10 Tips for Setting Up a Mailing List
In my last post, I talked about the Pitfalls of Addressing Mail. Today I’d like to talk about actually creating your mailing list. I have created and maintained many mailing lists over the years, and have learned from my many mistakes how to avoid some of the problems you run across when you create a [...]
Grammar Tip: Easier vs Easily
photo credit: quinn.anya
Proofreading is an essential skill for all administrative support personnel. In addition to spelling and typos, you also need to be looking for proper word usage. In a previous post, I talked about confusing the words Prospective and Perspective. Today I have another pair of words that I often find misused.
Easier vs. [...]
Create a Desk Reference Manual
photo credit: Dan4th
What happens if a sudden emergency occurs and you have to be off work for a week or more? Could a temp walk into your office and be able to easily handle things while you’re gone? She can if you’ve created a Desk Reference Manual with procedures on how to handle your [...]
Working With Confidential Documents
photo credit: ivoryelephantphotography
As you progress in your career as an Administrative Assistant, and especially as an Executive Assistant, you’ll be working more and more with confidential documents. Pretty much every interview you go on will ask you about your experience in handling these types of documents. Below are some tips for properly handling confidential [...]
What Are Your New Year’s Goals?
As the holidays wind down, New Year’s Day looms, and with it the spectre of New Year’s Resolutions. While most people look at these resolutions in a personal sense, like losing weight, exercising more, or being more assertive, I’ve found it beneficial to apply the idea of New Year’s Resolutions to work as well. We [...]
Create PDF Files for Free
Many times in an office environment you need to create a file that can be opened by anyone without any specific software requirements. If you have Windows, you can use the Microsoft Image Writer that is in your printer directory, but that doesn’t work for people using Apple or Linux operating systems.
The standard document [...]
Controlling Your Graphics
Has this ever happened to you? You place a graphic in your Word document and send it to the back so you can type the text over it. But then you decide the graphic placement isn’t quite right, and you click on it to move it. Only it won’t click. All you do is move [...]
Creating a Zip File
You need to e-mail a big file to a client, but it’s too big for either your or their e-mail limits. What do you do?
Easy, you just compress the file and send it again. While once upon a time you needed to have 3rd party software like WinZip to compress files into a zip folder, [...]
Make Your Documents Cleaner
One thing that I see over and over again, even from experienced Administrative Assistants, is badly aligned text. It might not look that bad on screen, but once you print out your document, it detracts from the overall look and professionalism that you want to project.
The mistake that most make is using the space [...]
Understanding formatting in Microsoft Word
One question I often get from other Administrative Assistants is how to figure out why a document is doing something strange. Most of the time I find out they have formatted something without realizing it. Usually they are quite amazed that I figured out the issue, when all I did was turn on [...]


