How Office 365 Helps You Get Work Done

How Office 365 Helps You Get Work Done

Microsoft Office 365 takes the familiar Microsoft Office solutions and adds an extra level of usefulness to them in the form of accessibility and collaboration. This week, our tip covers how to use these features of Office 365, in the context of Microsoft Word.

Anywhere Access

Life isn’t perfect, and so you may find yourself needing to work from multiple places. Unfortunately, a desktop workstation isn’t well-suited to travel. Fortunately, if you need to work on aWord document, you can utilize another facet of Office 365 to pull it up: OneDrive. All you have to do is access your Microsoft Office account on another machine, and you will be able to pull up your document from your recent history.

Putting In Your Two Cents

A big part of collaboration is brainstorming and providing feedback. Thanks to the collaborative capabilities of Office 365, not only can you and your team work together on documents, you can add comments to share an insight or annotate a section that needs more work.

Furthermore,your collaborators can add their comments to yours, making it easier to brainstorm better things to include or how to word a certain phrase in your Word document.

Inviting Collaborators

Speaking of your collaborators, Word 2016 makes it easy to add them to your document. Again, using OneDrive, you can share access with anyone else with access to that OneDrive location through Microsoft People. You also have the option to share your document via email in a variety of ways, either sharing editing access or not.

To access this area from within Word, click on the File tab at the top and go to Share.

Clearly, Microsoft Office 365 was meant for teamwork. Have you ever benefited from these capabilities? Let us know in the comments!

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Tech Terminology: Authentication

Tech Terminology: Authentication

Authentication isn’t an unfamiliar aspect in everyday life. Driver’s licenses, library cards, and PIN numbers are all forms of identity authentication. However, as computers have become a cornerstone of everyday life, the most commonly-used way to confirm one’s identity has almost assuredly become the username/password login combination. Today, we’ll take a deeper dive into what authentication is.

How Authentication Differs from Authorization

As we briefly mentioned above, authentication is simply the process of confirming that yes, someone is in fact who they claim to be. While the two are often correlated, this process is different than that of authorization, which is the process of using that confirmed identity to grant access to information or materials. This access is the real difference between the two, yet without authentication, access cannot be authorized.

How Authentication Works

When a user provides their credentials, they are compared to the credentials that are already in a database. If these credentials match, the user is then given the authorization that their identity has been assigned.

Two-Factor Authentication

In the interest of boosting security, many organizations have implemented two-factor authentication, often referred to by the shorthand 2FA. 2FA incorporates an additional factor into the authentication process beyond the typical username and password.

This process commonly involves an additional code being provided to the user via email or text message when they attempt to access the account protected by 2FA. This one-time code is required for them to get in, meaning that someone attempting to access an account also needs access to the user’s email or phone in order to successfully do so. This is why 2FA has been so widely adopted by security-minded businesses.

If you’re interested in adding another layer of protection to the business accounts that you and your users leverage, reach out by calling (877) 771-2384.

WheelHouse IT has the experience needed to improve your security through two-factor authentication and many other means.

Tip of the Week: Two File Storage Solutions That Work for Personal Use, Too!

Tip of the Week: Two File Storage Solutions That Work for Personal Use, Too!

We generally cover tips that help business owners get the most out of their technology, but even the best business owner has a personal life, as well as technology that helps them stay connected with those they love.

How can you share files with people you are close to without leaving them wide open to attack? We’ll discuss some possibilities for personal file sharing.

As it stands, there are a lot of solutions out there that are leveraged by businesses that work just as well for the average user. The majority of them take advantage of cloud storage to make them more accessible for collaboration or sharing. We’ll go over some of the more popular storage systems at a consumer level.

Google Drive

Google Drive is quite a useful cloud service in its own right, but it’s even better for sharing files. All you have to do is select a user from your contacts or enter in their email address and you can share a document, image, video, or other file with them. You can even control what people can and can’t do with the files. For example, you can create a text document in Google Drive, share it with users, and determine who can and can’t edit the file. It’s great for collaboration or simply sharing a file.

Google Drive is free for the average user up to a certain storage point, but you can purchase additional space for a modest fee.

Microsoft OneDrive

Much like Google Drive, Microsoft’s flagship cloud storage system OneDrive provides access to both Microsoft Office applications and OneDrive cloud storage at a whim. The cool thing about this is that Microsoft OneDrive can also sync up with Microsoft Office to create a solution that keeps everything up-to-date. Like Drive, OneDrive can be a great collaboration tool for a business in need. Microsoft OneDrive has plenty of plans available.

Ultimately, it’s up to you which solution you would want to go with. How do you store and share files in your personal life? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe for more details on the latest technology tips and tricks.

Tip of the Week: How to Add a Watermark in Microsoft Word

Tip of the Week: How to Add a Watermark in Microsoft Word

Adding a watermark to a document is a great way to very visibly share a message about the contents of a document. Microsoft Word makes it pretty easy to do it yourself and leverage the associated benefits. Below, we explain how.

Why They Work

Watermarks are effective for a lot of the same reasons that a billboard often is: it’s a concise and clear message, printed in a very in-your-face-way. The big difference is that sometimes, a watermarked document can almost literally be in someone’s face. This works to your advantage.

A watermark is really difficult not to see, so if you need someone to know that a document is confidential, having it display how CONFIDENTIAL it is will likely catch their eye and respect the need for discretion. Oftentimes, legal requirements or security obligations make the addition of a watermark on certain documents a necessity.

In short, a watermark is a quick and easy way to share the nature of the information in a document, whether it is just a DRAFT or if it happens to be an INVOICE that requires immediate attention. Essentially any message you need to convey can be incorporated into a watermark.

Creating a Watermark in Word

Microsoft has made it fairly easy to set a watermark into your documents. If you’re using Word
2016:

  • Open the document that you need to add the watermark to, whether it is completed or still needs to be edited.
  • Access the Design tab and select Watermark.
  • You now have the option to either select from Word’s collection or add a custom piece of text or image to use. If using one of Word’s, simply make your selection from their menu.
  • If adding a custom watermark, instead select Custom Watermark.
  • Select either Picture or Text, and then insert the text or the image file that you want to use. Word allows you to tweak it further from there as well.

Whatever your purpose, whether it’s sharing a message or customizing your official company materials, a watermark does the trick. What other tips would you like us to go over?

Leave your suggestions in the comments!

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6 Tips for Speeding Up Your Slow Computer or Laptop

6 Tips for Speeding Up Your Slow Computer or Laptop

If you’ve had your PC for any significant length of time, chances are that it is much slower than it used to be. Over time, computers and laptops slow down. However, there definitely are ways to slow down the slowdown of your computer. Here are a few things you can do to speed up your computer.

Scan for Viruses

It’s possible that there is malware or adware that is slowing down your computer. Run an antivirus and an anti-malware scan to clean up your computer. Do a deep scan, not just a quick scan.

Clean It Out

Clean out the fan area of your computer. You’ll be surprised at how much dust there is in there. Dust stops the fan from working properly, which causes your computer to heat up, which slows it down. Use compressed air or a vacuum to clean out the dust.

Clean It Up

Besides cleaning your laptop physically, clean out any unnecessary programs, software, and temporary files that you don’t need or use. These all slow down your computer’s performance.

Do a Task Check

Launch the task manager and check which programs are running in the background. You’ll be surprised at how much CPU they are using up. Close down the programs you don’t want running. On Windows 8 PCs and up, you can also use the startup manager to stop programs from running automatically when you start your computer.

Speed Up Your Browser

Like your computer, your browser can get overloaded as well. Too many browser add-ons can slow it down. Disable and delete those you don’t use. Consider trying a different browser as well, such as Opera.

Expand Your Storage

If your storage is full, it can also slow down your computer. Expand your storage by getting an external hard drive that you can attach to your computer.

For more computer tips, contact us today.