I’ve become a bit of a software junky recently. When I worked for a small business, there were young, technologically literate staff around, and when I ran into a problem I would simply yodel pathetically across the office until one of them came to my aid. Now that I’m freelance I have had to buy various tools so that I can do things for myself. Last week I bought the ebook WordTips: The Macros (5th edition). Following its instructions, I actually managed to install a macro to paste unformatted text; this was a major achievement for me (I’d tried macros before and failed). I doubt I’ll ever read the whole 500 pages, but at least when I now come across a useful macro that someone else has written I’ll know how to install it on my system.
I also purchased SmartDraw, so that I could prepare flowcharts for a document I’m editing. I had intended to buy Visio, because that was the program I was familiar with. However, when I went looking for Visio online, I found a comparison of the two products, and decided that SmartDraw looked more useful. It seems quite user friendly, and the training videos gave me the idea of creating flowcharts of the various procedures I use in running my business.