across the top, so that users can migrate gradually as they are comfortable. The buttons have the “new Vista look” so they are not exactly like the old Word buttons, but the functionality is the same.  So if you have only a couple of users on Word 2007, get them this program. Then, when Word 2007 has been purchased for the whole office (or close enough) you can switch in a systematic fashion. 

Recommendations for Best of Breed

A while ago I noted that the concept of "Best of Breed" was perhaps a dying breed. Nevertheless, prospective clients often ask me "if I were starting from scratch, what would you recommend?" In order to answer this, you first have to ask two questions:

1.  In terms of spending money, on a scale that ranges from "I know I have to do it, but I don't want to spend a penny more than absolutely necessary" to "I'm willing to spend a little more if it will increase productivity and any competitive advantage vis a vis other firms" – where does your firm stand?  Interestingly, virtually all firms immediately know their answer – nobody has to think about it for very long.

2.  How much customization do you want to do? - a lot to match your practice needs in great detail, or minimal, just to get up and running and make it easy for technophobic attorneys?  Again, most firms are quite clear on this issue.

There are three types of functionality a firm must provide for:
    Practice Management
    Time/Billing/Accounting
    Document Management

For practice management, for firms that don't want to spend money and don't care about customization, I recommend Amicus Attorney. For firms on the higher end of both scales, I recommend TimeMatters.

For Time/Billing/Accounting, the choice is simple: PCLaw best fits the needs of almost all firms up to at least 25-30 users.

For Document Management, the choice is equally simple: Worldox.

Some people argue that TimeMatters has an adequate or "good enough" document management system and why go to the extra expense of Worldox?  There are many reasons to do this, but the main ones include:
    Worldox is an industrial strength solution that forces end users to use it. TM depends on the good will and training of end users. Do you want to depend on the good will and discipline of end users when they are trying to cut corners to meet a deadline?
    Worldox search capacities are significantly superior to those in TM.  For example, Worldox will let you do a search for specific words in a particular type of document (contract, say). TM will not.
    Worldox does an excellent job of mail management, including attachments. This is one of the main weaknesses of TM and frequently requires the purchase of a relatively expensive add-in to remedy.

The additional expense of Worldox will more than pay for itself in very short order.

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Taking Worldox Documents With You on a USB Drive

People frequently need to take documents with them either to work on at home, or Powerpoint files for presentations, or simply to have a client's files with you at a meeting. Worldox has a "send to" function that lets you do this. It is a bit dated, and includes options like "send to a floppy disk in drive A."

However, with a little work, this can be customized to create a "send to" function that will send documents to a USB key drive. The only catch here is that it has to be done on an individual basis (and you would not want to give everybody in the firm the right to copy documents to a key drive anyway) because USB drives show up as different drive letters depending on the configuration of the computer.

When you right-click on a file in the Worldox list and select "send to" one of the options is "Add/Edit."  If you are fairly knowledgeable, you can copy the settings from "send to floppy in Drive A" and modify the drive letter. Otherwise, ask a consultant to help you - it only takes a few minutes.

My Favorite Keystroke Shortcuts

Your favorite keystroke shortcuts are often the ones you have just discovered.  I recently discovered several that are incredibly useful.

1.  There are shortcuts associated with the "Windows" key on your keyboard.  Windows + D brings up your desktop no matter how many programs you have open.

2.  Windows + M minimizes all your open programs. In many respects similar to Windows + D.

3.  Windows + E brings up windows explorer.

4.  When you are typing in a web site address, if you just type the name -- e.g., heckmanco -- and hit Ctrl-Enter, it expands to include the rest of the address.  Works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Wear and Tear on Laptops

My Dell Latitude D800 laptop was getting a little long in the tooth (3+ years), so I recently bought a new Latitude D630.  Naturally, as soon as I bought the new one, another thing broke on the old one.  Laptops are well known to be substantially more fragile than workstations, and that's quite logical – after all, you don't lug your workstation around in all kinds of situations. 

In looking back over the three years, I've had the following issues:

Replaced the motherboard - twice (the first time was with a refurbished motherboard that had a different thing wrong with it). When you replace pieces, Dell uses refurbished parts, not new ones.

Replaced the screen - twice. Once it had developed some blue vertical stripes, and the second time it just died.

Replaced the hinges - it turns out that the lubrication in the hinges can leak out and cause a short circuit in the on/off switch so that the laptop won't boot up at all (unless it is used with a port replicator).

Fortunately, I had gotten next business day support, which was impeccable - the technician showed up at my office the next day (or the day after, depending on what time  you place the call), replaced the part within a half hour or so, and everything was back to normal.

The moral of the story is: if you are buying a laptop, buy business support.  For Dell, that also means you get support from somebody in the US - in my case with a thick Texas drawl.

Fingerprint Reader on New Laptop

I ordered a fingerprint reader on my new Dell Laptop (a D630). It operates pre-boot, so before the computer even boots up you see a screen asking you to swipe a finger over the fingerprint reader. It takes a little getting used to, since you have to swipe in a straight line and fairly slowly. After a “good swipe” message, it boots straight into the computer. Very cool.

Since laptop theft is a major problem (just think of that IRS laptop that was stolen with thousands of people’s names and data on them, not to mention your company information), this is a great security measure.  It does have a couple of limitations, however,

First, you can opt out of the swipe screen by hitting Esc and entering a password. So you want to make sure you have a “good” password here. Typically good passwords combine numbers, letters, odd characters (such as ~) and capital letters.  Full sentence passwords are also good. So a good password might be “D0notStea1me" - easy to remember, hard to break. Typical number substitutions are 1 for L, 0 for o, and 3 for e.

Secondly, if you use the laptop in a docking station at the office, the cover is closed and the fingerprint swipe is not available. However, since the chances of having your laptop stolen at the office, this is not a major issue - except of course that you can’t show off how cool you are by demonstrating the fingerprint swipe!

Anyone who travels a lot and is buying a new laptop should definitely consider getting this sort of system.

Related Documents vs. Versions in Worldox

There are a couple of instances where you might want to create a version of a Worldox document and it is not possible. Consider the following:

You send a document to a client via email. The client edits the document and returns it to you.  You want to save this document as a version of the original document you sent out. IF (and that’s a big “if”) the client has not renamed the document, Worldox will automatically offer to save the document as a version. However, more than likely, the client has renamed the document, especially if they are also using a document management system. In this case, you cannot save the document as a version.

What you CAN do, however, is relate the returned document to the original document. When you go to save the attachment, click on the “Menu” button at the upper right corner of the Worldox window. Select the option “relate this document to....” Then select the original document you set out. For this system to be most effective, you will also want to include a “Related?” column in the list of files that appears in Worldox.

A second case is when you are using a document comparison program such as DeltaView. If you use DeltaView to compare two versions of the same document (say, version 6 against version 1), when you save the result, DeltaView will offer to save the document as a version. However, if you are comparing to different documents, you do not have the option to save as a version.  The workaround here is the same as above: save the DeltaView document (remember you have to make sure it is saved as a Word document) as a related document to one or both of the compared documents.

Saving PCLaw Bills to PDF

PCLaw has an option to save each individual bill to a PDF file, even if they are generated in a batch.  When you generate the bills, just check the “save to PDF” box. You can also email the PDF files by checking the “email” box as well.

However, when you do this there are several things to consider.

First, when you create the bill template you must check the “PDF” box on the template. If you define the template as producing an RTF file and then try to save it to PDF, it will not work properly.

Secondly, by default PCLaw saves the bills to the Dyndata directory. This is not a good idea. You should redefine the directory under System Settings | Banking - “Output Options for Invoice Images” so that it is part of your data files structure. Also check the “automatically generate PDF output.”

Lastly, if you also check the “email” option be aware that the bills and emails will be generated one at a time, which can be a bit time consuming if you are generating large numbers of bills. If you have a large number of bills, but only some of them are to be emailed, you would be better off generating them all and then use the “Regenerate Bill” function to email specific bills .

This not only makes the PDF images available for emailing, but also facilitates getting them into your document management system (if you are using the PCLaw system, they are automatically assigned to the appropriate matter). Depending on your scanning software, you might want to designate the directory you use for scanned documents as the bill output. Then, depending on the software you are using, you can move them into your document management system.