Here are some quick tips for using activities, history, and follow-up properly in ACT!  to ensure you don’t miss a beat when managing your tasks and taking care of your customers.

Activities

Activities are items that you schedule in advance that show up in a few places: on your Task List, your calendar, and on the record for the contact that you’ve scheduled an activity with.  To schedule an activity, first look up the contact that you want to schedule with, then choose the “Schedule” menu and choose the type of activity that you want to schedule or use the toolbar icons.

Pretty straight forward, right?  If you’re an ACT! user you’re likely already using activities.  But – are you clearing your activities and creating history records?

History

History items are the details of e-mails sent, meetings held, calls completed and other interactions between you and your staff and your contacts.

To create a history record when you’ve completed an activity, simply right-click the activity and choose “Clear Activity…” and you’ll get a window that allows you to fill in the results of the activity.  It’s important that you fill in the details so that later, when you or other ACT! users need a reminder, the information is there.

If you want to record history, but didn’t schedule an activity first – for example: the phone rings and a customer calls, you skip the activity creation and just record a history.  You’ll find this option on the Contact menu as well as on the History tab in the contact detail view.  Again, make sure you fill out the details otherwise this information would not be useful.

Follow-up

More often than not, when you’ve finished one thing and are clearing the activity, you’ll want to schedule the next thing to be done.  E.g. you clear a meeting but now need to schedule a call to follow up.  The “Follow-up” button will help you do this and saves time by pre-filling the contact and regarding line for you from the previous activity.

Ever want to get a map of your Contacts? well if the curiosity ever struck here’s a handy tool to help you get it done!

1. Create the lookup of contacts that you want to plot on the map
2. What you need to do next it to get a list of Contacts into Excel with the following fields: Address, City, State (or Province), ZIP Code (or Postal Code), and Company.
   1. From the Contact List View, click “Options” in the upper right corner and choose “Customize Columns”
   2. Choose just the fields listed above to be included in your list
   3. Click OK to go back to the Contact List View
3. Click the “Export Current List to Excel” button to get your Contact List in Excel
4. Highlight the whole works, all the rows and the headings and everything and press Ctrl+C to copy them, or right-click and choose Copy
5. Go to www.batchgeo.com and click inside of the “Source Data” window and then press Ctrl+V or right-click and choose Paste
6. Click Map Now (or click Validate & Options for some tweaks) and BatchGeo will crank through your list and display a map for you.

If you’re going to use this on a regular basis, or simply have fallen in love with the concept consider a donation as that’s how Phillip supports and runs the site.

Sometimes when I have a ton of things to get done, I don’t track all my activities in ACT!, I need a bit more of a unpolished system to sort stuff out.

Why? Well, I have a strategy for getting things done – I like to sort things by both importance and the “fun factor”. I don’t always work that way, but when I’ve got a lot to do, this helps me to:

• Make sure the important stuff gets done
• Get the things done first that take more effort and energy, and leave the things I enjoy to be done afterwards, when I might not otherwise have as much energy and enthusiasm

How do you sort by “Fun” you ask? Well, the answer is that you can’t do it within ACT! – but it’s an easy thing to do in Excel by adding an extra column. I won’t get into the details of how to do it, but if you know Excel you can figure it out quickly. Now to get to the point of this post – how to export your task list to Excel. As long as you have a compatible version of Microsoft Excel installed (2002 and later are supported with most recent ACT! versions), you can export your Task List in a single click!

To do it, just look for the “Export Current List to Excel” button which is on the toolbar. In ACT! 2010 it’s right above the dropdown box for the Date filter. In any version of ACT! it looks like a little box with a green X in the middle. Presto! Excel opens with your Task List, almost exactly as it was showing in ACT! when you clicked the button.

You might notice a few things from this:

• Once the data is in Excel, you can sort and manipulate most of the data, or even do calculations.
• The columns show up in the same order as they were in your Task List – so if you add, remove, or change the positions of columns in ACT!, you’ll get the same positioning in your Excel export.
• The filters can be used to change what activities show up. Want a quick way to get a printable report of all the meetings you have scheduled for the rest of the month? Just change the date filter to “Current Month” and the Types to “Meeting” and click the Export button!

So there you have it – Exporting the Task List to Excel. Now that you’ve done that, check out the same feature on the Contact List and Opportunities List.