Bacon Bits:

Well folks, it’s officially the year 2012. And even though the Mayans have put a stigma on 2012 with all their “end of the world” mumbo jumbo, I’m very excited about the upcoming year.

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This is the time for new-year’s resolutions. I was going to put down “stop procrastinating” on my list, but I never got around to creating it.

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If you too have yet to create your list of new-year’s resolution’s, here are a few Excel resolutions you can adopt for 2012.

1. Stop emailing workbooks called Book1.xls
2. Stop using Merge and Center
3. Stop hiding cell content using White font
4. Start making your workbooks Print-ready, so we don’t print 25 blank pages when we print it
5. Stop printing Excel eye charts with 8 pitch font

Feel free to add your own. Happy New Year!

On this Friday, I’d like to share another life lesson from The Oatmeal:
» More: Buying Apps on Your Smart Phone

Happy Thanksgiving to all you Excel Nerds out there.

I hope you all enjoy your time with family and friends.

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I’ll return next week with more stuff.

Can we all admit that Takes Your Kids to Work Day is a joke?

Who is getting any serious work done with little a-holes hanging around?

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On my last “take your kids to work day”, my kids asked if they could make paper airplanes and fly them around the office.

Does that sound like I’m getting any real work done?

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It should be called let your spouse sleep in day, because that’s the only real benefit of this charade.

I need a workforce reduction.

It’s October 17^th, which means it’s Spreadsheet Day! Today is the day we all celebrate Excel and take a moment to think about how Excel has made our lives better.

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Spreadsheets are used by lots of people in many different ways. The best thing about spreadsheets is that you don’t even have to be smart to use them.
» More: Happy Spreadsheet Day

I firmly belive that when you create the next great application in your organization, you do yourself a major injustice by sending it out with a crap name like “The Data Inputer” or “Turd Churner 6000″.
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It’s important to brand the application you’ve worked so hard to develop. In all likelihood, you’ll want your application to become an ongoing fixture in the organizatoin. Given that, it needs an identity that accurately places focus on its purpose and place in the daily operations of your company.
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Here are a couple of rules I use when naming a new utility, application, or dashboard.
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1. Stay away from lazy alphabetisms. “The CPT Tool” may be easy to say, but that name just relegates your work to the pool of countless other utilities in the the alphabet soup of tools the company has.
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2. Stay away from nonsensical acronyms. Sure, it’s cute to force your newly created inventory reporting application into a name like “F.I.S.T. (Field Inventory Srategy Tool)”. But it sounds like the evil spy network in a Marvel comic book. Acronyms in general are not bad when they’re done right. The acronym should end up capturing the spirit of your tool. Something like “EPiCenter (Enterprise Productivity Information Center)”  sounds like what it is – the central focal point for an organization.
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3. Don’t give your application a corny name like “CASPER” , “OSCAR” or “JOHNSON”. As much as it makes sense to you, other people won’t get the inside joke. It just sounds goofy.  Besides,  do you really want users calling to tell you that your JOHNSON has bugs?
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4. Use words or terms that have some relevence to the tool you’re creating. Some of the names I’ve used in the past are: PlanningExpress, PricePoint, ResourceIQ, BudgetExpress, ProfitCenter. I bet you could look at any one of these names and get a pretty good idea what the associated application does.
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5. Don’t be afraid to come up with a completely unique name. Most software applications have catchy and unique names that are fairly easy to remember. For example: Xcelsius, Zilliant, Antivia, GMaps. Nothing says you can’t give your application a Web 2.0 kind of name – something like Centizio!
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So what are some of the names you’ve come up for your applications?
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Oh… and if you’re struggling to find a catchy name, check out this nifty name generator.

It’s the Thursday before a three day weekend (we have the Labor Day holiday on Monday). This means that most of us are already heading for the barn. So today, I’ll take it easy and share with you a new Canadian band I’ve been listening to.

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They call themselves Rural Alberta Advantage. I would describe their music as Alternative-Folk-Canadian-Country. In any case, the star of the band is their drummer Paul Banwatt. For my money, this guy makes the band. Every time I listen to one of their songs, I focus in on the drumming.
» More: Drummers and Sticky Notes

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SHOCK

» More: The 5 Phases of Grief as told by Mrs. Pig and Ava

I’ll be busy today, releasing a new dashboard for user testing.

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Why spend hours of your own time finding bugs, when you can let users do it for you!

I’ll be back tomorrow with a new trick!
» More: User Testing

The other day, I stopped into Whole Foods Market and I picked up some tasty pork ribs.

They were actually pretty good, so I looked at the label.
» More: Vegetarian Pork Ribs