Tech Bytes – Page 20 – Ulistic Projects Blog

April 15, 2019

Microsoft Excel Tip: How To Copy Cells In Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a staple program in Microsoft’s Office suite. It’s a powerful spreadsheet program that allows users to organize data and calculate results using a wide range of formulas. Let’s look at one basic element to this program: how to copy cells in Microsoft Excel.

Basic Cell Copying Technique

Before we move on to some advanced techniques, let’s cover the basics.

1. Select the Cell or Cells You Want to Copy

If you want to copy just one cell, simply click once on that cell. IF you want to copy multiple cells, click and drag until all the cells you intend to copy are selected.

2. Copy the Cell or Cells

The next step is to actually copy the cells. You can do this by pressing control+C on a PC (command+C on a Mac), or by clicking the Copy button in the ribbon at the top of the Excel window. You’ll know you’ve copied a cell or cells when you see a spinning dotted line surrounding the copied area.

3. Choose Where You Want the Copied Cells to Go

Next, click once on the cell where you want the copied cells to go. If you’ve copied multiple cells, click the cell where you want the top left cell in your selection to go.

4. Paste the Copied Content into the New Location

Now that you’ve selected the cell where you want your copied content to appear, use the paste function to place the copied content in the new location. To do this, click on the Paste button in the ribbon (near the Copy button), or press control+V (command+V on a Mac). The material you had copied will now appear in the new location. If the copied material was in a cell that contained a formula, the formula will be copied, too.

Please note that if you’ve selected a location that already has content in it, the old content will be overwritten by the new content. Usually, that’s exactly what people are intending to do, but it’s important to note how this works.

Advanced Techniques

Now that you understand the basics, check out these two advanced techniques.

Paste Options

If your copy and pasting doesn’t work as planned, try this. Click on the clipboard next to the cell you just pasted into. Hover over the buttons and choose the one that sounds like what you’re trying to do.

Smart Fill

Select some data. See the green square at the bottom right? Try dragging that square down or sideways. With some data, Excel can intelligently populate either data or formulas to help you work more quickly.

This quick tech tip will help you get started using Microsoft Excel. For more help, give us a call!

April 9, 2019April 9, 2019

Using Delayed Delivery With Email to Boost Productivity

Email is one of the best ways to communicate with people in the business world, but it’s also one of the biggest time drains for those same individuals. Some of the most productive people turn their email completely off and only check it a few times a day, but is there more that you can do to stay productive throughout the day without stressing out that you’re missing important messages? This quick email productivity hack may be the answer that will help you stay more organized and less distracted throughout the day.

Delayed Email Delivery

Even though it’s a core part of Microsoft Outlook, few people realize that you’re able to delay the delivery of emails until a later date or time — and even fewer people use this function on a regular basis. Delaying the delivery of your email is a great way to ensure that people receive your message when they are most likely to act upon it. If you need someone to provide a crucial report for you but they’re currently on vacation, sending an immediate email request is likely to get lost in the waves of requests they will be wading through when they return to the office. If you delay the message until a day or two after they are back in the office, you’re much more likely to receive a response without having to follow up again.

Scheduling Your Day

Another great way to stay focused during the day is to schedule all of your emails to go out at a certain time, perhaps around the time you will be leaving for the day. This allows you to answer emails at preprogrammed times throughout the day, but not being a slave to pinging notes back and forth when you would prefer to focus on other tasks. The hope is that others will respond to your requests at the end of their day, and you’ll have a wealth of actionable responses waiting for you when you come into work the next morning. It’s not difficult to schedule emails for delivery at a later time, and this simple productivity hack could save you over an hour each day — providing you with a significantly greater amount of targeted time to pay attention to what you need to accomplish each week.

You’re not getting more hours added to your day, and there’s almost always more than you can accomplish in any given week. Using these simple email scheduling tips to delay your email deliveries helps you eke more work (and fun!) out of the time that you do have available.

April 8, 2019April 7, 2019

Eliminate Distractions In Your Work Day

Our days are full of distractions, from phones that don’t stop ringing to apps that don’t stop dinging. Each time we pause from one task, it takes us several seconds to a few minutes to get our minds back on track. This may not seem like much of an impact, but it can really add up over the course of a day. Not to mention all the time that is lost during meetings because someone was multi-tasking when they are asked a question and needs to regroup before they answer. It may seem like this is simply the way we do business today, but there are ways that you can eliminate distractions and be more productive during your workday.

Be Singularly Focused

Each task that passes your desk isn’t the highest priority. When you rigorously prioritize your work, it can help create a singular focus on the task at hand. When you absolutely must get something accomplished, train yourself to turn off everything else — turn your phone on airplane mode, pause email notifications and send your office phone straight to voice mail. Close all applications other than the one you’re working in at that moment, or go old school with a pad and paper in a quiet corner of the office where you know you won’t be disturbed. This singular focus on a task allows you to put all of your brainpower behind it, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly and efficiently you’re able to get things accomplished.

Be Ruthless in Meetings

Meetings today can be quite a challenge, with people working remotely and others tied to their laptops or tapping away on their phones. If you want to have a truly productive meeting, then you have to get a little ruthless! Schedule your meetings for a shorter period of time, and set up the expectations as soon as everyone is in the room. Ask for agreement from the room that everyone will leave their phones off and turned over, so they are not running the risk of distractions. Even a 15-minute meeting can accomplish great things if you have the full mental capacity of everyone in the room focused on the task at hand.

Being productive doesn’t have to mean constantly locking yourself into a corner or alienating colleagues by closing your office doors. You can find pockets of productivity in your day when you can focus on your most important tasks, providing you with the structure that you need to help move your organization — and your life — in a positive direction.

April 5, 2019April 9, 2019

Are You Good at Saying No & Setting Priorities?

There are never enough hours in a day, but how you spend the hours that you do have can make all the difference in the world. Just think: business leaders such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have exactly the same 24 hours available to them as you do! All good business leaders have to determine the best way to be productive, but this can be a challenging lesson to learn. Here’s a quick hack that will help you be more productive without adding to your stress level.

Just Say No!

Ask yourself this question multiple times each day: “Am I adding unique value to this conversation, or could someone else do (nearly) as well?”. You have to be honest with yourself, but when you rigorously apply this rule you might find that you can skip some meetings, delegate decisions and allow others to take the lead on smaller projects or tasks so you can focus on leveraging your core competencies. Getting rid of the smaller annoyances leaves you more time to focus on what’s truly important — moving your organization forward.

Effective Prioritization

Did you know that the word “priority” was never meant to be plural? That’s right, we talk about “priorities” all the time, but for more than 500 years it strictly meant the very first thing. When you think about it, it’s impossible to have multiple “first” things, there’s only one first. When everything is a priority, nothing’s a priority, but how can you make decisions about where to focus without freezing yourself or your team in a circle of indecision?

Multitasking is a Myth

Your brain can truly only handle one task at a time. When you’re jumping back and forth between several tasks, your brain takes a minute to adjust each time you make that leap. This mental price is time taken out of your day that could otherwise be spent on a single productive task, allowing your brain to work at peak performance. Even if you’re only wasting 60 seconds between each task, that can easily add up to more than an hour each day. This performance disruption reduces your focus and makes your delivery less consistent.

If you can’t help with a particular project, or don’t need to be involved in a decision, don’t be afraid to step away and let others handle it. You need to be able to trust that your team can take care of the rest. There’s no need to add what is essentially busywork to your day when you can harness the power of your mind to create value in your little corner of the universe.

March 26, 2019March 24, 2019

Set Reminders to Stay on Track with Important Tasks

Raise your hand if you’re one of the millions of Americans who are overworked and don’t have enough hours in the day — isn’t that everyone? When you do manage to get into the groove of getting something done, it’s easy to forget everything else in the work or play. You may not even realize exactly how long you’ve been spending on a particular task, and perhaps spend more time than you can afford. This leads to a spiral of stress that can be damaging to your productivity. Productivity experts recommend a simple hack that will keep you on track. Leverage the tools that you already have at hand to stay on track with these time-sensitive tasks.

Use All the Tools You Have

When you’re in the thick of a project, you don’t want to completely stop and think about using several mouse clicks or taps to set a reminder to do another task in the future. Fortunately, today’s smart speakers have everything that you need to set a timer or a reminder for a later date and time. Simply let your smart devices do the work for you! Be sure that you’re using a task reminder or timer that will work across all of your devices. That will save you from setting a reminder on your desktop that doesn’t sync to your phone after you’ve left the office for the day.

Be Specific When Setting Reminders

Jotting a quick note is great, but do you always understand what it was you needed to do at a later time? If you’re viewing a reminder that is out of context with the project, it might take you a few minutes to get back up to speed. Reduce that problem by being very specific when you’re setting your reminders. At a minimum, each reminder should include:

Specific time and date for the reminder
Projects your reminder relates to
Tag any individuals you need to consult

You’ll find that your reminders are most helpful if you quickly state the specific actions that you need to take and why they’re important.

Keeping your life organized doesn’t have to be difficult. When you’re using the tools that are around you and reminding your future self about specific tasks, you’re already taking several steps in the right direction. Microsoft Office 365 productivity suite includes everything that you need to keep your projects rolling smoothly regardless of whether you’re in the office or on the road.

March 21, 2019March 21, 2019

Instagram Users: Fake Copyright Infringement Notices

There’s a new scam targeting highly-trafficked Instagram accounts, and anyone with several thousand followers on their account — including businesses and clients — are fair game to the fraudsters. The scheme masquerades as a false claim of copyright infringement, according to Kaspersky Labs, who first noticed the new way influential and popular users are being cajoled into giving up their credentials to attackers.

How can you tell if your company or a client is in the crosshairs? The first sign of attack comes in the form of an official-looking email, seemingly from the team at Instagram.

“Your account will be permanently deleted for copyright infringement,” the email threatens. Tripwire reports in a recent article that the scam then requires action in the next 24-48 hours that involves “addressing the claim” and “verifying credentials.” This is where the user is required to type in the account’s password, which hands over the keys to the social media account to the attackers. It doesn’t end there, though — Tripwire warns that an “email verification” is required in addition to the credentials verification, where the user is asked to choose their email provider and give up the username and password for that login as well.

Kaspersky warns the false emails from Instagram are extremely similar to actual Instagram addresses. They include “mail@theinstagram.team” or “info@theinstagram.team.” Protecting your business or your clients from giving up the information in the first place is paramount — once the information is handed over, scammers can then demand ransom to return the account, spread malicious content across the page, and of course, change the information required to assert control over the account, like passwords and security questions. Tripwire encourages managers of popular Instagram accounts to enable two-factor authentication to make it significantly more difficult for attackers to gain access to the account. Kaspersky advises staying up-to-date on best practices, like avoiding suspicious links and only logging into Instagram through the official app.

March 20, 2019March 20, 2019

Review Your Calendar Monthly For Better Perspective

Life is extremely busy with people scheduling every moment of their day while still looking back and wondering where their month has gone. It’s all too easy to find yourself reviewing a 6-month plan only to find that you are seriously off-course. Focusing one day at a time can cause you to be short-sighted when it comes to achieving your long-term goals. A quick review of your monthly calendar helps ensure that you’re well on the way to meeting business — and personal — objectives.

Leverage Project Management Strategies

Most project managers realize the importance of scheduling regular project reviews where you focus not on the daily tasks, but on the distance, you have moved from the overall project perspective. You can leverage this same methodology when it comes to tackling your calendar! Looking at your calendar on a daily or even weekly basis gives you an idea of what you have to get through, but it doesn’t provide you with a holistic view of your month and your year. Breaking deliverables and goals down into monthly chunks lets you see results more quickly and provides ongoing motivation to stay the path.

Using the Right Tools for the Job

Keeping your calendar updated with all of your various home, family, personal and work obligations can be a chore, especially when you’re splitting childcare or after-school activity duties with your spouse, parents or friends. Outlook and your Google Calendar may be great for scheduling work items, but is your work calendar getting bogged down with non-work related tasks? This can make it extremely difficult for others to schedule meetings with you and to maintain visibility for crucial work projects and tasks.

Thinking Strategically

Do you have a 1-year, 5-year and 10-year plan? Breaking these plans down into bi-annual and quarterly chunks allows you to more accurately track where you are according to your plan. This also keeps you from getting to the end of a busy year and wondering what happened to all of your time! Bringing this type of strategic thinking into your calendar on a monthly basis assures that you’re setting aside a time that is just for you. Even if you only spend 15 minutes reviewing the next month on a Sunday afternoon, you will find that it was time well spent.

Don’t let yourself get tied down to the daily hassles of life that can keep you from meeting your long-term goals and objectives. You can even use your calendar to help schedule time for your monthly calendar review! Your future self thanks you.

March 19, 2019March 19, 2019

Reduce Travel Costs & Expense With Video Calling Apps

Endless airline terminals. Overpriced airport food. Overly-close seating on packed planes. What’s there to love about business travel? Sure, there are some road warriors who appreciate never having to clean a room or make a bed as they spend all their time in hotels, but for most people, business travel is simply something to be endured. Even 10 years ago, it would have been challenging to have the kind of high-speed access and seamless experience that you need for video conferencing, but today’s a different story. See how you can save time and money by utilizing some of these next-gen video calling apps.

Business Happens Everywhere

Workers want to be able to be productive anytime, anywhere — and that could include while watching their child’s baseball game, stepping out of a client meeting for a few minutes or even from home on the weekends. This is especially true of small business owners who are never truly off duty. Fortunately, video conferencing software and apps have come a long way from the fuzzy, slow-moving images and poor sound quality of the past to provide crystal-clear images and sound with no noticeable lag. If you haven’t tried it lately, video calling apps are now quite seamless to use and work equally well from your desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.

Benefits of Video Calling

Let’s face it: travel is expensive, and the cost is not always justified for the value that you provide. There are certainly times when business travel will still be required, but many negotiations and conversations can happen equally well over a high-speed video call. Phone calls without video are not enough to provide you with the nuanced information that you receive when you’re able to see someone directly in front of you, and video calling fits that bill nicely. Business is increasingly global in nature, making video calls one of the few cost-effective ways to work with teams that are scattered throughout the region — or the world. Until the last few years, it was a bit more difficult to ensure that both individuals or teams had access to the right software and hardware to make video calling truly viable. With the majority of laptops being shipped with high-resolution video conferencing hardware already installed and the prevalence of smartphones, that is no longer the case.

Windows Server 2008 End of Support (Questions and Answers)

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end — and on January 14, 2020, Microsoft will be stopping mainstream service for their highly popular Windows 2008 Server. If you are one of the millions of organizations who are still using this secure and highly stable solution, it may be time to look for other options before maintenance becomes an even greater challenge. The current Windows Server 2019 was released in November 2018 and since this is the fifth software release since Windows Server 2008, it’s not surprising that Microsoft has finally decided to deprecate mainstream support. Here are the answers to your burning questions about Windows Server 2008 end of support transitions.

What Does End of Service Mean for Windows Server 2008?

While the end of support period (EOS) for Windows Server 2008 is looming, that doesn’t mean the platform will stop working on January 14, 2020. It simply means that Microsoft will no longer be required to provide support and patches unless your organization has a specific contract in place to maintain support. All software and hardware have an effective lifecycle and Windows Server 2008 has been in a period of maturity for many years. This planned EOS period means that non-security updates, free support options, online technical content updates and free security updates on-premises will be halted by the Microsoft support team. Microsoft recommends that organizations immediately review options to shift to cloud-based options such as Microsoft Azure as this allows businesses an additional 3-year window of updates that are classified as Critical or Important by the Microsoft support teams. There are also options that allow customers to purchase Extended Security Updates at a premium to provide additional time to perform a migration.

What Are the Dangers of Windows Server 2008 Being Unsupported?

The security vulnerabilities alone should be reason enough to drive your business to make a decision to shift to a new solution. Cybercrime accounts for over billions of dollars of expenses and lost revenue for businesses each year, and a lack of security updates and patches can provide hackers with a door directly into your most valuable digital systems and information. With Accenture estimating that cybercrime could cost businesses over $5.2 trillion in the next 5 years, creating a secure environment for the backbone of your business is more crucial than ever before. That staggering statistic is based on the possibility of losses primarily to major health and life sciences organizations such as pharmaceutical companies. The potential for industrial espionage is significant when you consider the value of pharma knowledge and the capture of personally identifiable information.

What Happens to My Business When Windows Server 2008 Support Ends?

System vulnerabilities are nothing new for technology professionals, but many security-minded teams recommended freezing technology at Server 2008 as a stable and reliable solution for their business in years past. Now that the support is due to be deprecated, data managers are looking for ways to upgrade their server solutions or move directly to the cloud. Cloud-based solutions provide you with the flexibility and scalability that is needed for today’s modern organizations while offering a high level of security to combat the continual threats to your systems and data.

What Steps Should I Take Before Windows Server 2008 End of Support Date Arrives?

It’s not unusual for server upgrades to take quite some time, so it’s prudent to begin researching alternatives immediately. Begin with an audit of all the servers that are being used to determine the scale of the upgrade as well as any possibilities for consolidation. Server migration can cause a significant impact not only to your budget, but also to your users. If you do not already have a server migration strategy in place, now would be the time to map out those recommendations with a trusted technology partner. Finding a partner with a great deal of experience in Windows Server 2008 migrations or upgrades can help you avoid many of the land mines that might otherwise have a negative impact on your project.

What Are Best Practices for Windows Server 2008 Upgrades or Replacement?

While some organizations choose to go directly to the cloud for their server needs, there are other options for your business. You could decide to simply upgrade to a newer, stable version of Windows Server on-premise or utilize a private cloud or other hybrid solution to meet the needs of your business and stay within your budgetary requirements. Working with a technology solutions provider gives you the added firepower of external backup and recovery mechanisms in case something goes dramatically wrong during your transition period or in the event of a cyberattack.

Whether you decide to push forward with a full migration using your internal team or decide to work with a technology solutions partner, it’s crucial that you complete your investigations and make a plan of attack to migrate away from Windows Server 2008. There is an extremely high-risk factor when you stay with an unsupported software platform, making it all too easy for cybercriminals to infiltrate your weakened digital defenses.

March 14, 2019March 12, 2019

Top New Additions To Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 has rolled out an impressive array of new features that business owners will appreciate. These range from handy mobile-to-PC interactions to intuitive, behind-the-scenes IT integrations to keep a business running smoothly. Here are some of the standout new additions to Office 365 that were specifically created with business managers in mind.

1. New Digital Pen Features

The Microsoft digital pen has some new tricks up its sleeve that make it easier than ever to edit your important documents. It’s like having an entire editing suite rolled into a single device, and it all but eliminates the need to type or use the mouse while editing. The digital pen lets you insert words or line breaks, split or change words, cross out paragraphs, circle text and leave detailed comments.

2. Embedded 3D Animations

3D animations can now be embedded directly into Word documents and PowerPoint slides with no coding required. Microsoft made this extremely easy to use: Insert a 3D model into the slide, select from a list of pre-built animations, click ‘Apply’ and the animation does its thing.

3. Blurred Background on Video Calls

Business managers who use a remote workforce will appreciate this feature. Video callers can now automatically blur out their backgrounds to minimize distractions and increase meeting productivity. No more worrying about video calls from the home office or a busy workplace — just blur it out.

4. Powerful PowerPoint Upgrades

This is a really cool feature for managers. Need a PowerPoint slide in a hurry? Office 365 now lets you draw your slides by hand on a tablet and convert your “chicken scratches” into a professionally-designed PowerPoint presentation in just a few minutes. PowerPoint now has digital design recommendations that it will make to recreate your sketches. This includes layouts, text suggestions and icons. The end result will look like you had the graphic design department laboring over it for hours.

5. Publish-to-Web Upgrades

Microsoft Office has allowed users to publish documents as web pages for years, but this feature just keeps getting better. Office 365 now allows users to publish docs as Sway websites by clicking ‘File’ and ‘Transform.’ It’s a big time-saving feature. It can also be used for publishing training documents, newsletters, pitch decks and product pages.

6. Compatibility Checks

This Office 365 addition allows you to make system upgrades without suffering any downtime from incompatibility issues. Microsoft’s most recent desktop application lets you check compatibility of apps before you run a system upgrade. Managers can save time and money, and keep things running smoothly by using this upgrade.

7. Robust Data Compliance

Office 365 has a long list of compliance certifications that are now directly integrated with the software. This is an incredibly helpful feature for public-private businesses, government organizations and non-profits that deal with a lot of regulatory compliance issues. For example, Office 365 now offers HIPAA and HITRUST CSF Certification for medical organizations, which allows them to remain security- and privacy-compliant in their documentation. Other certifications include AICPA Service Organization Control Reports, FedRAMP authorizations, FIPS 140-2 Cryptography, and much more. Microsoft also maintains a dedicated compliance team that monitors regulatory changes and quickly recommends changes to keep data compliance up-to-date.

8. Increased IT Management and Resolutions

Microsoft’s SharePoint Admin Center has some upgrades that IT departments will truly appreciate. The system now allows easier management of Office 365 group-connected sites and hubs. IT admins can now restrict access from non-compliant devices, automatically kick idle users out, and restrict or allow access from known IP addresses. The latest iteration also has a number of security upgrades and compliance upgrades.

These Office 365 upgrades were clearly designed from a business manager’s perspective. Microsoft has made the latest additions intuitive and simple to integrate in order to keep your business running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Category: Tech Bytes