CHRISdotTODD

Occasionally we have the need to search just a single website, yet the site search engine doesn’t seem to be up to the task. Google has a great feature that many don’t know about that lets you search a website using Google. The steps are quite easy to follow. Go to www.google.com In the search box enter the following: site:domain search term(s) . For example site:nba.com damian lillard . Site:  (including the colon) is the Google keyword telling it to restrict its search to the domain you will name next. The domain must come immediately after the colon -- no spaces . You don’t need to include “www.” or other sub-domains unless you’re certain you want to restrict the results. Here are some examples: nba.com for the NBA website ( https://www.nba.com ) nhl.com for the NHL website ( https://www.nhl.com ) adobe.com for Adobe’s website ( https://www.adobe.com ) Treat the search term(s) like any other Google search Check out the results. There are a few tricks that you

There are many job search apps and websites including LinkedIn , Monster , and Indeed . It seems with all the various search apps and sites, it’s difficult to find a good match for the job titles I’ve been seeking. After many frustrating attempts to use the advanced search features on these sites, I discovered that good old reliable Google has a better solution. To use Google to find your next job, search Google by following this simple pattern: job level (optional) of job title followed by jobs . For example, “manager of social support jobs.” If you want to search in another city or if you’ve blocked your location, just modify your search to include the city, “manager of social support jobs in Seattle.” When you get the initial results, either select the heading or one of the many filter options, e.g. “Full-time,” and you will be directed to a page specific to job postings matching your search criteria. From the job postings page, you can very easily further refine the resul

You’ve invested in a knowledge management program, maybe Knowledge Centered Support (KCS), to improve the availability of self-support content for your customers. It’s going reasonably well, but one day you realize that the amount of written content has begun to pile up. Before you reach this point, I highly encourage you to start a content maintenance program as part of your overall content governance. If you're past this point, well, better late than never. Why do you need a maintenance program? You may think of content governance as defining roles and ownership for creating content with appropriate processes and editorial guidelines, which it is, but you need to include ongoing maintenance, too. Without a maintenance program, you likely have one or more of these issues going on. Your support agents and customers are running into irrelevant articles , having to skip listings in search results and/or even clicking and reading those articles that are no longer relevant. Wor

Only Microsoft Word has a built-in watermark feature, but Excel and PowerPoint have a reasonable workaround to adding watermarks on those files, as well. For each of the instructions, I'm using Office 2016 for Windows. Word Word is very easy -- just 3 quick steps. Go to the Design ribbon in your Word document. Click on the Watermark icon of text found near the right end of the ribbon in the Page Background section. Select a watermark you prefer or Custom Watermark... from the menu. If you select the custom option, you have multiple options beyond just custom text. Enter watermark text (or alternatively a picture). Change the font used. Change the font size or use auto for auto-scaling. Text color. A layout of diagonal or horizontal. When you need to remove the watermark, repeat steps 1 and 2, and then select Remove Watermark found at the bottom of the menu. Excel The workaround for a watermark in Excel is done by using an image file.  Find or

If you've ever used a Microsoft Word template, you often find the same line that has both left flush and right flush text. I had a recent need to do this and set out to figure out how to accomplish this trick. It ended up not being so difficult - it can be done with Tabs. Have the line you're working on set to left flush. Enter the text that you want to be left-flush. (Leave the cursor at the end of the text.) Select the Home Ribbon (Home tab). In the Paragraph section of the Home Ribbon , click the lower-right corner  where you see the half-square and arrow. This will open the Paragraph properties dialog box. Click the Tabs... button located in the lower-left of the dialog box. This will open the Tabs properties dialog box. There are 2 settings to make in this dialog box. Enter 6.5" for the Tab stop position . This assumes you're using 8.5" width paper and have 1" borders on the left and right sides. 6.5" was determined by this sim

Many times I've heard from colleagues who want to make our help website search the top priority and  I think they’re really missing more important priorities that are much more effective in assisting customers in finding relevant content (and site features/functions). Step back for a moment and consider your site search compared to a Google search. (For that matter even compare to Bing and Yahoo search.) The technology is fundamentally different. Google indexes every page its crawler can access. Your site search has a finite amount of content to index. Google looks at what pages are the most popular both from links to (the pages) and click-throughs (and so much more). At best your search engine knows page popularity, which will become a problem for new content and may likely become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will search with 1 to 3 keywords -- only sometimes using a phrase. Google has a rich history of search results related to those words and what’s

I’ve been on both sides of the interview table throughout my career. Having been hired and passed upon as well as hiring (and firing) great employees, I’ve had plenty of time to practice the skills in hiring and interviewing. In short, it’s extremely difficult to get to know someone from just a few hours (at most) of dialog. In most cases, I think the interviewers are doing it wrong and they’re missing out on great people. In this article, I’ll share some of my own experiences and best practices from interviewing and being interviewed. I honestly believe 85% of the work belongs on the interviewer side. If you’re looking for the best candidate based on how well they can interview, you’re missing out. If you want to find the best employees, you need to do the work! Think about the times you’ve started dating someone new. Most of us have experienced that person who was on their best behavior for a period of time, but that charade can only go on for so long. As an interviewer, you w