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Saving Time

© Bert Markgraf

As a small business owner, your most valuable commodity is your time. The best way to save time is to get good at using technology efficiently. The area of technology which at present has the most scope for efficient time saving techniques is the use of computers and the Internet. Unfortunately, this is also an area where it is difficult to see the few valuable trees in the forest of products and claims.

What I am looking for in time saving products is something that is inexpensive, easy to use and does one thing really well. While the big software packages do a number of things well, I've found that shareware is often the way to go to get certain additional functions and features.

As far as saving time goes, I've always wanted programs which could automate operations. Macros in various programs work well but can't perform operations across several programs. The Recorder in Windows 3.1 never did the job properly and Windows 95 doesn't even have it.

I've just downloaded a program which satisfies all these requirements. It's called Macro Mania and I've only programmed it to do one thing but so far but it seems to work brilliantly. Several times a day I log onto my Internet provider, check my e-mail in two accounts using two different programs and then start Netscape for the Web. This can take a while, depending on how much e-mail I have and now Macro Mania takes care of it while I go get a coffee. Next, I'm going to program it to automate some web page creation using four different programs and some invoicing. It took me half an hour to get it running and, while it seems to have a lot of fancy features I haven't even looked at, the basic functions are easy to use.

Look for it here. I have no connection to this company besides being a user of this particular software and I haven't even registered my copy of the shareware but I will.

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