MenuMonthly Archives: December 2012
Tropical Cyclone Evan causes much loss to Fiji
A quick blog post to explain why there have been delays in responding to customers over the last few days. Tropical Cyclone Evan hit Fiji a few days ago and has left much of Suva without power.
We still count ourselves lucky. The loss of power is a small inconvenience compared to what others in our country are currently going through.
While we have no power in the office, some team members had power restored to their homes late yesterday. We have temporarily relocated some of the team to one of the homes to start responding to customers.
We hope to catch up with all your queries by tomorrow. Again our apologies for the delay… and thank you for your understanding.
Some further information about the cyclone…
The last time Fiji experienced such destructive winds and the wrath of a cyclone was 19 years back when cyclone Kina hit the tropical Islands of Fiji.
On 17th December 2012, Fiji experienced yet another equally (or even stronger) tropical cyclone named Evan which left many people in the northern and western parts of Fiji Islands homeless and many others still struggling without food, water and living in darkness without power supply.
Destructive winds reached speeds of up to 200km per hour (125 mph) causing roofs of many houses flying off (this was witnessed by one of the team at Standss), branches of many tree’s breaking off and tree’s fallen in the middle of the roads causing road blocks and breaking electricity lines causing power outage in many areas including our office.
Road Block during Tropical Cyclone Evan
Source: The Queensland Times
Roof's of houses Blow off due to strong winds of Tropical Cyclone Evan
Source: ABC News
While all the staff here at Standss are safe and slowly resuming work, our prayers go out to all the people who have been heavily affected by the cyclone. We are currently trying to find out if there is any way we are able to assist the affected people.
We would like to again take this opportunity to thank all our readers and customers for your understanding.
While we will try our best to respond to your emails within 24 hours, we apologize in advance for any delays caused.
Here are a few links you can follow to read more about the Destruction caused by Cyclone Evan:
Video is Ready: Effortless email filing (and finding)
A quick email to let you know that we have just uploaded the video showing you how tagging emails may be the best way of organizing and finding emails.
This is our SECOND ATTEMPT at a email tagging solution… in fact most of the software has been completely redesigned based on feedback from hundreds of users.
See the video to find out…
- How you can make your emails more findable without actuallychanging the way you file emails
- How you can get the benefits of folders without having to create or maintain folders
- How you can organize your emails without wasting time organizing your emails
- Why tags are better than folders for many users
The video is ready for you to view on our updated website
There’s also a fully functional trial version you can download and try for yourself… and we’re offering a 30% discount for the next few days if you’re ready to order.
We hope that you like what your fellow Outlook users helped us create.
Best Regards,
Sanjay Singh
PS: You may want to look at the video even if you tried Email Tags in the past. This is a total redesign of the software and the pricing based on what Outlook users wanted (as opposed to what we thought they wanted).
Myth #6: Sorting and Organizing Is the Solution to Email Overload
I read a great article on Life Hacker recently titled Seven Productivity Myths, Debunked by Science (and Common Sense). Myth #6 (Sorting and Organization is the solution to Email Overload) will be of interest to Outlook users.
We all suffer from too much email… and most have tried various ways of trying to organize our emails… usually by organizing them into folders.
But here is something interesting from the LifeHacker article…
One University of California Santa Cruz study (commissioned by IBM) concluded that email technologies have gotten to the point where filing messages may actually make them harder to find, and more importantly, wastes your precious time
The study noted that it was simply more efficient to search when a message was needed than it is to scroll through folders, and then scroll through messages in a folder.
Our own survey from our 30,000+ readers seemed to indicate the same. Some of our own findings were:
- Maintaining a folder based email management system took too much time (and discipline)
- As a result it was too easy to procrastinate… and end up with emails everywhere.
- Many users are now using Outlook Search (or other search tools) to find emails. This was true even for users who were filing their emails in folders.
Read the rest of Life Hacker article for more information and for other non-email productivity tips as well.
Back to email… while we agree that Search is the way of the future, folders do provide some benefits that Search does not.
That is why we created Email Tags. Now Outlook users can get the benefits of both Search and Folders without actually having to use folders.
Email Tags works inside Outlook and allows you to get more control over your emails WITHOUT requiring that you change the way you currently work.
You can see how easy Email Tags for Outlook is by using the fully functional trial version or watching the short video on our website.
Do you still organize emails using folders?
Do you use Tags?
Tell us what works for you by leaving a comment on the blog
Holiday Season Invites, Greetings & Newsletters via Email, Fax or Post
Christmas is just around the corner… its the time of the year when we need to send out invitations, greetings and newsletters to friends, families and clients.
Depending on your contact list, the best way to contact your friends this year maybe using email, fax or post/hand delivery.
Most of these mailing can be considered “mass mailing” i.e. we want to send copies of the same mail to everyone… possibly customized with their name and address at most.
Microsoft Outlook and Word have some built-in features that automate this process for you. In addition we have built our own tools to further speed up and simplify the process for you.
In this post I’ll discuss both, the built in free way as well as our own addins.
How to Email out Invites, Greetings and Newsletters.
I am going to start with what I consider to be the easiest, fastest and most powerful way of doing this… our own EmailMerge PRO for Outlook.
Seeing is believing so check out this short video on how to send out Invites, Greetings and Newsletters using EmailMerge Pro.
Send unlimited emails to unlimited number of contacts directly from Outlook. EmailMerge supports HTML emails so don’t hold back in creating beautiful and colourful emails this Christmas season 🙂
How to Fax out Invites, Greetings and Newsletters.
Despite what many people will have you believe, Faxing is not dead.
In fact in terms of deliverability, it can beat email – there is almost no chance that your fax won’t get delivered because of an over-zealous spam filter.
You can use Microsoft Word and the free fax printer that comes with Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 to send out personalized faxes to your customers this year.
The Bad News: Windows Fax and MS Word don’t talk easily to each other out of the box.
The Good News: Fax4Word allows you to fax merge straight from Word to the Windows Fax printer.
View more information on Fax for Word
How to Print Letters and Envelopes for Posting and Hand Delivery
Even if you will be sending paper based mail this year, technology can help you.
Here are step-by-step instructions to:
Use mail-merge in Word with Outlook data to create and print personalized letters
Use mail-merge in Word with Outlook data to print mailing labels and envelopes
I hope you find the above information helpful in staying in touch with friends, families and clients this year.
