Recently two new members joined our crew on the good ship Hodgson/Meyers. Along with their marketing bona fides the pair bring with them unusual ties to the animal kingdom.

Seattle native Rachel Omiliak joins our team as an Online Marketing Specialist. A graduate of Santa Clara University, Rachel lends her expertise to all of our search optimization projects, including work for the Applied Systems, CSG Systems. Quaero, Meydenbauer Conference Center and QuickMedical accounts.

While in college, Rachel expanded her worldview through the Semester at Sea program, where she traveled to 11 countries in 108 days. Among her adventures during the trip were holding a crocodile, hugging a seal, being attacked by a pelican larger than most people and—get this—catching three piranhas while fishing the Amazon River in Brazil.

As for Gonzaga grad Erin McNiff, she comes to us from Cole & Weber United. While there she helped manage the Washington Lottery, Livingston Cellars and TiVo accounts. Among her many accomplishments was directing the Lottery’s Dream Agents campaign that broke sales records by $1 million dollars. As one of our project managers, Erin will bring her talents to the Clark Nuber, CSG Systems and ISIS accounts.

Erin’s animal connections? She finds that wrangling her long-haired mini-Dachshund is good training for keeping creative types on task. And having sung as a waitress at a Red Robin Restaurant, she may well have been destined to work for us. After all, our CEO is a woodpecker named Spike. And from red-breasted robin to red-crested woodpecker is not that far a flight.

While our clients are sure to appreciate Rachel and Erin’s contributions to the marketing cause, we feel secure in knowing that we’re in good hands should we ever be attacked by crocodiles, piranhas or wiener dogs.

As a project manager at Hodgson/Meyers my key responsibilities include the creation and management of budgets and timelines.  Creating these quickly and accurately, and keeping them updated on a daily basis requires the use of a trustworthy program.  My program-of-choice is Microsoft Excel.  Flexible and expansive, it allows me to be as straightforward or as complex as needed in my daily responsibilities.

WARNING:  If you are a creative person (I’m surprised that you’ve made it this far into the post!) this isn’t going to be pretty for you!

The “formatting” toolbar is one of the most common and useful toolbars in Excel.

You can easily implement standard formatting, such as font, alignment, text color, highlighting color, and outlining.  Additionally, it includes the basic “currency” functions, which are very useful on budget worksheets.

With just one quick click, you can format numbers in your worksheet to show as costs (using dollar signs), percentages, and adding or subtracting decimals.

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Jennifer Bell
Project Manager