Category: Tuesday Tech Bytes

Ever since Microsoft incorporated as a company in April 1975, it has led the way in releasing innovative computing products for home and business users. From the release of its first operating system to the computer mouse to Microsoft Office, the company has always been one step ahead of the competition in changing the way people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and England manage their home lives. This year will be no exception. With 2019 being just days old, Microsoft has already indicated it will make three significant changes to the personal computing landscape.

Microsoft Edge to Become Chrome Engine

For as successful as Microsoft has been with its software programs and operating systems, the same cannot be said for each of the browsers it has released. It seems that every browser from Explorer 1.0 for Windows 95 to Microsoft Edge has struggled with spotty performance and security issues that did not win the confidence of users.

The introduction of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox gave consumers more options and caused a steep decline in the number of people who still used Microsoft Explorer, Edge, or other Microsoft browsers. To counteract its lost market share and inspire consumer confidence, Microsoft is rebuilding Edge using open-source software. It is the same software that currently allows Google Chrome to operate. Microsoft even plans to make the upgraded browser available to Mac users.

People who currently use Microsoft Edge will not have it disappear on them. Instead, they will notice greater consistency in website displays and overall improved performance. Current Chrome users will have a better experience while surfing the web on a Windows operating system. The goal is to improve the Internet for all who use it, not just those who choose to use a Microsoft product.

Skype for Business Changed to Microsoft Teams

Skype, the application that allows users to see and talk to one another through a video application, has long been a staple of the business world in developed nations around the globe. It has allowed companies to forgo expenses associated with sending people out of state or to another country to attend meetings and hold them remotely instead.

However, Microsoft recognized that the application required some tweaking to be more user-friendly for teams with people working remotely all across the world. This led to the creation of Microsoft Teams along with the announcement that Skype for Business would no longer be part of the Microsoft Office bundle for customers with fewer than 500 seats.

In development for several years, 2019 is the year that Microsoft Teams officially launches. Its designers considered the corporate and remote user and included several features that would make file sharing and team collaboration much easier.

The new communication system is a single platform that draws largely from cloud computing. This includes a chat application, inclusion of the popular cloud collaboration program Slack, and all features that users currently enjoy with Microsoft Office 365. Perhaps the biggest benefit of Microsoft Teams over Skype for Business is that it includes all features on a single platform.

The Introduction of Microsoft Office 2019

In the three decades since its 1989 launch, Microsoft Office has consistently been the productivity tool of choice for businesses and private users alike. People use programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Visio, and Project every day to create, manage, and communicate on the job and at home.

Its current version, Office 365, connects people to the cloud to make it easier than ever for collaborative teams to get their work done without sharing the same office space. Coupled with the increased ability to store files on the go, Office 365 shares much of the credit for making it possible for growing numbers of people to log in and work from anywhere.

The release of Microsoft Office 2019 is one of the three major changes the company will make this year. The new program shares many features with Office 365, including the availability of each of the seven productivity applications. It also has several key differences, including the following:

• Developers planned Microsoft Office 2019 as a one-time release, which means it will not receive any future updates
• More mobile application features that enable users to create a higher volume of content in less time
• Zoom features on PowerPoint for an enhanced viewing experience
• New Excel spreadsheet features that make it easier to create charts and analyze data
• Outlook email program automatically sorts emails and pushes the most important ones to the top

The major decision facing Microsoft Office business users is whether to remain with the subscription-based 365 program or upgrade to the one-time 2019 release.

What Next?

It is too early in the year to determine how these changes will affect users and whether Microsoft will ultimately profit from them. The only thing any computer user or an IT department can say for sure is that change is constant. The most successful people accept that nothing stays the same in the world of personal computers. They welcome the opportunity to change and to reap the benefits of someone else’s innovation.

Smartphone technology and the internet have made it possible for us to share ideas—and do business—with people all over the world. Learning to use the powerful tools we have at our fingertips more effectively is one of the most significant challenges of our time. Today’s consumers aren’t just looking for products—they are seeking mutually beneficial long-term connections. No matter what your business is, you can increase your sales by using photos to share information about your products, your company, and most importantly, yourself.

The success of Instagram and Snapchat demonstrate that photos are one of the most preferred methods of sharing information and making human connections. People want to feel personally connected to those they do business with, and social media is a great way to introduce your staff to the world. The right photos can reveal their personalities as well as showcase their talents and abilities in a way that words alone just can’t. You don’t have to be an award-winning professional photographer to create amazing photos, either. The following eight tips can help you transform your iPhone camera into the window through which the world can view your company.

How to Get to the Camera Quickly and Never Miss a Shot

The perfect shot never lasts very long. That’s why there’s more than one way to get to your iPhone camera. The fastest, easiest way is to just swipe left after waking the phone. If you are already in another screen, swipe up to get to the control center where the camera icon is located. If you don’t have a camera icon in your control center, you can add it in three easy steps by going to settings, choosing “customize controls”, then choosing “add camera”.

How to Snap a Photo

You can snap a photo by pressing the home button (aka shutter button) while in the camera app. However, trying to hold the phone still while maneuvering your hands towards a button located near the bottom of the screen can be difficult. Luckily, once you have the perfect shot lined up, you can also use either of your volume buttons located on the side of your iPhone to snap the photo. Being able to use whichever method is easiest to access can mean the difference between a good shot and a great one.

Object Placement, Composition, and Symmetry

Your iPhone camera comes equipped with a grid to help you line up your shots more accurately. The grid is also a useful tool for creating more balanced compositions because it breaks the available space into separate parts. To utilize the grid, go to camera settings, find “grid”, and enable it by swiping the radio button to the right until it turns green.

HDR—High Dynamic Range

The right lighting is often difficult to achieve, but the HDR setting on your iPhone camera can help. This setting allows to you reduce distortion of light and dark in photos taken where there are high-contrast light sources. It also helps reveal more details in both light and dark areas. HDR uses a process of shooting several frames in rapid succession, then merging them together to achieve the best effect. In camera settings, the HDR option will be near the bottom. Make sure the “Keep Normal Photo” option is switched on, so your camera will save both versions of your photo.

Automatic Focus and Exposure

Once you have the shot you want, it’s time to lock your focus. To do that, just tap and hold the focus box. When the yellow AF/AE circle slider appears, press it to lock the focus. If you want to adjust the exposure, drag the yellow exposure slider to the right side of the focus box. You will then be able to slide it upwards to increase exposure, and downwards to decrease it.

Camera Modes

Burst mode allows you to take ten photos per second, ensuring that you get just the right one. To go into burst mode, simply hold down the shutter button for a half a second or longer. Portrait mode is perfect for close-up photos that focus on human subjects and don’t require depth of field. This mode also has several special lighting effects, including studio, contour and stage lighting that you can apply either during the shot or afterwards. While the digital simulation of a shallow depth of field may not yield the professional results that a DSLR (Digital single-lens reflex) camera can, the results can still be amazing.

Lighting Effects

The studio light effect enhances highlights. The contour effect creates a dramatic shadow effect. The stage light effect darkens the background. The stage light mono setting transforms a color photo into a black and white photo. To apply any of these special lighting effects afterwards, just press the edit button.

Live Photos

The Live Photos feature. Available on iPhone 6s and newer, creates shots that are part photo and part video. Like video, it can capture both movement and audio. To activate this feature, just tap the circles icon in the camera app. You can then apply different effects to your live photo shots, such as bounce, loop, or long exposure. To access them, just swipe up while you are in Live Photo. Loop plays, then repeats the video, using a dissolve transition. Bounce plays, then reverses, the video. Long Exposure combines all the frames into one blurred image, which is great for moving water shots.

These eight tips can help you take better photos with your iPhone camera. But don’t forget that your iPhone also has a front-facing video camera. While photos can capture beautiful moments, some of the best memories your customers will have of your business are the ones you create together. The video camera is excellent for either FaceTime or Skype, both of which provide almost all the benefits of speaking in person. You’ll be able to look into one another’s eyes, see one another’s emotional reactions, and transform puzzled expressions into “Oh!” moments.

Using photos on Snapchat or Instagram, you can introduce your friendly, highly competent staff as well as new products and services. Video capability provides a way to show your customers not just your finished products, but the processes that created them. Affordable prices, quality products, and superior customer service are all important elements of any successful business. However, all other things being equal, the ability to make and maintain genuine human connections is the one element that can guarantee not just short-term profits, but future returns.

Companies today are increasingly relying on freelancers to support one-time or ongoing projects. The growing need for freelance support can create complex challenges for companies.

How, for example, can companies manage projects across time zones? How can freelance and in-house staff access the same information and collaborate in real time? How can companies provide access to necessary information quickly when needed but keep systems and access secure when projects are done?

Answering these questions led to the development of Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit. The service leverages tools already in use by many businesses via common Microsoft applications.

The toolkit provides functionality explicitly designed to address freelance management and simplify the complexities of working with teams comprising internal and external employees. It includes a curated set of templates, tools and best practices designed to help organizations launch, manage and execute projects that rely on freelance talent.

How Is the Microsoft 365 Freelance Toolkit Organized?

The toolkit uses four functional areas that Microsoft calls “workloads.” Each is designed to work with existing tools to address core needs:

• Communication
• Collaboration
• Analytics
• Workflow

How Does the Product Manage Communication?

SharePoint has long been a powerful tool allowing teams to access critical information and understand complex projects. Leveraging your existing SharePoint investment, toolkit users can learn about a project or program, access necessary training materials and see best practices. These spaces allow for key stakeholders and adopters to understand projects, including goals, metrics and desired outcomes.

Users can post use cases, guidelines for using freelancers for the project, FAQs or Microsoft-provided research reports on the gig economy, alternative work arrangements, and the future of work.

As with all the workloads included in the toolkit, the communications space is customizable.

How Do Freelancers and Staff Work Together?

The collaboration space uses Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Planner as a way to get cross-functional and distantly located teams moving in the right direction.

With these tools, your organization can provide a shared space for teams to hold discussions and to track project progress in one place. Team member assignments can be managed and updated online, and files can be shared using intelligent search tools.

Your organization can grant guest access at no additional cost to freelancers. When the project is concluded, you can easily remove team members who no longer need or should have access.

You can also learn from best practices detailed in the space, including whether to use email; how to use, review and comment on documents, slide presentations and spreadsheets at the same time; and capture shared notes.

How Can the Toolkit Measure Success?

With Power BI, you can create connectors and dashboards that measure key performance indicators about the use of freelancers. Analytics help to gauge which internal groups benefit most from using freelancers. By using the business and data analytics tools, your organization can connect multiple data sources, ease data prep and generate easy-to-read reports.

How Can I Manage Repetitive Tasks Associated with Projects?

There are multiple processes associated with using freelancers. Provisioning, budget, compensation, compliance, monitoring and assessment tools all play a role in managing freelance workers.

Using Microsoft Flow, toolkit users can reduce the reliance on manual, repeated tasks with workflow automation tools. Create seamlessly integrated processes among apps and services to send notices, synchronize files, collect data and report on progress and needs. Using Boolean logic strings, you can streamline and simplify many processes.

As your business evolves, it may require a rapid influx of resources that cannot be acquired using traditional hiring practices or budgets. The freelance market offers companies greater flexibility and reliability. Now, with the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit, you’ll be able to manage freelancers and empower them to solve pressing business needs.

WordPress 5.0 was just released to the public on December 6, 2018. According to WordPress’ blog, this new version of the go-to platform for small business websites and blogs will “revolutionize content editing with the introduction of a new block editor and block editor-compatible default theme Twenty Nineteen.” However, if you’re like most small business owners, you’ve been burned before by being a little too eager to try a new software product. Is WordPress 5.0 the amazing new upgrade that its creator is touting or should you wait until it’s been tested by others and worked out any bugs?

A little about WordPress 5.0

WordPress 5.0 changes the way users compose and publish pages. The new editing function will do things like allow you to “drag and drop” blocks of text, more easily insert videos and images and be able to preview what your page will look like throughout the creation process without having to toggle back and forth to a separate preview screen.

Upgrade or wait?

Whether you should upgrade immediately or not, in our opinion, depends on a few factors…

• Is this your busy time of year? If you’re in the middle of a busy holiday retail season, this is clearly not the time to be potentially disrupting your revenue stream and impacting your customers’ user experience by updating to WordPress 5.0. In addition, you won’t have time to learn the new editor, play around with the new features and find the best ways 5.0 can work for you.
• Are your plug-ins compatible with Gutenberg? Gutenburg is the driving force behind WordPress 5.0’s new editing functions. However, not all plug-ins are really to work with it. Make sure that you’ll be able to fully use the new WordPress functions before making the switch.
• Do you really need 5.0? Will the new features of WordPress 5.0 really impact your business? If not, or if only marginally so, we suggest you pass or at least wait until spring.

To learn more about using whether WordPress 5.0 is right for you and your company and to learn ways to better your website’s user experience, contact your IT services team at {company} immediately by calling {phone} or dropping us an email at {email}.

In order to become a successful business, it has become increasingly crucial to maximize online content for current and potential customers and clients. One way to do this is with video.

Unfortunately, many business owners and marketing managers stay away from video because they think it’s too difficult to create a polished commercial, a useful and informative “listicle” for YouTube, or other videos that would serve their industry.

But this isn’t true!

In fact, today more than ever before, video creation and editing basically comes down to buying a camera, learning a bit about lighting and sound, and finding a good video editor. The latter is what we will be discussing today.

We have compiled a list of the top seven video editors available online. All of these video editors are completely and 100% free for download. All of them can be used on Windows computers, and some of them can even be used with Macs and Linux.

Let’s get started!

1. OpenShot

OpenShot is one of the best free video editing software programs out there. It has an easy to use interface, and if you have any questions, the user forum associated with OpenShot always has a thread on what you’re looking for.

Only occasionally will you experience a lag with this program, and keep in mind that you’ll need to go through several steps to set up the editor. We especially like this program for scaling, rotation, motion picture credit creation and scrolling, audio mixing, and preview-creation.

2. Shotcut

Shotcut is fairly straightforward to understand. It offers excellent file format support and has a clearly designed interface, which makes it easy to learn. You’re also not going to get any ads or features that you can’t use unless you pay. The only drawback to Shotcut is that it can be difficult to transfer your video files to different devices.

3. Avid Media Composer

Excellent for learning professionals, Avid Media Composer does have a few limitations if you don’t buy the paid version. Still, it’s amazing software for honing your video editing skills.

You should also be aware that this program does take some getting used to. It is able to produce high-quality, professional-looking video, but that comes at the cost of having a steep learning curve. Even the download process and installation process is long. Once you’re ready to get started, however, we recommend using the start-up wizard to learn the platform.

4. Lightworks

Lightworks provides stellar software capabilities for both media marketers and actual film industry professionals. It is a powerful program that is quite easy to get the hang of and allows for seamless workflow and multiple high-end capabilities you won’t find elsewhere.

Still, many people are frustrated with Lightworks because the free version is so different than the paid version. Essentially, the paid version is excellent, so if you’re thinking about purchasing it, the free version of Lightworks is a good try-before-buying option.

5. DaVinci Resolve

DaVinci Resolve is another program that has a free version and a paid version. But in this case, the free version isn’t going to limit your features too much, and for simple video editing (with many added creative features and options), you won’t need anything else.

Just keep in mind that at first, DaVinci Resolve can be a little overwhelming. Like Avid Media Composer, many users have lamented the long learning process. Therefore, if you’re a novice, be sure to go slow and don’t allow yourself to get discouraged.

6. KdenLive

KdenLive is a non-linear video editing program. Beginner editors and novices to the video world will especially like this program as it’s simple to use — essentially from the get-go.

With that said, this editor provides only basic features. You likely won’t get any wild editing options, and your video should be pretty set when you upload it. The program is also smaller than some of the other options on this list, and it requires less fancy upgrades to your PC. If you only need the basics, though, this is an excellent option.

7. HitFilm Express

HitFilm Express is the last video editor on our list. Again, with this program, you have a paid version and a free version. The latter offers many options, however, including a strong timeline editor and playback options that allow you to edit faster and easier.

Drawbacks with this program include the fact that some of the more popular features you might want to try require the paid version. In addition, exporting can be extremely slow when you’re ready for this step. Still, it’s an intuitive program that’s fairly easy to learn and use.

Why Should My Business Need a Video Editor?

Keep in mind that video creation is an excellent way to get people to go to your website, click on your links, like your social media pages, and in the end, buy from your company. You can create videos about anything, but of course, the more informative, to-the-point, and easy to watch they are, the better.

Again, having a way to edit your videos is part of what video-creation entails. Fortunately, you’ve got a lot of options, so to get started, simply try out one or several of the video editing software options above.

And remember, they’re free, so you’ve got nothing to lose!

Windows users need their computers to do many different things. While the operating system has lots of built-in functionality, sometimes it can’t do everything it needs to.

Fortunately, there are thousands of utility programs designed to simplify tasks and make work easier to manage. Whether you’re a programmer, artist, music fan, system administrator or computer enthusiast, you’ll find something in our top 10 free Windows utilities to get more functionality.

1. IrfanView (Image Viewer)

IrfanView is a flexible image viewer that makes it easy to run through folders containing lots of photos. You can easily scroll through folders with keyboard shortcuts and click Enter to see an image in full-screen mode.

This utility has some editing capabilities, including crop, text and image overlay and special effects. Among its other top features:

• Multi-language support
• Paint options
• Slideshow building and burning
• Adobe Photoshop filter support
• Batch conversion
• Multimedia player
• Email and print functions
• Dozens of available plugins

2. Recuva (File Recovery)

If you ever accidentally trash a file, Recuva is a stress-relieving utility that lets users recover deleted or otherwise lost files. It can scan and recover files on your Windows computer, digital camera card, MP3 player, external hard drive or USB drive.

The tool scans a folder or remote device and provides a list of files that can be recovered, along with information about the files. Press Recover, identify a location for the recovered file and the utility does the rest. It can recover files from newly reformatted or damaged drives and its deep-scan feature does a thorough examination of your drives to find lost or deleted files.

If for some reason you want to be certain that a deleted file is gone for good, Recuva can use advanced deletion techniques to keep files permanently erased.

3. VeraCrypt (Encryption)

VeraCrypt is a powerful utility for keeping your data safe. An offshoot of the popular (but now discontinued) TrueCrypt project, VeraCrypt allows you to virtually encrypt a disc, drive or a system partition on your computer or an attached portable device like a USB drive. It can be used to create encrypted containers, too.

The preferences tab lets you customize the default mounting options, auto-dismounting, Windows settings and password cache. Another helpful feature is a benchmarking tool to assess the encryption and decryption speeds of all supported algorithms.

4. Etcher (OS Imaging)

For computer users who need to write operating system images to SD cards, USB cards or other flash media, Etcher is a great choice. The utility uses a very straightforward process to get images written over. There are three steps:

• Select an image. The utility supports multiple image formats.
• Select a drive to write to. Etcher attempts to identify the drive automatically, but it can be changed.
• Flash the image.

Etcher displays estimated time to completion, write speed and progress. It will validate to make sure everything copied properly. You don’t need to decompress any files either; the utility does it for you.

5. VLC Media Player (Entertainment)

When you need to play many different types of media, you need a versatile player. The VLC Media Player fits the bill. It plays files, webcams, discs, streams and devices.

VLC features include audio/video synchronization, subtitling, chapters, a media library with video management and a mini-player for audio. Audio files can be sorted by artist and album and picture-in-picture features let you look for a video in your library while watching one.

It includes some nice Windows-specific features, including response to Cortana voice commands and pinning of artists or albums to the Start menu.

6. NoteTab Light (Notepad)

If you use Windows’ Notepad frequently for editing code or other text, NoteTab Light is a far more sophisticated text editing utility. As the name implies, the utility lets you open multiple tabs that allow for fast access, referencing and copying-and-pasting.

This free version is very configurable and lets you easily strip HTML code, search files and format text. You can build libraries of text macros to speed up your work, too. Paid versions add more functionality, including wildcard searches, a disk search-and-replace feature and bookmarking.

7. SD Memory Card Formatter (Memory Management)

For those who use SD cards frequently, the SD Memory Card Formatter is ideal. It’s offered by the SD Association, whose members are leading memory card manufacturers. The association is responsible for developing and sharing SD standards to ensure quality and interoperability.

You may wonder why a special utility is necessary for formatting memory cards when they can easily be formatted in Windows. While that is an option, this formatter is ideal if you are having trouble formatting a card, the card is corrupted or it’s been used previously in a different operating system. The tool will get your cards back into a standard state and give you far fewer issues with corrupted or otherwise malfunctioning cards.

8. MP3Tag (Music Management)

Music lovers will gain more control and capabilities to edit metadata and tags with MP3Tag. If you want more details in your music collection, this is a terrific utility. Its top features include:

• Batch tag editing in multiple file formats in addition to MP3
• Tag importing from online databases, including Discogs, freedb and MusicBrainz
• Cover art support to download and add covers to your files
• Playlist creation
• File renaming from tags and tag importing from file names
• Export functionality to CSV, RTF and HTML formats
• Support for iTunes tags

9. Macrium Reflect 7 Free Edition (OS Migration)

The Macrium Reflect 7 Free Edition is the tool to use when migrating an operating system from one drive to another, maintaining backups or cloning a drive. Now licensed for personal and commercial use, this version of the free edition helps protect data and upgrade your hard disk. You can use it to try out a new operating system while remaining confident that your files and applications are safely saved in a backup that’s easy to recover.

Among the features are:

• Differential imaging
• Windows Explorer browsing of backup contents
• Restoration of non-booting systems
• Templated backup scheduling

10. AngryIP Scanner (Network Security)

With AngryIP Scanner, you can find the IP addresses for every computer and device connected to your network. It works quickly to scour the network using multi-threaded scanning to speed up completion time. For each detected device, it displays the IP address, host name, open ports and ping time. Additional fields can be added to the query to display filtered ports, HTTP sender, NetBIOS information (including computer names, workgroups, and logged-in Windows users). MAC address and MAC vendor. Users can expand the amount of data gathered about each host with available plug-ins.

Other tools include hotkeys that will find open, alive or dead hosts; select different host types; and complete actions on those hosts. Right-clicking on a host lets you explore a device further.

Using these utilities will save you time and give you more functionality to get the most out of your Windows operating system.

We all know that social media can play a significant role in marketing your product. In the world today, more people are getting hooked up to social media meaning that the market is shifting in that direction. Social media calendar is, therefore, able to help you understand your audience’s preference. As a business person, you can interact with your followers and get their say concerning your product.

This is how the calendar helps.

• Achievement of Goals

An organization is driven by its goals; both long term and short term. This is the main reason for the calendar. This step should be realized even before you find out how to create the social media calendar.

The goals set on the social media calendar are realistic and achievable. With everything set on the platform, you can easily track the record of your performance and do away with what holding you back. At the end of the day, you’d have met your goals of the said timeframe.

• Consistent Results

Apart from meeting the achieved goals, social media calendar is responsible for positive results you set in your business. Organizing and setting of responsibilities bring the feeling of working in the business sector. At the end of the day, results are yielded since everyone wants to accomplish his/her set goals before time.

• It’s Convenient and easy to Operate

The main idea behind Microsoft Excel social media calendar is to turn data into insights. Also, it enhances collaboration in the business as you are able to share what each one of you has, to come up with one perfect organized calendar.

What to Note while Creating a Social Media Calendar that’d Yield Results

Why are social media calendars so important?

As a business, your primary goal is to reach many customers that leads to more sales hence more profit. To make this happen, your social media calendar should?

• Be Audited

Everyone dreads this word but you shouldn’t be worried. Social media audits are essential and it yields results to your business.

During the process, you are able to realize the content that is shooting high regarding engagement and which one isn’t. What follows is the measures that increase the performance of the least and how to optimize the whole content.

• Tracked on the days you Share content

After creating the calendar, you apparently have planned what you’d be sharing daily or weekly. To ensure there is effectiveness on your content, track what you’ve shared, when and where. Spreadsheets will ideally help you here.

Promoting your content is helpful and this assisted by the spreadsheet. Also, you should add descriptions and text for each post.

• Meet your Content Mix

Everyone in social media is sharing their preferred type of content. However, you should be careful to create content on the calendar that is specific to your niche or industry to avoid confusion for your audience.

The Takeaway

With the calendar, you can achieve a lot in your business. This only happens when it well organized and result oriented though. In conclusion, excel social media calendar is integrated to bring together increase productivity and safeguard your business.

If your business uses Microsoft 365, you know how difficult it can be to locate information amongst many different programs and applications on your computer network, your devices, and any other place you may be working from. But what if there was a way to access the information you need as quickly as you needed it? What if there was a way to search across all your different, integrated apps in Microsoft Office 365 and find everything relating to one employee or one project so you could comprehensively view the progress of a project or an employee?

Sounds fantastic, right? It is, it’s new — and it’s called Microsoft Personalized search. Let’s take a look at what Microsoft Personalize search is, how it works, and how it can help your Canadian business reach its goals with less time spent searching.

What is Microsoft Personalized Search?

Microsoft Personalized Search is a cohesive way of searching across different apps in Office 365. Microsoft Search can help you and your employees find, discover, command, and navigate all your business software and cloudware to make business easier and more simplified — saving you time and dollars. Personalized search allows you to search for any application or project in Office 365.

How Does Microsoft Search Work?

Microsoft Personalized Search uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Bing, a search engine whose name you may recognize. This IA and Microsoft Graph’s deep insights into personal search usage make searching more effective for organizations. The purpose of the new Personalized Search is to connect your projects and your employees across your business’ data network to make projects easier, more collaborative, and above all, help you find the information you need when you need it.

Hyperlinked pages of results from searches are not what Microsoft or your business is after with its new search algorithm. Here are the differences you may notice right away:

1. That oft-used “search” box will be visible and available across the apps your business and employees work with every day — it will stay in one place in Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Sway, OneNote, Microsoft Teams, and Sharepoint.
2. As soon as your employees click in the search box, personalized results will begin popping up (names of people you share with most or recent documents); no query is required for suggestions
3. The search box will command the application you’re working in. Want a quick example? If they begin typing “acc” in Word, employees will get a list of suggested actions they perform often — no more hunting through toolbars and wasting precious business time.
4. Search results will include results from across your business organization, including a Word document you’ve been working on, the PowerPoint that goes with it, and the Excel spreadsheet that demonstrates the budget for that project. The employees working on the project will also pop up in the search results.
5. Organizational search will work wherever your employees are working: Bing, Edge, or Windows, as long as employees are signed into Office 365 accounts.

How Can Microsoft Search Help My Business?

The main benefit for your business of Microsoft Personalized Search is saving time. No more precious minutes spent looking through toolbars or trying to hunt down the document or presentation employees were working on. Another intangible benefit that will definitely increase your business bottom line is your oversight ability. With a word and one click on the search icon, you can locate all the information about a particular project and who’s working on it in a millisecond. You can reach out immediately to start a conversation, get an update, or suggest changes. The time and convenience Personalized Search provides is priceless.

Many users have found that Office 365 PowerPoint is much easier to use than previous iterations of Microsoft PowerPoint. This application features tools like Designer that take advantage of Microsoft’s cloud technology and machine learning techniques for processing pictures and choosing a suitable layout for an image. Designer also makes it possible to change your content to make slides look more aesthetically appealing.

 

Here is some information about how to use Designer in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Get Design Ideas

The main advantage of PowerPoint Designer is that it provides you with design ideas to make beautiful slides. To use Designer, you should open up Microsoft PowerPoint. If you’re connected to the Internet, Designer will automatically provide you with suggestions when you add a graphic to your PowerPoint presentation.

You can ask for design ideas by navigating to Design > Design Ideas on the Microsoft PowerPoint ribbon. You can scroll through the Design Ideas pane to look at the suggestions. This pane is positioned on the window’s right side. You can either close the window or click on a design you like. When you click on a design, the slide will be changed according to the design. You have the option of choosing another idea from the Design Ideas pane. You can also press Ctrl+Z to undo a design change you chose.

The first time you use PowerPoint Designer, it will ask for your permission to provide you with design ideas. If you want to use PowerPoint Designer, click on Let’s go or Turn on. You need to turn on intelligent services so that Designer will provide you with design ideas every time you add photos to your PowerPoint.

To get design idea suggestions, you should use images in one of the following formats: .JPG, .BMP, .GIF, .PNG. You should also make sure that the size of the graphic is larger than 200 x 200 pixels. Otherwise, you may not get design ideas suggestions.

Professional Layouts

Designer in Microsoft PowerPoint is able to detect not just pictures but also charts and tables on a slide. Designer will provide you with a number of suggestions to arrange all of these graphics in an attractive, cohesive layout.

SmartArt Graphics

Designer is able to turn text like timelines, lists, processes into a SmartArt graphic that is readable. If you use bulleted lists, you will receive suggestions for an icon to be used for each bullet item. If you don’t want to use the suggested icon, you can stick with the original icon.

Illustrations

Designer looks for concepts and key terms that it has related illustrations for. It will show you these illustrations in different layouts. These illustrations come from the icons library in Office 365.

Turn Off PowerPoint Designer

If you decide that you don’t want to use PowerPoint Designer, you can do the following to turn this feature off:

• Select Preferences on the PowerPoint menu
• Select General under Authoring and Proofing Tools
• Clear the check box marked “Automatically show me design ideas” in the General dialog box, which is under PowerPoint Designer.

PowerPoint Designer is a powerful tool if you want to make your slides and PowerPoints as aesthetically appealing as possible. For more information about how to use Designer in Microsoft PowerPoint, don’t hesitate to contact us.