David Huby’s Blog Technical and business stuff

27Apr/110

Microsoft Office keyboard shortcuts

I've added a new link to the blog today - Microsoft Office keyboard shortcuts. I highly recommend this to anyone using Office products - and in fact I think it's essential for productivity.

When I'm using Outlook I use a hierarchy of folders to store emails which require no further action*. The particular shortcut that led me to find this page was
Move item CTRL+SHIFT+V
It's worth taking the time to acquaint yourself with all of these shortcuts.

*When I'm using Gmail, I don't categorise - but that's because Gmail has a far superior interface for performing searches.

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3Feb/100

Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small

  • Organisational structure should not be confused for communication structure
  • Success hides problems.
  • If you give a good idea to a mediocre group they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group they'll fix it - or throw it away. (described by Ed as "People and how they function is more important than ideas")
  • When a team functions well together, they will succeed
  • Make something that's broken better rather than copying a success -> taken literally this could be contrary to Al Ries theory of mining the rich gold vein in his book Focus
  • Post mortems should be a critical in depth analysis. Pixar's current post mortem technique is to ask people to give feedback regarding the process they used on that film: 5 things they would do again and 5 things they wouldn't do again
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