Over the summer, we will be highlighting Legal Sourcery’s most popular research tips.  On that note, here are Legal Sourcery’s most popular current awareness tips:

• Follow Legal Sourcery via Email
• Introducing Robeside Assistance
• LegalPubs. ca – The Latest Canadian Legal Publications
• Native Law Centre Case Watch
• Saskatchewan Law Firm Blogs
• Staying Current with the Canadian Law Blogs List
• Staying Current in Legal News (or How to Be a Legal News Ninja)

If you have any questions, ask a Law Society Librarian! We are pleased to provide high-quality legal research services to Saskatchewan members in person, on the telephone, or by …

Over the summer, the Legal Sourcery blog is publishing its most popular research tips.  On that note, here are Legal Sourcery’s most popular CanLII tips:

• CanLII’s Boolean Operators
• CanLII Commentary
• CanLII Connects: Start Taking Your Research to the Next Level
• CanLII Tutorial Videos 
• Office of the Residential Tenancies Decisions on CanLII
• Saskatchewan Labour Arbitration Awards
• Saskatchewan Real Estate Commission on CanLII
• What Do You Do When You Find What You’ve Been Looking For?

If you have any questions, ask a Law Society Librarian! We are pleased to provide high-quality legal research services to Saskatchewan members in person, on the telephone, …

The Internet is home to a growing body of high quality materials such as research guides, government reports, and legal commentary.  Accessing this material is as easy as typing keywords into Google and hitting enter, right?  Wrong!

The challenge to using Google efficiently is wading through the overwhelming volume of results retrieved.  Fortunately, there are tools to help pinpoint what you are looking for.  There is far more to searching Google than you might think.

Identify the Core Concepts

The first step to searching effectively is selecting effective search terms.  Identify the core concepts.  These will become your search terms.  …

With over 467 million users in more than 200 countries (including at least a 1 million in the law practice industry) and web traffic that ranks it as the 24th most visited site on the planet, LinkedIn is the social networking tool of choice for professionals.

Regardless of whether they trying to find new lawyer, or looking for you specifically, a Google search is one of the first things prospective clients will undertake. Along with the bio on your firm website, your LinkedIn profile is likely to be at or near the top of any Google search results. Clients will …

• I know it can be done in Word (or Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote). I’ve done it before but I don’t remember how or where it is on the menu.
• I know it is there, but I don’t have time to look. I need to get this done now.
• The instructions say look for Picture Tools, look for format tab, and click…. Where is everything? Seriously…

If you have ever been in any of the above situations, read on. There is a great feature for you in Office 2016. “Tell me what you want to do” (also known as Tell …

A question I have been asked numerous times is how to add personal notes, annotations, additional information or comments to an email that you have sent or received. There are numerous imperfect ways to add notes to email messages received or sent but no perfect method. For now, we can only pick one or two imperfect workarounds and hope that Microsoft will some day add this as a feature. There are third party plugins that facilitate adding notes to mail messages, but for this article I will limit the scope to Microsoft Office products.

Below are a few options you …

Maybe it was you that installed your small firm’s Wi-Fi. Perhaps it was a contractor. Do you remember what year that was? Perhaps your cable company put in a router when you moved into your home.  Or a friend helped you put it in place for your home office.

For whatever reason, your Wi-Fi router is there and has worked reliably for years. It’s dependable and no one is complaining about it.

There seem to be an infinite number of reasons as to why someone’s Wi-Fi router can become old and ignored, but it happens. So if your router hasn’t …

Conditional Formatting is a largely underused and undervalued feature in Excel. Very often I see people re-sort the entire spreadsheet or use the search feature to find specific values. These can be easily done instead with Conditional Formatting.

Ranking

Instead of re-sorting your spreadsheet, try selecting the data cells you wish to rank, then click “Conditional Formatting” on the command ribbon and select “Data Bars”. Hover your mouse over the fills and watch the data bars appearing on your spreadsheet where you can easily locate the high and low values.

Colour Scales

If you keep track of workflow, transactions, cashflow, …

Passwords are a necessary evil if you use a computer and the Internet for almost anything these days. A typical user has to remember 19 passwords on average, and a whopping 80% of us use the same password for multiple online accounts. Password-cracking technology has changed over the years and the definition of a “strong password” evolves over time. Some years ago, a strong password required about 8 characters, with mixed cases, at least one number and one special character, and could not contain words found in the dictionary – something like this: j6tLwFJ!.

Here’s the good news. Security …

Have you ever had to create a simple interactive presentation in a hurry and PowerPoint seems too daunting when you are in crunch mode? Give Microsoft Sway a try. In a few easy steps, you can create an online interactive presentation that you can make public, keep private, or share with people who are given a link. Best of all, Sway is free, and you can’t argue with free.

Sway and PowerPoint are both Microsoft products. While PowerPoint gives you full control of animation, sound, layout, design and branding, Sway is for you to whip up a presentation (even if …