LinkedIn is the greatest thing since crushed ice. Really.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but the one that has me falling deeply, passionately, hopelessly in love with LinkedIn is the Answers feature. As everyone should know, in LinkedIn, you create a universe of your contacts. Your contacts have contacts, your contacts' contacts have contacts and so on. This group of people is collectively known as your network, and it can be quite large.
It's kind of like the Borg, from Star Trek. The Borg, as Wikipedia describes it (and we all know that Wikipedia is never inaccurate) is an amalgam of cybernetically enhanced humanoid drones of multiple species, organised as an inter-connected collective with a hive mind, inhabiting a vast region of space with many planets and ships, and sophisticated technology.
Hive mind. I like that.
Anyway, one of the great features of LInkedIn is that you can ask your Hive Mind a question. And you get really good answers, about almost anything, really, really quickly.
This morning, I had a problem. I have this bad habit of creating Microsoft Word documents, and like an absentminded squirrel burying a nut, forgetting where I put them. I will be holding a printed document, and have no idea where in the computer it resides. This leads to all kinds of depressing, exhausting attempts to dig it up using Microsoft's search function.
What I need is the ability to insert a footer into my Word documents that lists the entire document path. However, I am using the brand spanking-new Word 2007, which is packed with features and pretty neat, but also sometimes a little user-unfriendly. I could not figure out how to create the footer I wanted.
So, I asked my network the questions. And I had a detailed, friendly, flawless answer back within five minutes. Problem solved. And I was back to my regularly scheduled work.
Try it.