I happened across an excellent solution tonight for a problem that takes up a lot of time, but tiny bits at a time.

The Problem
I meet with clients and take copious meeting notes. Since we use Basecamp for everything in our agency, we archive all meeting notes into Basecamp so that they are backed up and can be referenced by all teams.  The issue is that I take my meeting notes in Word, since it’s easiest for me to quickly and easily produce an outline.  Getting that data turned into the same info for Basecamp was always a pain because it required a lot of manual reformatting, which equals an enormous waste of time.

The Solution
I figured that there had to be an easy way to convert Word formatting into Textile formatting. Instead of using bullet points in Word, you use asterisks (*) to create bullet points with Textile.  Easy enough, but when I get on a roll and really need to quickly get thoughts down- I find that I’m much better at hitting the Tab key to create sub-points and quickly get down an outline.

After a little poking around, I found exactly what I needed to convert a Word document with standard bullet point formatting into a Textile formatted doc that I can just copy/paste into Basecamp. And Poof! It was just this simple: you install a Visual Basic macro into Word that does it all for you with a few clicks.

Update 6/10/11:  After playing using this a few times, I realized that I need to hack this file so that it is more geared for Textile, and less for WikiMedia.  I’ve updated the link below so that the download is of my file, which will work much better for Basecamp users.

Installation

1. Download Valeo’s Word2Textile macro (<-right-click and Save As)
2. Start Word
3. Bring up the Visual Basic Editor (Tools->Macro->Visual Basic Editor or Alt+F11).
4. From the VBE, import the macro library (File->Import File…) and select the file you downloaded.

Usage

1. Open a word document to convert
2. Run the Word2MediaWiki macro by bringing up the Macros dialog (Tools->Macro->Macros… or Alt+F8), selecting Word2MediaWiki and clicking Run.
3. The macro converts the document to MediaWiki markup and places a copy of the content on the system clipboard.
4. Switch to a MediaWiki editor and paste the result.

That just saved me about 2.37 minutes of reformatting my meeting notes.  I project that will save me… (computer beepy noises) …  more time than that down the road.  Yeah – you’re welcome.

A big thanks to http://www.infpro.com for providing the great VB script and instructions for it’s use!

During a recent presentation at Emerge Memphis on 3/10/11, Managing Project Director James Hutto covered some fantastic tips and tricks to help business users become more proficient and secure when using Facebook for professional purposes.

One of the questions we are most often asked has to do with the best way to use the same Facebook profile for both business and personal.  Since Facebook’s terms and conditions stipulate that you are not supposed to create 2 profiles, this is often confusing for a great many people.

James covered the power of Friend Lists and how they can be used to really fine-tune the security settings in Facebook and only show specific pieces of your profile to certain groups.  At the most basic level, James urged all attendees to create a list for Personal and a list for Professional, and to set what those 2 different groups can see through security settings.

There was also an overview of Facebook’s security settings, and some instruction on the best ways to optimize for privacy and professional networking.

This seminar had some great Q&A and a great deal of ground was covered with specific answers to attendee questions. Some participants even decided to test out what they learned by leaving some comments on our Fan Page!

Here is a copy of the presentation: