As promised – here’s an update on useful software solutions to help you succeed with us!

Of course a lot of you use basic tools for creating your writing masterpieces. They probably include MS Word, and MS PowerPoint . These are just the standard tools that Microsoft bundles with their products.

As you probably have discovered, perhaps painfully, there are always moments when even this software can’t offer the help you need. Why? Because the MS Office package was designed for processing the information you input, and organize it for display.

It does not matter if we are discussing MS Excel or MS Word. These programs were not designed particularly to enhance your writing style or your grammar. Any corrections they suggest are based on very general information stored in their memory.

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I guess since most of you take advantage of all the available social networks these days, you must have figured out how they connect you swiftly with your friends and relatives.

But what if all of these friends could help you to find a better job, based on your skill and performance? Wouldn’t that be nice? It surely would=). This article will bring up-to-date on one of the most powerful career tools currently available on the web.

Social networking is awesome. But career social networking is even more awesome. Why? Well, social networks are mostly about keeping up with friends, and you may agree that much of the info you get from your contacts via social networks is actually useless.

The resource I’d like to bring to your attention is called LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com). This is a business-oriented social network designed to provide you with a career growth tool.

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For those somewhat unfamiliar with our communication system, I’d like to provide some useful information. This combines my experience of working both with the writers, and the support team.

First of all, there are a couple of ways to reach out and touch us: the chat, the messaging system, e-mail, and you can try calling.

Let’s break all this down:

The Live Chat: You can exchange messages online 24/7 with one of our support representatives. They are a reliable source of crucial help or advice.

The critical point to remember is that those folks staffing the chat are really, really busy. At any time, there might very well be another 5-6 people, just like you, waiting for a response as well.

This can be frustrating, but we do ask you to be patient and wait for your turn. One way to reduce “traffic jams” is to make sure to use the chat screen feature only for emergency issues!

The purpose of the chat feature is live support, on the spot. Of course you can address the support team who work on the chat on general issues, if you are a rookie. But if you fill this chat screen time with comments such as, “I don’t like how things inside the system work, and as for that…blah-blah-blah”, you are probably wasting their time. Support will have to do their best to accept your feedback; they will have to record it, forward it to the appropriate department, add a comment, etc.

You can imagine that the rest of the writers using the chat screen will have been waiting all this time. There are ways to provide your feedback; we will get to those a bit later on.

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As you have probably already figured out, we at the ResearchWritingCenter are obsessed with deadlines. Why? The answer is that meeting the deadline and making timely delivery are among the main criteria that make our customers love us. People generally tend to prefer and come back time after time for reliable service. Duh!

That customer preference for timely turn-ins is why we are starting an aggressive campaign to help our employees who are struggling with their own time management problems. You probably know that time management issues act like a chain of dominoes; one negative outcome after another. You put off the work and do something irrelevant instead. Then, you do not have enough time to do a superior job because now you are up against the deadline. So, you say to yourself: “Who cares!”, and do a rush job. Isn’t it logical to assume that the quality of a rush job will never even approach being “good”, never mind “great”?

One of the main issues with time management is the choice of the right time to start with a task. When folks receive an order with a deadline offering more than a few days lead time, they often think that this allows them to postpone beginning to work. This is wrong, wrong, so wrong, simply because you can never be sure what the task includes, exactly.

Yes, you might very well already have, in hand, an outline and the general assignment from the customer. But that is not the whole picture. There is also the research, locating credible sources, note taking, compilation of the information, etc., and the list goes on infinitely.

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I’m guessing that if you’re reading this article, you struggle sometimes with word processing tasks: opening a file, compressing a bunch of files for sending, inserting tables and graphics, etc. That’s why I’ll try to guide you through the peculiarities of several software products which you will definitely need.

First, and the most painful for our Support Department, are file compression tools. These make sending large amounts of data (more than 2-3 files) much faster and easier. The most widely used ones are WinRaR and WinZip. They offer free trial downloads for a period of several weeks.

After the 30 day trial period (which could be more, or less) you can try uninstalling the software, but you will have to pay for it. Perhaps you can afford to purchase a license. “Free” versions often include a toolbar and other add-ons you might/might not welcome.

The installation package consumes only 4-5 Mbs and is easy to install. Sometimes, it takes less than a second for the program to be installed, and the software is automatically filed in your system folder. This means many of you folks cannot even verify completed installation.

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