Number crunching is the kind of art you don’t appreciate fully until you have to do it. As we were analyzing the data from the social media report, one of the biggest challenges we had was finding the right kind of chart to represent the trends we were seeing.

A big help would have been Chart Advisor, a little experiment from Microsoft Office Labs. This division plays around with prototypes and ideas that you can try before they’re fully released. Chart Advisor, according to the website, “ … was created as a concept test to explore new ways Excel users can create graphs quickly and effectively. Based on the data in your spreadsheet, it identifies, ranks, and displays an array of charts most relevant to you so you can make the most out of your presentation.”

Give it a shot and see if it helps you crunch your numbers.

Here’s a trick we use when we have a collaborative online whiteboard project that we want to lose when we log out of our web meeting software. We simply print to PDF.

This is handy too for documenting online receipts, itineraries and sending low-resource proposals and other documents that you don’t want in easily-editable Word format.

Here’s how:

• If you have a PC with Adobe Acrobat installed, you can simply go to Print and then choose Adobe PDF from the Printer Name drop-down box.
• You can also download and install CutePDF Writer. This free program does the same thing as Acrobat.
• If you’re using a Mac, PDF print software is already installed. Go to the File menu, choose Print and click the PDF button in the lower left-hand corner of the new window.