In the New Workplace survey (if you haven't taken it yet, please click here), we ask survey takers to  tell us a specific example of when they used technology to make themselves more productive and to provide us with a description of being confronted with a problem and using software in a clever way to solve it.

I thought I would share some excerpts with you; the ingenuity of the knowledge worker is boundless.

• I write custom applications using for example Microsoft VB, Excel/Access vba, and SQL, to extract, translate, and load tax data from disparate systems into my company's software.  The programs I have written have automated processes that would otherwise been performed via manual Cut and Paste efforts, or even thru retyping.
•  Used Office applications (spreadsheets, etc.) to transform data into usable form.
•  I adopted local HDD search capability from the earliest times (Alta Vista Personal Edition).  My organization did not provide such tools, so I've always purchased the latest tools available in this category to enhance my ability to find stuff on my machine.
•  I heavily use our enterprise blog/wiki platform to collaborate with customers, partners and team members.  We are constantly evolving how the technology is applied to use cases in customer support, support documentation, sales reporting and requirements management by Milestone.
•  Created a traffic light system using Macros and a heap of conditional formatting and validation in Excel to manage 27 concurrent projects and their priorities.

Share your stories by taking the survey; we'll send you a complimentary copy of the executive summary of our findings and you can enter our drawing to win a new Microsoft Zune digital media player.