Author: William Gallagher

Use Microsoft Office for free on iPad – kinda

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It's a trick, but it might be useful if you don't want to pay a subscription just to make one twiddle in a one Word document. As of today – 28 March 2014 – Microsoft Office for iPhone is completely free. Not just free as in you can read a document but must pay to edit or create ones, it's completely free.

But you can run iPhone apps on your iPad. They don't look great. This one doesn't look as good as the proper iPad version of Office released yesterday. But it is Office and it will open Word and Excel documents. Possibly also PowerPoint but, seriously.

You do still have to sign up for a Microsoft account and there are myriad better ways to write and edit documents than on the scaled-up iPhone Office but it works.

Get Microsoft Office for iPhone (it's one app with Word, Excel and the other one together) here.

Get Microsoft Office for iPad here – if you want

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It's been a long time since I would've automatically bought Microsoft Word for anything, for anywhere, let alone for my iPad. Word's last killer feature was that everyone else had it and everyone needed documents sent in that format. Once we couldn't get it on iPad, we said nuts to Microsoft Office and did just fine with everything else. We did so just fine that now Office has come, it's a shrug.

Partly because we don't need it, partly because you have to pay a subscription to use Word, Excel or PowerPoint to actually do any work.

But aren't you curious? Don't you just want to try it out? You're bound to have some Word or Excel documents somewhere and you can read those in Office for iPad. You can read them in anything, really, but you can get Office and you can have at least something of a play, so give it a go.

Except.

Truly, Apple's App Store has some severe problems when you can't find Microsoft Office for iPad on it on the day it launched. Seriously: search for Microsoft Office or Microsoft Word on the iPad App Store and you will get a slew of other apps first. I couldn't find it at all. Searching for just the word Microsoft is worse.

But somehow Microsoft OneNote pops up in various searches and if you select that, there's a Related tab which does show you Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Don't bother digging, I've done that, here are the direct links:

Word:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-word-for-ipad/id586447913?mt=8

Excel:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-excel-for-ipad/id586683407?mt=8

PowerPoint (seriously, you want PowerPoint?)
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-powerpoint-for-ipad/id586449534?mt=8

Notice the /gb/ part of those addresses: these are the UK (or Great Britain) links but tap them wherever you are, iTunes will figure it out.

Even if it's the best-ever implementation of PowerPoint, that presentation app would come a distant fifth out of the three anyway. Excel is certainly the most powerful and least top-heavy of the three. But I am a writer and I've got form writing about word processors so it is Word I naturally go for. And without yet schlepping through setting up a SkyDrive (or whatever the lawyers require Microsoft to call that now) and definitely without paying around $10/month or about $100/year just to experiment with typing, I've gone for it and got it and am now deleting it.

Good to see it finally arrive. Good to see it seemingly well-worked out. I just need a compelling reason to buy it and it's been many years since its mere existence on iPad would be enough.

How to pick the right To Do app for you

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Let me do the joke first: if you have a Mac, iPhone or iPad, buy OmniFocus. That’s it, we’re done, thank you for coming, I’m here through Friday, two-drink minimum, see your waitress for details, try the veal.

OmniFocus is so good that I’ve been asked whether the makers pay me to say that. And I really would offer it up as the one-stop, suits-all solution except that you can’t just stop once and it doesn’t suit all. It’s pretty close. Two things held me back from recommending it universally and one is that the Mac version has been hard to use. I’m sure I can’t say anything in detail about the beta release of OmniFocus 2 for Mac but I will certainly tell you that it is really good and much easier to use than it was. I’m saying easier, I’m not saying easy. But OmniFocus 1 was always worth the effort it took to learn it, OmniFocus 2 gets you its powerful features much more readily and clearly.

The other thing that has held me back from universal recommendation, though, hasn’t changed. And it won’t change. OmniFocus only runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads. There’s no Android, Linux or Windows versions and seemingly there never will be. I’m fine with that. Better the company stays great on one platform than it becomes okay on a few.

But it does mean I have difficulty recommending To Do apps. Actually, I won’t blindly recommend specific ones – not even OmniFocus when it comes down to it – because everyone is different and the best I can do is point you to some great and good To Do apps. In my latest The Blank Screen workshop, I discussed specific To Do software and hit a snag. To Do apps for iPhone: legion. To Do apps for Android: myriad. To Do apps for Windows Phones: hello?

Try this yourself. Do a google search on “best to do apps for Windows Phone”. You will get many results and several will be articles that state they include such things as To Do apps – but they don’t. I’ve read many top tens, top twenties, top something else and found not one single To Do app in there.

At the other end of the scale, if you have an iPhone, you’ve already got a good To Do app. It’s called Reminders and it’s very basic but what it does, it does very well. Reminders invented the Location Reminder idea – the way that when I leave a certain client’s office, my iPhone will tell me to send them an invoice – which I think should be mandatory now for all To Do apps.

Mandatory is a hard word. To Do apps are also a great example of when the word specifications is bollocks. I do recommend that you try many different apps but if, in so doing, you decided to write up a spec sheet of what they all did, it wouldn’t help you. Remember the Milk would score high for being on the web as well as Macs and iOS; OmniFocus would score low for being limited to Apple’s gear. Yet Remember the Milk isn’t right for me and OmniFocus is. Though I love the name Remember the Milk.

You can’t quantify experiences like using the right To Do app. But you can try.

Picking the right To Do app for you means testing out a lot. But you can limit how many you have to try or buy with this one simple thing: don’t look at a To Do app for mobile phones and tablets or for desktop Macs and PCs or for using online, if it doesn’t have Start Dates. These may be called something else like Defer Until (that’s what OmniFocus calls them and I don’t like that). But when you enter or edit a task, you must have the ability to prevent yourself seeing it until you need it.

Follow. I’m doing The Blank Screen at the Stratford Literary Festival in May. I do not need and I do not want to see that on my To Do list until it’s time to prepare for it in about mid-April. So I don’t. “Prepare presentation for Stratford” is in my To Do list but it has a Start Date of 15 April and until that day, I won’t see it. I can look for it, I can see it when I review all my tasks, but each day as I look to see what I’ve got to do, Stratford will not be one of them – until it’s supposed to be.

Start Dates are as vital as Due Dates and if you use them, they are gold. But even if you don’t and never will, the fact that an app has them is a good indication that the app is powerful. Maybe you don’t need powerful features, probably you do, but it’s better to have them available, isn’t it?

 

Best news all day – OmniFocus 2 for Mac confirmed for June

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What’s more, the beta test version is available right now. Or at least, it is to those of us who were on the beta last year and who haven’t forgotten their login details like I have. I’m working on getting those back so I can spend the evening playing with this – seriously, I’m not ashamed to say that to you – and if you haven’t beta-ed before but want to, you can sign up to be added to a list.

When we unveiled our plans for OmniFocus 2 for Mac last year and invited you to try our test builds, it was so we could learn from you which parts of the design were working well, and which parts still needed improvement. We didn’t know what to expect, so we weren’t sure how close we might be to setting a ship date.

The feedback you provided was generally positive: the new design was easier to navigate, and the new Forecast and Review modes were making it much easier to stay on top of all your projects.

But listening to your feedback, we also learned a lot about ways we could make the app even better—and we were further inspired by Apple’s latest designs when they unveiled iOS 7.

We paused our test builds and went back into heads-down mode to focus on the hard work of another round of design and development. Since that time, our team has been working tirelessly behind the scenes on a fresh design that preserves the best features of their original work while adapting to the latest changes to the platform.

With this new design in place, I’m thrilled to announce that OmniFocus 2 is now ready for its final round of testing.

The Omni Group – 26 March 2014

Update – I’ve got my login details back. I’m not kidding: that’s my evening sorted out. Man, I must love this software.

Do go read that full Omni Group blog because it has much more specific detail about what they’ve been doing.

Update 2:

21:01. It’s gorgeous. All the power of the old Mac version but even more of the gorgeousness of the iPad one. I used to hesitate recommending OmniFocus (you couldn’t tell I was hesitating but I was) because the Mac one was hard to learn. It was worth it, but it took effort where the iPad and iPhone versions were straightforward. Now I think the new Mac version is going to be the best of the three.

 

Pick yourself up and have another go

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Productivity is supposed to just be a handy single word to cover all the things we want to do. But it becomes a label and then it becomes an ideal and you can see people for whom the word itself has become a cult. If you spend more time thinking about productivity than actually doing anything, you need help.

Hello. My name is William.

(Hello, William!)

The ease with which we can get caught up in shaving a few seconds off those tedious emails, in making sure our work is everywhere we are so we can get right down to it and finish that vital paragraph on the train, in writing sentences so long that you’ve forgotten the start… um… The ease with which we get caught up like that is one reason I think it feels so bad when we stop. When you fall off the productivity line, it’s rarely because you’ve made a conscious choice to get a life. It is usually that you didn’t keep up the effort. That feels bad enough but then these things snowball and you just see all the jobs you’ve got to do mounting up and mounting up. Perhaps because you have been on top of it all, you can see how big that mountain really is and that makes it even harder to get back going again.

Bollocks to mountains.

Do you know the phrase ‘sunk cost’? It’s the money you’ve already put into something. If you’ve invested £50,000 in something that isn’t working, it’s ferociously hard to forget that £50,000 and move on. Of course it is. It’s bleedin’ £50,000. Yet sometimes you should weep now and move on, sometimes it is a sunk cost. Because we are so wired to feel the loss of that £50,000 that if someone says you just need to do this simple thing – oh, and it only costs £20,000 more – we think about it. So we should: I’m not saying investors should bail out early, though you know how every website gives financial advice like that and then says, by the way, nobody here knows anything so you can’t sue us? Seriously, I know nothing about investing. I’m making an analogy. You knew that but I had to say it. Anyway. This £20,000 more lark: we don’t see the £20,000 because we’re still blinded by the enormity of the £50,000 we’ve lost. There’s a very good chance that we will spend that extra £20,000 because of it.

And then we’re out by £70,000.

Sometimes you must, you must accept that the money and the time and the sweat you put in to something is gone, it is this sunk cost and nothing you do will bring it back, maybe everything you can do will make it worse. Except moving on.

If you’ve fallen off the productivity line, forget everything that’s behind you. Yes, you failed to complete this important thing, yep you should’ve done that other vital thing. But you did fail and you didn’t do what you should.

Let it go because it is already gone.

Bollocks to all of it, there is literally nothing you can do to fix it so move on and put all that energy into doing the next thing instead. Some problems will cause you damage forever but not actually that many and most things you didn’t do today will be forgotten by everyone else by tomorrow, so join them. Forget it. Move on.

If you really are in a bad place and it really does seem like a mountain that is resting on your chest, do take a look at Bad Days in my book The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition).

But also just take a breath. Look at what’s in front of you right now and see what tiny bit of it you can actually do, right now.

Don’t look down, don’t look up, just chip away in small moves and I promise they add up to mountains. And if that’s too Hallmark Card-like for you, think of it this way: maybe small moves don’t add up very quickly or to very much, but they add up to a hell of a lot more than your sitting there doing nothing but regretting mistakes.

Monday Productivity Pointers

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Not my pointers, unfortunately. But I’m just trying out Lynda.com with one of its free trial offers* and have found Jess Stratton’s Monday Productivity Pointers videos. They are short little clips with advice on specifics about being more productive at what we do – and especially at using software tools. Today’s one is about writing a press release: not everybody needs to do that but actually her advice is useful for many more things. Being clear, getting to the point quickly and knowing what your audience needs are things that apply to every email we ever send.

Try out Lynda.com and particularly Stratton’s Monday Productivity Pointers here.

*I said I was using a trial. The training website Lynda.com often has trials and they are usually tied to somewhere like the MacPowerUsers podcast – which is where this one is. I’d tell you how to get it but I think we’re right at the edge of when that trial is valid so let me instead give you a general wave and an encouraging nod in the direction of that podcast. If you hear a bit about Lynda.com and it’s still valid, great. If not, you’ll still have heard one, two or a hundred and eighty very entertaining listens.

Quick productivity tip – don’t search for questions

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Speaking with someone who is new to computers and especially to Google, it seems people believe the search engine answers questions. What it really does is search. Specifically, if you type a question in to Google it is going to search for anywhere on the web that has that question. The difference between these two can be so small as to be semantics except sometimes it's a huge difference.

If you asked Google “Who is the Prime Minister of the UK?” it would start by looking for pages that had that exact question in – so you're likely to first see lots of people on discussion boards or political websites asking this. Not necessarily answering it, either.

Whereas, if you searched instead for the answer, Google would look for pages that had the answer. Follow: search for the words “The Prime Minister of the UK is…” and you'll get every article that includes this sentence.

It is always better to search for the answer than to unknowingly be searching for the question because it is always more useful and sometimes it is gigantically more likely to get you what you want.

Mind you, be careful. If you start typing something like “The Prime Minister of the UK is….” into Google, it might autocompete your search with some choice words.

Easy and hard ways to break a bad mood

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If it's someone else in a bad mood, try singing to them.

It was worth a shot.

Lifehacker has ten persuasive suggestions for how to handle things when it's you in the mean reds and I rather like the last one:

Lastly, while it may seem counterintuitive, you may have to spend some time on what's bothering you. If it's something you need to deal with, pushing it down isn't going to help. Instead, think through what's making you mad—whether it's a piece of bad news or something else—and let your brain fully process it. If you do, you can actually lessen the effect it has on you. That isn't to say you should dwell on it all day long, but if it's something you need to work through, you're better off doing it now than letting it fester.P

Top 10 Ways to Beat a Bad Mood – Lifehacker

Thoroughly biased app recommendations

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But not my bias.

Staff at the fairly new site The Sweet Setup have jotted down a lot – a lot – of apps that they use on iOS and Macs. What's good about it is this is a collection of apps that a group of people have tried and tested, yes, but also come to rely on. There's no attempt to calculate a score or to compare things very much so there are many times that competing apps are mentioned just because they are what the Sweet Setup staff genuinely use.

What's not so good is the repetition in the article. It's divided into useful general categories like Productivity but then only seemingly-useful ones like Mac, iPhone and iPad. If you just dip in to one, you're fine. But I have and rely on the three equally soI read the whole article – until the repetition got too irritating. If something is mentioned in the iPhone section and there is also an iPad version, it gets listed there too along with almost identical text. Almost. Someone has obviously decided they can't repeat the text verbatim but they haven't done anything very good about it.

So read with that one caveat, okay? Here's the direct link to the piece but do then also take a look around the rest of The Sweet Setup.

Do it all wrong. But preferably quickly.

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Aim big, set goals, focus hard and work long hours. Or, you know, don’t. Creativity Post (via 99U) has advice that goes against the grain but apparently works. Or at least works for the industry figures who’ve each been quoted for this piece about your own business:

We all love to take advice from people who’ve previously been through the same situations as us or who are further along a similar path to us. For entrepreneurs this is particularly useful, since it’s such a difficult, unknown path to tread sometimes. Funnily enough, some of the advice I’ve come across through reading interviews and articles from famous entrepreneurs is often counterintuitive to what I would expect them to say. I thought it would be interesting to gather some of this advice into one place, so here are ten of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I’ve come across from famous entrepreneur.
Creativity Post

I’m leaning toward being sarcastic about this because you can walk away with the certain-sure knowledge that the answer to business success is to take what advice you fancy and do something else anyway. But actually there is a huge amount in here that’s making me think. Some of it’s backing up ideas I’ve had, some of it is challenging assumptions. It’s a good read.