Shortcuts and Secrets: How to Work Smarter with Microsoft Tools

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Janet Lienhard with Virtual Instructor. Welcome.

Janet Lienhard: Hi. Nice to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Virtual Instructor. How are you serving folks?

Janet Lienhard: I primarily train and do consulting for people that are using Microsoft 365, so that would be Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. And there’s a lot of people out there using it and I help them to make sure they’re not spending hours on things that should only take a few minutes.

Lee Kantor: So, what’s your backstory? How did you get into this line of work?

Janet Lienhard: Well, I get my cane out. I have been doing software training for over 35 years, so I was actually one of the first ten certified WordPerfect instructors in the country, and that was back in the ’80s, so I have been doing this a long time and I love it. The thing that makes me the happiest is when I see that light bulb go off and someone says, “Oh, my goodness. Are you kidding me? I was spending an hour doing this, and now I can do it in, like, five minutes?” So, that’s what I love doing.

Lee Kantor: So, now, what drew you to become like a specialist in the Microsoft world?

Janet Lienhard: Because Microsoft started taking off when Windows started coming out, and I am a Microsoft action partner and I’ve been doing just so much work with Microsoft and with different clients, so kind of moved into that world. And there’s just so many things you can do with the Microsoft products, anything from beginning to advance programing things. So, it’s just amazing what you can do and how much time it can save people.

Lee Kantor: Well, I think it’s a good lesson for our listeners if they’re consulting or doing training like you’re doing, rather than be kind of a jack of all trades but to really hone in and find a niche and just become a super ninja expert on that one specific thing, there’s a lot of value in that. You create a lot more depth of knowledge, and so this deeper set of knowledge is really helpful to people who want this thing, and you picked a good one obviously with Microsoft.

Janet Lienhard: Yeah. And if you’re dealing with any major businesses, the majority are all using Microsoft, so you pretty much need to know how to use, if nothing else, Teams but Word and Excel and PowerPoint and Outlook. They all work so well together, so it’s amazing how much time you can save yourself if you really start to understand how to use these programs. And it’s not difficult, it’s just knowing a few little tricks here and there.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you find that most people, you know, they were given Microsoft or they started with Microsoft and they’re using their products, but they only have maybe a superficial knowledge of just the basics, and they’re really missing out by not having a deeper knowledge of more of the nuances of what it can do?

Janet Lienhard: Yes, absolutely. I would say the majority of the times when I work with people, I usually go in pretty much at a departmental level and work with the department and see what they’re doing. And when they show me what they’re doing and I see how long it’s taking them, then I show them how to do it properly. And typically, I can save people when they were doing something that took about an hour down to, like five, ten minutes just because they just didn’t know about the little tricks that you can do.

Lee Kantor: Do you mind sharing some of maybe the low hanging fruit, some of the stuff that you see right away that this is what most people kind of are missing out on?

Janet Lienhard: Oh, yeah. So, I’ll start talking about Teams first. Microsoft Teams, a lot of people are starting to use Teams, a lot of companies, and it can just save so much time. I don’t know about you all, but I am not a fan of email. It’s just hard to keep track of everything. So, if you can collaborate with people on Teams, it makes it much easier to locate the information that you’re sharing. They can actually work on the same files and collaborate together. And this could be people that are maybe your clients, because you can set up a separate area that you work directly with your clients and share things back and forth so it doesn’t get lost in email, things like that.

Janet Lienhard: The other thing that’s great is, if you are working with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, it saves versions. So, if you have different people working on it and then suddenly like, wait, we used to have this here. Well, it’s really easy to just go back and find a previous version and restore that. So, those are just a couple of different ways.

Janet Lienhard: When it comes to, say, Excel, when I ask them about pivot tables, you would be surprised how many people are just like, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t want to do pivot tables.” Pivot tables, you take a really large amount of data, maybe you have like a couple thousand rows and, I don’t know, maybe a hundred columns, and you need to analyze it really fast, well, with a pivot table, you can come up with the answer and different ways to view that data in just a matter of, like, probably under 60 seconds. So, that would be one, I’d say, just go on YouTube and watch something about pivot tables to get the basics. It’s amazing.

Janet Lienhard: And I specialize in shortcuts for people, so I actually have 60-seecond shortcuts that I’ve been doing for people for over a year. And they’re just little shortcuts but, boy, those little tiny things can save you a tremendous amount of time. Did that answer your question?

Lee Kantor: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think people are hungry kind of for this type of information that they don’t know what they don’t know. So, they think they’re doing it in an efficient manner, and then you probably can see them in two seconds and go, “Oh, I can cut 45 minutes away from your day just by doing these six things.”

Janet Lienhard: Absolutely. Because most people are just using these tools for whatever project they’re working on, whatever job they’re doing, and they’re kind of just doing what they know all the time. And you can’t fault them. I mean, how do you know about all these other little tools if you’re not really doing this all the time? I’ve worked with so many different businesses and so many different industries and different projects, that over the years, I’ve learned and mastered a lot of these little shortcuts that I’m really happy to share with people. Because, again, one of my things is to help people to stop spending hours on things that should only take a few minutes.

Lee Kantor: Now, I would imagine in your world there’s always updates, there’s always better ways to do the thing, are you finding that you’re having to constantly be upskilling yourself in order to help your clients?

Janet Lienhard: Yes and no. There are more advanced features that are pretty cool that most people don’t really get into. So, depending on my clients then I get into those things and I love that sort of thing. So, in the whole Microsoft world, there’s like Power Apps and Power Automate and Power BI and things like that that are really fun, and that is constantly changing, especially with the whole AI, Copilot, ChatGPT, and all the other ones out there. So, that part, I am constantly learning new things and I love it.

Janet Lienhard: But I will tell you, you have Copilot, not everybody’s really using Copilot with their office products, but it’s just another AI or artificial intelligence tool like ChatGPT. And those tools can save you hours. And in some cases, some of the things I’m doing, it saves me weeks worth of time.

Lee Kantor: So, what’s an example of something that’s been transformed because of AI that you’re using?

Janet Lienhard: I am currently working on converting – so I have 60-second videos I said that I’ve done for over a year, so it’s a little free email subscription people do. Now, I’m turning them into books and to a reference membership site and doing all these other things. And just having it kind of pulling together the information that was in the videos, some of the other information I have, it’s helping me pull it together. I do rewrite things because I want to make sure it’s got my voice, there’s different tricks and stuff, but it has just saved me a tremendous amount of time combining this stuff together.

Janet Lienhard: Also doing research on different types of marketing type things and working with a client, this just happened not too long ago, they had a spreadsheet that was sent to them that had over 73,000 rows in it. And there was a certain cell in a certain column that if that cell was blank, they had to delete that row. And so, I showed them how to do it with Excel tools and we cleaned it up in about five minutes. And then, I said, let’s throw it into AI. So, we just used ChatGPT and I ask it to basically clean that up. I said, I have a spreadsheet I’m uploading, and I want anything that’s blank in this certain column to be removed, but I don’t want you to change the order. And in less than 60 seconds, it cleaned it up.

Lee Kantor: And that’s kind of the secret to AI, at least right now, is you have to be good at the prompts. That’s a lot of the skill is to ask it the right things and give it the right information to look at in order to really help you.

Janet Lienhard: Yes. For for example, what I’m doing right now is I’m creating a bunch of social media posts that I’m going to be writing. And I am not a social media content marketer type person. So, I used ChatGPT, and I said you are a social media content writer with 20 years experience and you specialize in writing posts that engage people into wanting to watch a video that’s associated with the post.

Janet Lienhard: And then, I told it the content of the post, and I said I would like it written for YouTube, for LinkedIn, and for Facebook, and I want the formats that those different platforms want, and I want it in my voice, and I want to make it so that if somebody is reading this post, they understand, they have a clue on what would be happening if they watched the video so they don’t waste their time. And it’s amazing what it’s come up with. Better than I would have written, let’s put it that way.

Lee Kantor: But that prompt was very detailed and specific. It wasn’t write me a Facebook post.

Janet Lienhard: Exactly, that was a long prompt. So, you really should write your post with a minimum of several hundred words. Ideally, the more you give it and the more background you give it, the better response you’re going to get. So, if you think about it, if you were going to hire a VA or an intern or a new employee and you wanted them to do something, the more information you give them, the better result you’re going to get.

Janet Lienhard: Now, you may have to go back and forth and say, “Hey, that was good, but can you work on this a little? And, no, I didn’t really want that, I meant this.” So, you do that with AI as well, whether it’s Copilot, ChatGPT, there’s some others, there’s Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. So, it’s how you interact with the AI.

Lee Kantor: And then, when you do it a lot, it kind of remembers, right, so you’re not having to create the wheel every single time?

Janet Lienhard: Yes. I was just doing something this morning before we started talking, and I said, now you know a lot about me, and you know what I do, and you know the voice and the way I like to speak, I would like to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it did a great job. Now, I do go back and tweak it a little bit.

Janet Lienhard: Something I also try to make sure if I’m doing anything that I might be publishing, I always like to say, please make sure that this is plagiarism free. Now, I always take it a step further and I will put it into Grammarly to make sure it’s plagiarism free as well. But that would be something that I would say you might want to put in your post.

Janet Lienhard: The other thing is you might want to make sure, especially if you’re using ChatGPT, they have a feature where you can have it turn on a temporary chat and so it doesn’t memorize what you’re doing. Otherwise, it is saving and it’s constantly learning from whatever interactions it is having with people. So, if it’s confidential, I usually say mask the information you’re putting in. So, if it’s about a company, then put – I always tell people I use Acme because I’m a Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner fan, so something so that it doesn’t really tell you who the company is.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re working with your clients, what is kind of that pain that they’re having right before they hire you? Or is your work just part of their onboarding when they have a new employee? How does your work come about?

Janet Lienhard: People usually engage with my services because they have something where they realize they’re not as efficient as they could be. So, it could be a department, it could be the entire company, they want to make sure that they’re all on the same page. So, there’s usually something where they’ve realized that they’re not using their tools as efficiently as they could. And so, I come in and take a look at specifically what they’re doing.

Janet Lienhard: Now, I can do the broad training, which is fine, but I always like to try to customize it to the clients, whatever their industry is, if they have any specific programs or projects that they’re working on, because people are going to learn more if you’re teaching them something that they can see how they apply it immediately.

Lee Kantor: But what are some of the symptoms they’re seeing that they realize, hey, maybe our people don’t know this as well as we think they know this?

Janet Lienhard: Sometimes they have things that are being turned in that have some mistakes and they have to keep sending it back and say can you kind of fix this. Other times they just realize, wow, this has taken a lot longer than we thought these things should take. There was a payroll department of one of the major universities and their accountants had different departments that they had to monitor on a monthly basis. And it was taking them about an hour for each department that they had to work with, and this is per month, and they had like 10 or 12 departments that they were working with.

Janet Lienhard: And so, we took a look at that because they thought this has taken an awful long time. So, I took a look at it and I showed them how to cut it down to about five minutes per department. So, usually they’re aware that there should be a faster way for whatever they’re working on.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you have a niche within your niche when it comes to serving? Like are you good with accountants or CPAs? You mentioned Excel, I would imagine they lean on that more than the average person. Or are there certain industries, like tech industries, that you work with? Or is it kind of industry agnostic, because pretty much everybody’s using Microsoft somewhere?

Janet Lienhard: Yeah. It’s pretty much industry agnostic. Because I’ve been training for so long, I have worked with pretty much every industry out there. But I will say the majority of the training that I’m initially requested for is Excel. Excel is by far the biggest one because there’s so much to it and so many things, that if you don’t know about little formulas or little shortcuts and things like that, you can spend an awful lot of time doing things that really shouldn’t take any time at all.

Lee Kantor: If somebody wants to learn more about your practice, what’s the website?

Janet Lienhard: It’s virtualinstructor.com. And if you go over there and if you are interested in these little free 60-second videos, you can sign up and you’ll get an email daily with an under 60-second video of a tip, whether it’s an Excel, Word, PowerPoint. And we have them specifically for Mac users and for PC users because it’s different on the Mac, so don’t want to leave them out.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for you to become part of the WBEC-West community?

Janet Lienhard: Many years ago, I wasn’t aware of this whole women-owned business, and I went to the small business development centers, and that’s where I learned about it. And I have been part of WBEC-West for now, I think about six or seven years, and it is wonderful because it not only introduces you to corporations through supplier diversity, but you also meet, I think there’s right now about 18,000 WBEs nationwide, so you meet other women-owned businesses.

Janet Lienhard: And there’s work out there, but you also meet other women that are experiencing the same things that you’re doing, whether it’s a frustration or you’ve got a question, you have somebody else to ask. And it’s just a great sisterhood. They’re extremely supportive, especially, I should say, WBEC-West is extremely supportive of the the women-owned businesses in their area. And they have a special program called Platinum Supplier, and it is a phenomenal program that helps you really understand your business, how to communicate about your business, and also how to interact with the supplier diversity and corporations.

Lee Kantor: And if somebody wants to learn more, is there a website or what’s the best way to connect?

Janet Lienhard: Just go to virtualinstructor.com, and you’ll see my contact information there, you’ll also see the information about the 60-second free videos. Or just contact me, it’s talk-with-janet.youcanbook.me. So, that’s another place you can get ahold of me.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Janet Lienhard: Thank you.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor, we’ll see you all next time on Women In Motion.