Skip to main content

Pause, Print, Repeat

For those who are faithfully tuning in on Thursdays for CryWolf® hints, I hope that you are finding the notes helpful. For those readers who are scoping out information on their competition (you know who you are, Texas), I would be happy to review your product for my readers if given the opportunity. And now, back to our scheduled "blog cast".

The other day, my office ran completely out of black ink. And I mean OUT.  No warning, no partially printed pages, just full stop by the printer.  Of course, we were in the middle of printing after processing a long weekend.  We are also in our high season for renewals so the queue was full and then some.  That night, without thinking, I shut down my computer.  When I realized what I had done, I felt sick because I had no idea if the printer would retain all of the jobs or if they were gone. I'm sure you have had instances of closing a program when a job was printing resulting in a half printed page in the printer tray. Although I knew that I could search for specific letters and determine who should have received that letter, I had no idea what letters had been in the queue.  I also knew that I could recreate most of the lost queue if necessary, but I didn't think it would be fun.  I knew too that I could get the total correspondence prepared on that day with the Workload Snapshot report.  One small glitch to that plan is that although I have been meaning to compare that number with the actual output, I haven't gotten around to it.  I suspect that the workload snapshot counts more than the documents that are printed.  (I'll let you know in an upcoming edition unless someone shares it with the group in the comment section).

The next morning when the office supply order arrived, I installed the ink cartridge. Much to my amazement, the printing resumed. I still had no way of knowing if all of the jobs had printed or if some had been lost, but I was relieved that at least some of the output had made it .  After a minute or so of perusing my options in the Report menu, I discovered the Activity Summary under the General Reports heading.

In the pop up window, it was simple to set my search parameters.


The resulting report gave me exactly what I needed.


Although knowing how many of each letter should have been produced would have sufficed, the report is clickable.  By clicking on the number, a list of the actual recipients can be revealed.  This made it very easy to verify that all of the "missing" letters were present.
Don't wait for a similar "emergency" to try out this feature.  I can think of several instances where this report will come in handy.  Have you ever used this feature?  What mishaps have led to discovery of useful CryWolf® features?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ferret Friday #16-Hey, that is my sock...

Before heading back to school after Spring Break, I said one last goodbye to the ferrets. It wasn't until I was back at school that I noticed that one of my socks had made its way into their cage.

CiteBlue

I have been enjoying participating in the MSU College of Law Social Media Contest . I have learned (and am still learning) a lot. Because of my activity, I have been able to connect with organizations and people that I would never have come across without social media. For this introvert, it has been like opening a whole new world. (I know, most people would never guess that I am an introvert; they probably just think that I am a snob. In social settings, I am a complete misfit, but put me in front of a classroom or conference room and I shine. It is strange, I know, but that is me. Perhaps we will dissect that in a different post). It has been interesting to see what posts attract followers. It has also been eye opening to figure out that followers also appear with an agenda--for example, some follow hoping to be followed in return to build their own group. This week, a company called CiteBlue "followed" me on Twitter. I wasn't familiar with the company, so I clicked o...

What is that Binocular Button anyway?

Sometimes we get so busy doing our jobs that we fail to take the time to learn more about the tools that we use everyday.  For alarm administrators, that tool is often CryWolf® or another similar program. Once I had discovered the Text Select tool, I began looking at other items on the tool bar.  In doing so, I found that clicking on the Binocular Button at the top right of a report (red arrow to the left) opens a search box.  This makes sense because the binocular button is officially called the Find Text tool.  To find what you are looking for, simply enter the word or number that you want to locate in the "Find What:" box (blue arrow below). If you want to limit the search, click on the search parameters boxes (green arrow below). Click the Search button (red arrow below) and the magic begins. In no time at all, the results of the search will be displayed in the results box (circled in black below).  Here, the sample shows that I searched for t...