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ManagePro February 2003 Newsletter
eNews Letter February 2003

  Contents
 1. Upcoming Training Event

 2. Tip: The Power of Simplicity and 3's

 3. New update available for non-Annual Maintenance and a new upgrade for Annual Maintenance holders - Auto Spell Check & Correction!

 

 

Download a one page summary of the key differences between ManagePro & MS Project

 

  1. Upcoming Training Event in Seal Beach  - 6th & 7th

Training - should you be there?
Our only scheduled training event for this year coming up in 31 days.  The first day is focused upon beginning and intermediate users.  The second is geared directly for applied business management and planning.  The question is, "Should you be there?"

The first day, March 6th will include a comprehensive and fast paced review of all of the program functionality in the morning and in the afternoon address the most common customizations to apply.  Here's some of the following questions that will be addressed to help you determine if this is a good fit for your needs.

  • How do you create custom views to match your top 10 business questions? E.g. what's coming due in 30, what are all the current priority one tasks, etc.
  • How do you customize the report editor to generate standard or recurring reports?
  • How do you set up goals to be tracked in the annual review process?
  • How do you set up a view to easily track the status of to-dos you've assigned to others?

The second day (March 7th) only has five seats left as the size is limited due to the amount of time spent on each participant's business plan and needs as configured and represented in ManagePro.  Participants will be bringing their current ManagePro database with them for use and review through the day.  The prevailing objective will be to ensure your ManagePro database represents both an alignment from strategic plan down to operational objectives, and a clear connection between goals, action plans and track-able metrics. 

For more information click: www.managepro.com/training.htm

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  2. Tip: The Power of Simplicity and 3's

Simple to grasp, easy to visualize, 1-2-3, all in one picture.  They are all terms when applied to action that suggest a high likelihood of implementing versus terms such as "incredibly detailed, multi-layered, highly complex."  Guess which group describes what we commonly see when reviewing customers' databases?  Yes, the latter.

Here's the tip - use combinations of three's to keep things simple and use our new graphic schema based upon the field Goal Type to add easy visualization.

What do we mean by using 3's?  Here are some examples:

  • Don't go down more than 3 indentation levels before landing on an objective or goal you want to drive.  More levels than that and you start reducing the likelihood it will be uncovered and worked.

  • Under each objective make the 3 or 6 most critical action steps (critical success factors) stand out visually.  In fact start by limiting your action plans to either 3 or 6 steps underneath each goal to force you to prioritize where the effort is going to be directed.
     

Notice that the planner views now provide three types of fonts you can use to make relationships between goals, action plans and (detail) lists easier to visualize.  Use the Goal Type field (available in the latest update).  The Goal Type field determines the display features in the Goal Planners.  If you highlight a goal, right click and select "Goal Type," and then select the "Action Plan" type, it will display the goal record in a gray font.  Select "List" and the goal will be displayed in a blue font.   Any other goal type will be displayed in a dark black font.  Oh yes, we also changed the bullets to arrows to create a better visual flow from goals to action plans to lists. 

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  3. New update for Non-Annual Maintenance users, and a new upgrade available for Annual Maintenance holders - Auto Spell Check & Correction!

1.  5.1 users who have a non-Annual Maintenance contract version of ManagePro will receive a web update with both bug fixes and the addition of improved graphical representation of goals, action plans and results, as described in the User's tips above.  This upgrade will pop-up when you open up ManagePro and are connected to the WEB.  If you do not receive update, and you have version 5.1 you should contact our Tech Support office at .
 

2.  5.1 users with an Annual Maintenance version of ManagePro will receive an upgrade that includes a new auto-correcting spell checker

If you're like me, you try to type as fast as you're thinking, but the letters don't quite match up to the correct spelling.  Now ManagePro has a new spell check engine that not only provides the basic spell checking on all fields in the Detail views, but it also includes an auto-correct feature that remembers and reapplies  your corrections to  mis-spelled inputs.

As noted above "miss" has a squiggly red line underneath to indicate a potential misspell.  Right click on the word within ManagePro to get a list of possible corrections, or use the "Auto Correct" set up an automatic correction for that group of letters.

 

The correction for each group of miss-spelled letters is directed from the "Spell" screen selection at the bottom of the first menu, e.g. "when I type mis automatically change it to miss"

 

 

Note:
The auto-correct feature only works in detail view, not the planner views.  If you want it to auto-correct while you are typing in a title of a goal or to-do, enter the title from the details view.

There's also an un-related, but very helpful additional feature in this release.  Double click on any long text field (ex. a progress note detail field or a goal's requirement field), and the screen will immediately expand to a large size for each viewing.

(This upgrade will pop-up when you open up ManagePro and are connected to the WEB.  If you do not receive update, and you have version 5.1 you should contact our Tech Support office at .)


Look forward to meeting some of you at our upcoming training.  Remember to keep it simple and powerful... have a great month.

Rodney Brim,
CEO, Performance Solutions Technology, LLC


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