expedienceblog
Stress Free SMEs
Tips for Working with Subject Matter Experts that Minimize your Stress Levels and Theirs Proposal Managers must juggle resources and calendars to make their deadlines. Here are a few tips to leverage your subject matter experts (SMEs) without burning them out or you....
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5 Ways Your Proposals Today Are Killing Your Business
There are a million things that your business could invest in this year. Why should proposal software be on the top of that list? Let me share with you my 5 Ways Your Proposals Today Are Killing Your Business. Just because you’re probably as impatient as I am, let me...
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What is Causing Microsoft Word to Slow Down?
As proposal writers we spend a lot of time in Microsoft Word. So If Word becomes slow or unstable it multiplies the time and effort, not to mention frustration, it takes to complete our work. Sometimes the slowdown is outside of our control – such as the unexpected...
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Building Internal Support for Proposal Automation and Other Musings
Contributing Author: Jason Anderson VP, Sales Expedience Software In attending my first ever APMP conference last week, I learned something that was almost therapeutic: I am not the only one out there that really loves (and hates) proposals!...
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Spring Training Tips: What can I do to Motivate my Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Ensure Better Compliance with Deadlines?
Continuing our series, we now turn our attention toward the education of the SME team. Some of your SMEs will likely be familiar with RFPs and proposals, but others may not. Have you ever thought about whether each SME truly knows the process and the purpose of the...
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Bullet Lists in Excel
“How do I insert bullet lists into Excel?” This is one the most frequent Excel questions that we receive at Expedience. Unlike Microsoft Word, Excel does not provide a simple way to apply bullets to a list. However, with a few simple tricks you can leverage Word’s...
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Part Two in a Series: What Can I do to Motivate My Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Ensure Better Compliance with Deadlines?
In our initial article on this topic, we turned the question around – focusing on how we as Proposal professionals can first evaluate and manage our own efforts to better assist our SMEs. ‘Be a Servant First’ is the strategy where we ask how we can be of assistance...
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What Can I do to Motivate Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Ensure Better Compliance with Deadlines?
With the start of a new year, our thoughts often turn to ways to improve our processes and procedures. Let’s focus on how to improve our relationships and team-building in order to keep the content rolling our way as deadlines loom. Managing SMEs is a challenge for...
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Checking-In on Google Docs
Google Docs: Ready for Power Proposal and RFP Response Users? We frequently monitor the progress Google is making with Google Docs. Given the ubiquity of the Google offerings and their web-based approach we wanted to see what’s changed in the last year that may add...
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Why Professional Implementation Services?
Most software implementations involve some amount of setup and configuration. So how do you know what the right amount of assistance is right for you? Yes/No Decision Let’s make this quick – take the help. Your budget request should include a line item for services to...
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RFP Content Libraries and the Chaos Dilemma
We often think that content automation will solve the vast majority of our reusability problems when it comes to finding exactly the right answers to our mountain of RFP questions. To some degree this is true but it is only workable with a well thought out strategy to...
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Mysterious Case of the Self-Locking Excel RFP
“HELP! Sometimes when I am answering an Excel RFP, a cell suddenly becomes locked, making it impossible to edit it afterward. What causes this?” Having an Excel RFP suddenly lock answer cells is exasperating to say the least. But there is a way to spot it and...
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How to Navigate Data Restrictions on Excel RFPs
The most frustrating challenge in answering Excel RFPs is not knowing if or what restrictions have been placed on the RFP answer cells and having to rely on Trial-and-Error. Is there any way to discover the criteria I have to meet BEFORE I insert the RFP...
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Locksmithing for Excel RFPs
I respond to a fair number of RFP’s in Excel. The RFP’s are usually locked so I can only edit the answer cells, but sometimes there are other restrictions too, like not allowing images or not allowing me to even select and copy the locked cells. How can I tell...
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The Awesomeness of AutoCorrect
AutoCorrect is an automatic editing feature that is often maligned for causing unwanted and sometimes embarrassing word substitutions. It is also a long standing feature of Microsoft Word that can be used in some surprisingly powerful ways. You are probably...
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Back to the Desktop – Real-Time Co-Authoring in Microsoft Word 2016
The emergence in recent years of the Web-based version of Microsoft Word has led some people to speculate that the desktop version of Word would one day soon become obsolete. But nothing could be further from the truth. In the 2016 release of Office,...
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What’s Great and Not So Great about Office 365 for Proposal Writers
Real-time co-authoring and online comments make the Web version of Microsoft Word a great tool for collaborating with SMEs and Reviewers. But sparsity of features makes it untenable as a proposal writing tool. In this post we will look at what’s great and...
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2 Great Word-to-Email Commands You Never Heard Of
Microsoft Word has commands you may never have heard of, since they don't appear on any Ribbons. In this post we will look at two of these little known commands that make it easy to share content through email. How to find commands that DON’T appear on any Word...
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Expedience Styles Survey Results
If you struggle with the process of formatting proposals, you are not alone. Here are a few of the comments we received in our Styles Survey: “Your survey taps into all the concerns I have when doing manual Proposal responses. Nice to see that everyone has the same...
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Custom Styles 101 for Proposal Writers – 4 Reasons Why Custom Styles Fail
Almost half of our Styles Survey Respondents reported that ‘Direct Formatting’ was their most common method of changing formatting AFTER inserting content into a proposal. Direct Formatting is usually the formatting method of last resort for...
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