The Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook is my twelfth book on contact management software and represents a transition by me to a new publishers after 11 previous books written under the “For Dummies” label.  The cookbook style is designed to give you simple steps to help you learn a new software feature. The recipes will show you how to create custom dashboards and reports, as well as utilize the new templates available in recent ACT! versions. You will learn to use ACT!’s Report Editor and Dashboard Designer so that you will be able to easily view important information about your business and your sales force.

I was delighted to have Roy Laudenslager as the co-author of this book.  Roy has worked at Tech Benders for the last 8 years and is considered the foremost expert on ACT! reports in the world.  In addition, he’s a great writer and has the ability to break down complex tasks into small, manageable pieces.

The book is available in paperback and e-book formats.  In addition it can be purchased as part of the PackT library subscriptions that gives you one year of unlimited access to hundreds of technical titles.  To purchase go to: http://link.packtpub.com/X2k2Dq

Some companies force you to upgrade every year or so.  For example, Intuit’s tax tables will stop working when QuickBooks reaches a certain age, or you’ll no longer be able to access your accounts online in Quicken after a year or two.  Sage takes a different approach with their new releases by trying to entice you to upgrade by offering a bunch of new “must have” features.  And of course, you’ll be forced to upgrade if you change other aspects in your computer world; for example, users of Vista and Office 2007 found that their older versions of ACT simply wouldn’t work.

Quite frankly, ACT 2009 didn’t have a huge “wow” factor, although it did make significant changes in performance.  On the other hand, ACT 2010 has added several cool features that I really like:

• The new Welcome Page includes things like instant access to search and links to your most common tasks.
• The new Web Info tab automatically integrates your contact records with data from all the latest sites including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Maps.
• The Opportunities area has been revamped to  behave like contacts, groups, and companies, which means you can add lots of customized fields and change the Opportunity layout.
• There’s now “out-of-the-box” integration with Swift Page’s e-mail and drip marketing solutions.
• There are 9 new dashboards, 13 new reports (created for Sage by Tech Benders!), and a new customizable Reports view.
• iCalendar and vCard compatibility so that you can send invitations and contact information to “non-ACT” users right from ACT.

I’ll be running a series of “Drive Before You Buy” webinars of ACT 2010 throughout August; for more information visit http://techbenders.com/users.php If you decide you want to take advantage of some great pre-release pricing drop me an e-mail at info@techbenders.com.