With a computer, correcting your work is completely taken for granted. For example, I've rewritten this paragraph about six times which, twenty years ago, would have required at least two pieces of paper and lots of crossing out (I still remember my Dad's first electronic typewriter which would let you correct the last 15 characters typed -- and at the time we were so impressed!). But the one thing that is still difficult to "undo" is sending an email. (Our friends at VideoJug.com have demonstrated just how hazardous this mistake can be!)
I probably need to "undo" an email two or three times a week, and it's almost always because I've forgotten to actually attach the attachment that I said I was sending... Even more frustrating, I usually remember that I've forgotten about 5 seconds after I've sent the email and I'm forced to send the embarrassing follow-up email: "Ah, yes, attachment actually attached this time...sorry".
A colleague took pity on me and pointed out this tip: set up a rule in Microsoft Outlook to delay sending all your emails for two minutes.
Office Online has all the details on how to set this up: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/outlook/HP012328171033.aspx?pid=CH100776981033#2
It took me five minutes to get it sorted and then every time I have an "oh no, stop that email" moment, I just go into my outbox and open up the email in question. Once the email's open, it won't be sent until I click "send" again, so I can take as long as I need to correct it.
The other alternative is to recall your message after it's been sent, but there are a number of limitations with this: both you and the recipients need to be accessing your email from an exchange server; and -- more importantly -- the email needs to still be unread. Better safe than sorry, so get that rule set up today.
The Cambridge University Eco Racing team (CUER) is a student society with a difference. They are designing and building a solar powered car to race across Australia at the World Solar Challenge in October 2009.
A new team – only formed in January 2007 – the Cambridge engineering students have already built Affinity, a prototype car, and driven it End to End, from Land’s End to John O’Groats. “We built the car in nine months for a practice run, which was very successful,” explained Anthony Law, Team Manager for 2008-09. “We got good media coverage and it was great experience for the team working on a real-life project.
“Now we’re running five research projects during the summer, with a further 10 next year. The difference for CUER is that the planning and build is integrated into the students’ academic work, which we hope will give us the edge. And we’re already seeing some exciting results.”
Anthony and his Technical Director, Charlie Watt, couldn’t manage such a complex set of projects without applications that allow everyone to work together when they’re scattered across the country.
“We use Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and Project 2007 to organise the team,” Anthony said. “It’s especially important during the summer vacation when members aren’t on campus. Managing everyone means we have to use proper project management, and Project allows us to do that easily. This type of project just wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago.”
There is a core team of 10, plus a technical group of 20-30, a sponsorship team of up to 10, and Anthony’s planning to expand the PR team from the current three members.
Building a solar powered car means big bucks are required. The regulation six square metres of satellite-standard solar cells costs £300,000 so CUER are not only engineers, but also sponsorship and PR managers.
“To keep our sponsors up to date, we produce a number of publications and newsletters, for which we use Microsoft Publisher,” said Anthony.
Another important aim of CUER is to engage in outreach and community work. They’ve already visited eight schools where they run solar buggy workshops. “It’s important to encourage young people to think about sustainable transportation and to show them that engineering is exciting – that it uses cutting edge technology,” he said.
The whole project is student-led and as well as engineering students, includes geographers, lawyers, arts students, and MBA students from the Judge Business School. Individual research projects are supervised by academics whose input is generally to offer advice and guidance. Anthony continued: “There’s a huge amount of interest across the university, and this is a new thing for us, to run 10-15 projects all focused on one goal.”
The World Solar Challenge takes place from Darwin to Adelaide covering around 3,000 kilometres of outback. Solar technology has improved since the first race took place in 1987. Then the top speed would typically be 60 kilometres per hour; in 2007 it was up to 91 kilometres per hour. But as the cars travel on public roads, they have to stick to the speed limit! Anthony explained that the race regulations are changing to become more practical and to acknowledge the new efficiency of solar cells.
Favourite fact? They can travel at 50mph using the same amount of power as a hairdryer! How so? A combination of a sleek, aerodynamic shape, lightweight materials, and efficient electronics ensure that the sun’s energy is not wasted and is all used to drive the car forwards.
Find out more about CUER by visiting their website; and email sponsorship@cuer.co.uk if you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities.
Sometimes I think Office Online is one of Microsoft's best kept secrets. Sure, most people have used a help link at some point or other, but the wide range of additional resources that you can find on the site is usually overlooked.
Take templates. Increasingly the different Microsoft Office products are coming with a stack of templates, but you can always get more from Office Online. I had a look around for PowerPoint themes and the "Design Slides" were a terrific repository of different looks - great both to use directly and for inspiration for your own designs.
Here are a few of my favourites!
Today, an update on Office Live Workspace from Tim Kimber, UK Office Live Product Manager. (Plus, if you'd rather watch than read, check out these handy Getting Started videos.)
How Office Live Workspaces can take the hassle out of getting stuff done
Working with different people in different places can be fun, but it can also present challenges. Take this example: you’re working on a project with colleagues in other organisations. How do you share your important documents? Chances are it’s via email. Each one in the team makes their amendments or adds comments, and pings it on for everyone else to look at. And you’re the one who has to co-ordinate the changes, making sure nothing gets forgotten.
You save the files to your flash drive or email them to yourself so you can work on them out of the office. Stop right there! There is a better way to save your sanity and size of your inbox, and it’s called Office Live Workspace.
Creating a workspace is really quick and simple, and within minutes you have a central location for all your files, including Office, Excel and PowerPoint files. It’s easy to put all the key documents into the workspace, and you can then invite your colleagues to share. They don’t need their own account to work on the documents in the shared workspace. But you’re in control. As the owner of the workspace, you decide who can edit and who can read your files.
So now you’re waiting for some important updates to your shared project, and you have to leave the office. You get home and decide to see whether they’ve been done. By simply using your password-protected login, you can get into the workspace from any location as long as you have internet access. Is it ready yet? No need to phone and find out – just check the Activity pane and you’ll immediately see when the new version is there.
The next day you discover that some content was deleted and now it’s needed again. Not a problem. Office Live Workspace saves the old versions with the new one if it’s more than 12 hours since you edited something, or someone else makes changes. The content is easily restored. Phew!
If you need to look at a specific document frequently, you can bookmark it just as you do with web pages for fast access. And you can email those bookmarks to your team members so they get the benefit as well.
Working on more than one project at once with different groups is easy. Set up a workspace for each one, so you can really keep tabs on what’s going on across your whole workload. With 500Mb of space (which is around 1,000+ files) available, you won’t have to clog up your email with large presentations or spreadsheets ever again!
Isn’t this the way to go? Best of all, it’s absolutely free and you don’t need to download anything to use it. Sign up today and you could be using your Office Live Workspace in a few minutes!
In April's At Work newsletter, I ran a competition asking readers to provide their favourite inaccurate predictions.
I had a lot of fun going through the answers and double-checking the accuracy of the inaccurate prediction. Several appeared more than once (most notably the allegedly misattributed quotes by Bill Gates and Thomas J Watson) and I share the frustration of many entrants that the prediction that computers would mean we only worked three days a week has not come to pass!
So on to our five winners who each receive a copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007. Congratulations to:
Steven Fisher, who nominated Arthur C Clarke's 1966 prediction:
"Houses will be able to fly [by the year 2000] The time may come when whole communities may migrate south in the winter, or move to new lands whenever they feel the need for a change of scenery."
Duncan Nagle, who nominated Margaret Thatcher's 1973 statement:
"I don't think there will be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime." [Although she did add: "And it's very difficult to foresee what may happen many, many years ahead."]
Josey Evans, who nominated Alan Hansen:
"You'll never win anything with kids" [referring to the youth team players promoted to the first team at Manchester United in 1995/96 -- the year they went on to win the Premiership and FA Cup]
Kate Phillips, who nominated Wilbur Wright:
"Man will not fly for 50 years." [He and his brother Orville successfully flew two years later.]
Graeme Denman, who nominated David Steel's quote from 1981:
"Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government."
Thanks to everyone who took part and congratulations also to the 10 winners of our "random draw" prize: Andrew Beasley, Mike Johnson, David Brooks, Stephen Mitchem, Lorrie Farrall, Bobbie Ingram, Erik Morley, Chris Warren, Bob Eadie and Iain Butcher.
A subscriber to the At Work newsletter sent me an email last month with an intriguing problem:
I and many other diabetics take a blood sugar reading on a 4 day cycle. Day 1 is Breakfast, Day 2 is Lunch, Day 3 is Tea, and Day 4 is Bed. This is a continuous 4 day cycle. The difficulty I have is producing a joined-up line graph that shows separate 4 lines per month. One line per measuring point: i.e. all Breakfast results per month.
It sounded like exactly the sort of problem that Excel 2007 should take in its stride...
First of all the data. I did a tiny bit of research and got some rough numbers for blood sugar readings (apologies if these are way off the mark).
Then, create the chart!
In Excel 2007, this is an easy two-step job: select the data and then (from the Insert tab) click on the type of chart you're after.
I quickly discovered that the type of chart you pick makes a big difference to the results you get. I hadn't really looked into the different types of charts before, but while the options might look very similar from the menu, I got wildly different results with the Line chart (below left) and the Stacked Line chart (below right).
Clearly, the first of these two options looks more promising...
Next you need to tell Excel to join the lines, but not to include the empty cells. This turned out to be remarkably straightforward:
1. Select the chart by clicking on it (this will make the Chart Tools tabs appear).
2. Click on the "Select Data" button (on the Design tab within Chart Tools).
3. Click on the "Hidden and Empty Cells" button.
4. Select the "Connect data points with line" option.
5. Choose OK twice to get back to the spreadsheet and update your chart.
And there you have it:
Problem solved! (I hope)
Every now and then, I do something and come across a feature that I don't use very often. The re-discovery of such a feature is a useful reminder that while everyone has a core set of "stuff" that they use Microsoft Office to do, each set will be as different as the people involved.
Today I was emailing some pictures to a friend. I've got my camera set to take photos at a large size (in case I take a particularly good shot and decide I want it enlarged!), but I don't want to overload my friend's inbox (or my sent items, for that matter).
Enter "Picture options" -- a really quick and easy way of shrinking pictures when you send them.
Create your email and attach your pictures as normal. Then click on the little arrow in the bottom right corner of the "Include" group on the Ribbon.
This opens up a side bar with attachment options, including some for pictures. The drop-down menu lets you choose between small, medium and large depending on why you're sending the pictures. For me, small was the best choice and my 4MB email shrank to 73kb - much more inbox-friendly.
[PS. the blurred graphic image was created by using Paint.NET - a very cool, free drawing program.]
Dan Rasmus has seen the future.
In fact, as Director for Information Work Vision, he spends his days looking at global trends and emerging technologies and exploring the challenges and possibilities that lie ahead.
The up-shot: our working lives are going to become more flexible and more fragmented and we're going to need to get very good at balancing.
More control, more responsibility
As technology develops, businesses are going to be able to use software to amplify the impact of their front-line staff. And as employees, we're going to be empowered to take more control. So when, for example, an investor calls a trader or a call-centre worker is talking to a customer, they will have immediate access to all the information needed to improve the quality of service provided. This has the potential to dramatically improve the experience we get as customers (imagine, no more "press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts") but will also radically challenge companies to trust their staff.
We know more than we write down
The flexibility and freedom inherent in this change to how we work is also going to help connect people beyond the formal structures of the workplace. Technology is going to link people together faster and more effectively. So the GP you visit in your local surgery might not directly know, for example, the alternatives to a traditional course of medicine but they can quickly contact a specialist who does.
This concept of social knowledge means that social networks are going to become increasingly important.
Facebook might be here to stay
Partnerships -- or who you know -- have always played a significant role in competitive advantage (whether for companies or individuals) and technology can magnify the impact of this. For the millennial generation, this is second nature, but older workers may need to adapt.
Already our workplaces are becoming increasingly virtual, with teams incorporating colleagues from around the country or even world. The boundaries are going to get more blurred as social networks infiltrate the workplace. Reactions to this are already mixed: some companies see the benefits of colleagues discussing work outside the workplace and view it as informal market research which helps drive and inspire innovation; others have a more traditional view, muttering darkly about corporate confidentiality and looking for ways to prevent these conversations.
History suggests that the traditionalists' days are numbered.
The always-on world
Even in the last 10 years, our lives at work and home have undergone a vast transformation. The internet has shifted from an intriguing scientific project to pervade every aspect of our world. For many of us, we can view our personal email or online shopping details at work as well as having access to our business email at home.
Many companies have recognised the benefits of this flexible world and, to a greater or lesser extent, now allow employees to choose where and when they work. The upside for employees is that it is much easier to get time during the day to take care of a child, visit the doctor, or attend to other personal tasks. The payback for companies is that they can expect employees to work outside core hours if needed.
This flexibility reflects the reality of twenty-first century life. Consumers don't operate in a 9-5 world (because so many of them are at work!) so companies need to be available outside these hours to maximise their business. Internet shopping has given us ongoing access to the retail world, while 24-hour news channels ensure that emerging problems can't be "switched off" after 5pm.
Finding the off-switch
But as individuals, switching off is going to become an ever more important skill if we're not to be overwhelmed by the increasingly pervasive nature of work. Just because we can check our email at 11 at night or from our holiday sun-lounger, doesn't mean we should.
Sometimes, as one of my colleagues argued this morning, it's less stressful to deal immediately with a problem than return after a few day's off to a deluge of emails. And ultimately it's going to be our individual responsibility to protect our personal time and make sure we spend our time in line with our priorities.
Resistance is futile
This brave new world isn't going to be music to every company's ears. (I'm thinking in particular of those companies that remove CD-ROM drives and block up USB ports in an effort to control the flow of information.) But disgruntled or duplicitous employees will always find a way round even the most tightly-controlled organisations and the benefits of flexibility and freedom are too big to be ignored.
I wandered over to our Mobile team today and asked Emily Lambert which three Office features she couldn't do without. Given that, in her words, she "lives in Outlook", it's not surprising that her favourites all come from that product.
1. To-do bar calendar
The to-do bar is quickly becoming indispensable in the daily quest to stay on top of your work, but Emily wanted to single out the "upcoming appointments" section (which you can customise to show more or fewer appointments as you need).
2. Calendar overlay
Trying to find free time in people's diaries can be challenging at the best of times. But you can save yourself a bit of squinting and hassle by using the "overlay" function. By clicking the tiny arrow in the calendar tab, Outlook displays the calendars on top of each other, making it much easier to find the elusive free space!
3. Time-zones for appointments
This is particularly handy for booking meetings with colleagues in different time zones (or putting the times of international flights into your calendar!). By clicking on the Time Zone button in a meeting request, you then get two additional fields added to the start and end time of your meeting.
This way it's easy to co-ordinate a meeting with, for example, a colleague in Munich. Or, by just changing one time zone, you can book out the time for your LHR-JFK flight starting in Greenwich Mean Time and ending in Eastern Time (US & Canada).
Family holidays can try even the most patient temperament. Over the last few years, I've noticed a few common problems with ours.
Firstly, we can never finalise the meal rota because at least one individual changes their plans at the last minute; they then try and swap with someone else, who has already swapped with another night and the simple idea of taking an evening each to cook descends into chaos.
Additionally:
- Someone (usually my sister's family) always gets lost. This is usually because she leaves the directions at work.
- A vital piece of equipment is always forgotten (because everyone thought someone else was bringing it...)
- Five calls and 17 emails are needed to try and get my brother to confirm if he's joining us.
- Another eight calls are needed with my mother who is a bit random on email and usually replies to the oldest version of a thread.
- There are numerous squabbles about who was meant to get which room.
As much as I love catching up with my family, every year I come away swearing "never again".
But this year was remarkably different... thanks to, of all things, Office Live Workspace.
Setting up the workspace took about 3 minutes. Then I loaded in the PDF map of our accommodation, created an Excel spreadsheet containing the draft meal schedule (to be revised and revised...), wrote a really simple list of shared "equipment" (DVDs, guide books, initial groceries, etc), created a contact list of who was invited (with columns to confirm attendance and allocate rooms) and shared it with the family.
Everyone got an email inviting them to the workspace and then were able to view and edit all the details whenever they wanted. My mother only ever saw the latest version of the plan (so no confusion there), for the first time ever nothing was left behind and I allocated the rooms based on the order of confirmation (which certainly encouraged my brother to sort himself out!) and everyone could see who was staying where.
I dread to think what the holiday would have been like "the old way" because the week before we left a project at work went a bit mad and I barely had time to pack for myself, let alone sort out the usual chaos.
Some things of course never change...
The meal schedule did get revised (about a dozen times according to the activity tracker) but we didn't end up with two people cooking on one night and no-one cooking on another...
And my sister did leave the directions at work, again. But she was able to login to the workspace from home and print off a second set of directions. (And for good measure she printed the contact list so she was able to call us to tell us she was running late...)
I might -- just might -- holiday with my family again!
What’s the difference and which is right for me?
Do you save your work on a flash drive or email yourself documents to work on at home? Perhaps you share documents via email and then manually merge all the comments later, or are you planning an event, juggling multiple people or suppliers?
If the answer’s ‘yes’ to any of these, then Office Live Workspace is for you. It extends all your favourite Office applications online. You get a workspace which is a secure online place to store 1,000+ files and documents, and you can access them from any computer with an Internet connection. If you want to share information, all you need is your colleague’s email address, and you choose whether they can edit or simply read your document.
It’s that easy! Best of all, it’s absolutely free and you don’t need to download anything to use it! Sign up today and you could be using your Office Live Workspace in a few minutes!
Looking for an online social space where you can share files, photos and music? Then you should think about Windows Live SkyDrive – your hard drive in the sky. If you use Hotmail, Spaces, Live Folders and Messenger, then Windows Live services are for you.
SkyDrive gives you a massive 5Gb of password-protected file storage free – plenty of space for you to chat to friends, organise a get-together, and share your pictures. Why not get started now?
Did you know that in Excel, Word, PowerPoint & Outlook 2007 you can preview formats, fonts, and styles before you apply them? I have found recently during the creation of presentations, Word docs & emails that this feature is saving me SO much time!
We all know, particularly with communications, that if there is a lot of text involved you need to make it look attractive or stand out to encourage people to take the time to read it and to also make it clear and easy on the eye. And with so many different styles and fonts to choose from it can take a while until you find the "right" one, from selecting the text, clicking on the font style, waiting for it to be applied, then deciding it's not right and having to repeat the process! Until you build a "memory bank" of the fonts etc which you prefer this can be a timely and tedious task.
But, a cool time-saving feature of Office 2007 is that all you have to do is highlight the relevant text, click change styles then HOVER your cursor over the different styles, scrolling down each one.
As you do this it will apply the selected font to your highlighted text giving you the opportunity to see what it looks like before confirming your selection. Kind of a "try before you buy!" This also applies to adding colours, shapes, lines, themes, every part of formatting you can think of so can save a huge amount of time.
For me this also works so well in the creation of PowerPoint presentations - this way you can see what your presentation would look like in the various formats & styles without having to select it, review and go back and change it.
Essentially this is known as "Live Preview" - a way in which you can see how the formatting you choose will change your text, pictures or other content, or how the overall look of your document will change when you switch the theme, simply by pointing to the different items in the galleries.
Give it a go and see for yourself and let me know what you like about it (or don't like about it) and the difference this has made to your daily work lives!
Look forward to hearing from you! :-)
Click here For more info
I've just spent a week out of the office on a work conference. It's the first time I've been away from my daughter for more than a night since she was born and, as chief child-minder in our household, an enormous amount of advance planning was required to make sure everything ran smoothly while I was away.
The contrast with the effort (not) required to keep my "day job" under control was vast, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts about the technology I used to survive.
1. RPC over HTTP (or failing that Outlook Web Access)
Basically this string of acronyms means I can get email through any internet connection. It's a godsend. No need to dial into a company server, just connect and go. And the number of places world-wide where you can get wireless internet access is incredible (even our local pub is offering Wifi!) so no more excuses for not sending that overdue email...
2. Groove
Groove synchronises files without you having to think. It's a great way to work on documents with other people and not have to email countless versions back and forth (and always end up with someone working on an out-of-date copy). For me on this trip it meant that I had the latest copy of our newsletter with me when we ran into a last-minute problem.I just opened up the Groove Workspace, fixed the problem and saved the document. Then when my colleague got into the office the next morning, it was all ready to go.
If you haven't discovered Groove yet, download a free trial.
3. Office Communicator
"Presence" is a wonderful thing. It's the little icon in Office Communicator that tells you when people are online (or busy, or in a call...). It means that although I'm in another time zone, my colleagues in the UK can easily see when I'm up and online. Then they can fire off a quick question (or just say hello) and get a quick answer, without having to clog up my inbox. Of course, it also means I can see which of my colleagues are having just as much trouble with jetlag as me...
And I haven't even touched on "Out of Office"...
We're all too familiar with emails.....(sometimes too many of them)....flooding into our inbox day in and day out. For many of us, our lives and jobs revolve around our inbox. We can often spend days just trawling through and answering those emails without actually ever getting to do your "day job".
For me, I have to take control back over my inbox.....I don't let it control me. I have to do this to stay sane....and here's how I do it.....
Firstly, I block out 3 small slots in my diary to review my inbox; first thing, lunch time and late afternoon.
As emails come in, I respond to those which I can answer straight away. And if I don't need them for future reference they are deleted. For those more important or those part of an ongoing project or topic I set up folders and often, sub-folders.
Then, once I have responded to that mail it's filed away where I can;
a) find it quickly and simply should I need to refer back to it and more importantly
b) it's out of my inbox.
For those emails I need to action later, I drag into TASKS, which automatically creates a new task. That email is then filed away for future reference etc, clearing my inbox. I then spend part of my day working through those tasks, setting reminders etc, including any additional correspondance. For those more urgent emails that don't warrant a task but perhaps I need to do some research into before responding - I set a flag.
![clip_image001[4]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/atwork/WindowsLiveWriter/HowIsurviveanoverflowinginbox.Fra_11D8A/clip_image001%5B4%5D_thumb.png)
For me, this works - my inbox is never over a screen page full so I can always see EVERYTHING and nothing ever gets missed. For me, if it goes below that bottom page you could run the risk of "out of sight out of mind" - I like to see everything. This is today's view of my inbox:
But of course, everyone does things differently, and everyone has methods that work for them in different ways. For example, my colleague Darren Strange, (Microsoft Office Product Manager) discusses how he does things on his blog - this works for him!
![clip_image001[6]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/atwork/WindowsLiveWriter/HowIsurviveanoverflowinginbox.Fra_11D8A/clip_image001%5B6%5D_thumb.png)
There is no right or wrong way to manage your inbox.....but the most important thing I think, is to ensure you control it and it doesn't control you! You need to find YOUR way to make it work for YOU. My way may help - I swear by it.....and for now....as the legend Frank Sinatra sings.......... "I'll do it my way"........
How do you manage your inbox? Is it spiraling out of control? Are you up until midnight "doing email?" Perhaps my way could help you!
I always used to hate the cliché, "a picture's worth a thousand words" because with my standard of drawing it usually took me at least several hundred words to explain what was happening in the first place. Not any longer, at least not now that Microsoft have come up with a fantastic way to illustrate a wealth of content with little use of words.
To back this up I wanted to share an experience I had recently with you. Having this year studied for a marketing qualification I needed to produce 12 assignments for my final assessment. Word count was tight and I found it increasingly difficult to get across what I wanted to in the limit allowed. This is when I discovered SmartArt! A quick, simple way to get information across using few words.
All, at the click of a button............even I could do it .........which I think is why I was so impressed!
After submitting my drafts to my tutor they all came back with the same comment...alongside my SmartArt diagrams...... 'reference?' 'reference?' 'reference?' It was then I had great pleasure in informing my tutor that these diagrams were actually MINE using SmartArt, a cool new feature in Office 2007...."what do you mean???" (Clearly, he had not heard of it) And when I explained, he was very impressed.....THAT is how professional and fantastic these diagrams were.....he thought they had come from a book!
So, my final assignments were submitted with my SmartArt diagrams, referenced as follows:
Saunders.E, 2007 (using SmartArt, feature of the 2007 Microsoft Office system)
Not being one to brag but I did receive my first ever A grades for those assignments......and if I'm honest, I think this is partly down to effectively & professionally presenting my ideas in a clear & concise manner.
It really is simple.....just click on 'insert' then 'SmartArt' on the top ribbon and you're given a whole host of different ways to show your data:
So there you have it in a nutshell - If I this had been available to me as a school child or university student my life would have been so much simpler (and probably my grades higher!!)
Does anyone else love this feature or is it really just me?
Oh, and this one below is my particular favourite diagram:
