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Dealing with Conflict: Keeping an Open Mind to Understand Other Points of View

Put a group of people into a closed system, add a dollop of diversity and a dash of deadlines, sprinkle in some stress, and voila – you have a perfect recipe for conflict. In the workplace, conflict is practically an inevitability. That’s unfortunate, because conflict is destructive and counter-productive to…
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Excel Dynamic Charts: A Great Time Saving Tool

If you use Excel for reporting on results each month, you have probably needed to adjust your charts automatically to add a new month, state, or sales rep. Typically, that means clicking on each chart and adding a new data series or expanding the range of the current series. Unfortunately,…
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Automatically Stop Duplicate Values on Input

Preventing duplicate values from being entered in a range of cells may be a requirement in some of your worksheets. Although not obvious, enabling this capability in Excel is very easy. You can prevent duplicate values from being entered in a range of cells through Data Validation. 1) Select the…
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Basic Formula Series: The Excel® Average Formula

Let’s say that you’ve been given a new set of projects to work on, and you’re being asked to calculate how long you think your team will need to complete various pieces of each project.  The best way to obtain those numbers is probably to look at other projects you’ve…
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Motivating and Inspiring Employees

Working on a project and everyone is burnt out? Get them excited again with these tips. Employees are a vital component to company success. While other factors influence organizational gains, your workforce is a sustainable entity that maximizes productivity and progress.  Create an ideal atmosphere to improve employee engagement and…
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Managing through Company Changes: Helping Employees with Office Transitions

When you manage an organization – any organization – through a period of change, there are four main stages to navigate. Preparation The End The Transition The New Beginning The firm I worked for divided the change as many organizations do: They rightfully spent time on preparation, but forgot to…
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Building an Effective Team – Choosing the best candidates to get the job done.

As a company leader, your time is as valuable as it is limited. You depend on your teams to take care of day to day business and make effective decisions in line with your organization’s purpose and best interest. The key is an autonomous, powerful team that works effectively without…
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Basic Formula Series: The Excel® Sum Formula

Excel® formulas have their own logic and syntax, much like math problems. Once you understand the syntax, you can save a great deal of time by building basic and complex formulas to do the majority of your work for you. Where in math problems you combine numbers with variables, in…
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Using the Excel PMT Function to Determine Loan Interest

We start out with a basic premise that we borrow $10,000.00 (D1). Our interest is 3.0% (D2) and the monthly payments are forty-eight months (D3). The PMT formula calculates what to pay back on a monthly payment loan. There are three arguments in this function; RATE,NPER,PV. Two other arguments shown…
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Use VLOOKUP to Find Values from an Excel® Table

VLOOKUP. You’ve heard about it – but what does it do? Vlookup searches a list for a value in the left most column and retrieves the corresponding value from other columns in that row. As an Excel user, what does that mean for you? Let’s say your organization receives donor…
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