B2B Service & Expertise
eMails
Sideways Sales Letter: Relationship Building eMails. Inform - Inspire - Invite
This technique produces
Lead-generating sales.
Newsletters
... can help inform customers about current offerings and new products, keeping you fresh and in front of clients.
Webpages & Graphic Design
Do your logo and graphics need scalable options or redesign?
Case Studies & White Papers
A 2-page confidence-building, more effective, Testimonial and an 8-12 page soft-sell piece that often highlights a new industry-edge product or feature.
SEO savvy Copy
Home and Landing Pages that have been SEOptimized for good ranking on Google.
Blogs & eBooks
... are a great way to become a thought leader and subject matter expert in your industry.
Recent Engineering Project I managed utilizing Excel and Word
The project I managed for Zainkelk Engineering Services involved developing techniques to record and evaluate a simple problem that requires a rather complex solution and brought my spreadsheet and writing skills to the forefront.
Not only did the process have to lead to a successful completion of the study in a quality context and time efficient manner but also, it had to be set up to be easily taught to workers new to the project. And what better backup to have to a verbal lesson than a well designed and easy to follow manual or White Paper on the subject (see Technical Paper under Technical Writing tab for this document).
The study involved viewing and recording the traffic movement and traffic violations at a number of intersections before and after red light border plates were installed in an attempt to curb red light running. So, cameras were installed and set to record 72 hours of video on 5 intersections. The recordings were copied to a hard drive at Zarinkelk offices and that is where the fun began.
It would have been too expensive, and out of the budget range, to have the videos evaluated off site and the company that won that bid would have only counted the traffic movement thru the intersections as thru traffic, and left and right turns. Violations would have still needed to be detected and recorded in house at Zarinkelk. Therefore, I had to come up with a way to record and analyze the videos and collect all relevant data. Numbers of vehicles, rights and left turns, and violations.
I looked online for a traffic counter tool but, no suitable one was found. They all required mouse clicks on multiple buttons, and that would have just been too slow to be practical for this large volume of video and the deliverable time constraint. Or, the counters only did one type of count and we need to count three different directions of movement.
So, I put my thinking cap on and came up with a solution. What if we used MS Word to count the traffic using three keys on the keyboard to indicate whether the car went thru the intersection or turned Left or Right. Then, the person viewing the videos could leave their hand over the keyboard and just click a series of letters that were assigned to a type of movement. Spaces between the letters would be needed later in the process to move the data into Excel columns for sorting, restructuring and adding. Adding them during the viewing and recording would have slowed down the keying-in process too much. But, how to manage those strings of letters with no spaces?
I reasoned that, if the letters could just be put into separate cells in Excel, they could be added, totaled, and graphed for evaluation. So, I new that the letters could be replaced with letters followed by a space using the MS Word “Find and Replace” tool. This would render each letter as a word and the “Text to Columns” tool in Excel could be employed to insert each letter (word) into a separate cell.
I also discovered that, in Word, I could select disjointed segments of these text strings and perform the conversion to letters with a space after them and bring them into Excel with one additional step and flow them into individual cells with the Text to Columns tool. Its really quite cool but, be very careful when doing this. Copying disjointed data and pasting it in Excel can be problematical if not monitored carefully.
The next step was to set up some cells with formulas to add these traffic movements into columns that could then be transposed to rows and then used to generate graphs for display.
I have written a document outlining these procedures with screen captures and everything needed to mentor new folks without having to be right there every minute of the early learning process.