Have you ever needed a Wingding or other strange character in a document, spreadsheet or presentation , eg.  ¼ ∞ ♥ ¢ … ?  Finding and inserting the right character is easy with the character map.

Select All Programs » Accessories » System Tools » Character Map:

in the character map, you can select any font and see what is available:

Just click on a character that you want to use, and click Select

Then click Copy

Then go to your document, spreadsheet, powerpoint or email and under the Edit Menu, choose Paste (or use the keyboard shortcut Control+V). The character should appear.

Have you ever seen a snazzy font that you wanted to include in your presentation?  Have you tried to find the font used for Rocky or Star Wars?  Instead of spending hours searching,  WhatTheFont font recognition system is a free service that uses a jpg or gif to identify the right font.

Upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches in our database. If WhatTheFont can’t figure it out, you can submit your image to the WhatTheFont Forum where cloak-draped font enthusiasts around the world will help you out!

Send a strong message to Visa, MasterCard, & other major credit card companies: Every penny of a charitable donation must reach the people who need it most.

If you agree, sign the petition at the attached link:

http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/clickToGive/campaign.faces?siteId=3&campaign=CreditCardProfits

Get Rid of the Ribbon

1. Introduce more products - The key for a sustainable growth and a means to increase basket size is to offer new products which are in demand. Stay tuned to trends in your industry and fulfill customer demand. Go to industry shows, conferences and encourage visitors to your store to email you their wish-list.

2. Offer product bundles - Using your current stock, create new products which include several items and position them as product bundles. The key is to demonstrate the savings which could be made by buying a bundle pack vs buying the items separately.

3. Push complimentary products - Most types of products could work nicely with a companion products. To increase basket size by making customers buy complimentary products you’ll need to push the products during the checkout process and ensure they are indeed complimentary.

4. Increase product prices - From time to time look at your prices, compare them to your competitors and double check your margins. Increasing prices is a legitimate means to increasing basket size provided conversion rate stays the same.

5. Display one off products - Products such as ‘limited edition’, ‘limited stock’ etc will give you an option to sell one off (ad-hoc) products which are hopefully priced higher than your current basket size.

6. Use in-store promotions - Offer free shipping, upgraded shipping, product gifts and more for orders above your current basket size. Display your promotions visibly across the store to ensure visitors to your home page as well as visitors to your product pages see the promotion.

7. Focus on quality traffic - Hopefully you are using some type of web analytics to measure traffic, conversion rates and basket size. You will notice then that some traffic channels have a higher average basket value. Invest your resources and time driving more traffic from those channels and you will increase your basket size.

What are your tips for increasing basket size?

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Guest article by Michelle Strassburg Co-Founder at Wood and Beyond, sellers of wood flooring and oak worktops. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing and is an active blogger.

But what happens when you move from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and all of your excel links to PowerPoint presentations break?  First, you cry. Then you install the Office 2007 service pack.

Links to Excel items may break:

Error message when you try to update a link in a PowerPoint 2007 presentation: “Some linked files were unavailable and can’t be updated”. By the way, the articles in these links sometimes refer to Excel “binary” files. That just means an Excel 97-2003 format file. In other words, all of the files you ever saved from Excel (or PowerPoint or Word) until now.

FIXED in Service Pack 2. See Office 2007 Service Packs.

MS has published a hotfix for this problem

click here: http://www.codebrain.com/archive/gifs_transparent_spheres/index132.html

Right click on any sphere, click copy and then click paste in your PowerPoint presentation.

Play games (aka “challenges”), score points, and compete with your friends while improving your productivity with Office. As a concept test, this add-in is not supported, but is an opportunity for you to try out an idea we are working on and let us know what you think. For additional challenges and the opportunity to earn more points, download Office 2010 Beta.

In late 2008 Secondmarket launched it’s website, and now is the largest centralized marketplace and auction platform for illiquid assets, such as auction-rate securities, bankruptcy claims, collateralized debt obligations, limited partnership interests, private company stock, residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities, restricted securities and block trades in public companies and whole loans. SecondMarket’s online auction platform has over 5,000 participants, including global financial institutions, hedge funds, private equity firms, mutual funds, corporations and other institutional and accredited investors that collectively manage over $1 trillion in assets available for investment.

Secondmarket creates a solution for companies that need to create liquidity in illiquid markets.

For example, what if you were interested in buying Facebook shares? You couldn’t do this via the public exchanges, but if you were an institutional buyer, you could go to Secondmarket’s website and review available financial and operational information to decide if buying pre-IPO Facebook was a good investment.

To download the SecondMarket Overview brochure, click here.