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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Tip of the Week: 5 Foundational Pieces to Computing Securely

Tip of the Week: 5 Foundational Pieces to Computing Securely

Every so often, it can be good to get back to basics for a bit of review. That’s why we’re going over five ways that you can improve your security through basic best practices for this week’s tip!

1. Keep Your Computer Protected, Inside…

Your device, whether it’s a workstation or something more mobile, relies on software in order to function. Malware and other threats will seek out vulnerabilities in this software.

To ensure the security of your system and files, you need to make sure that you are proactive in applying software patches and installing antivirus, anti-malware, and firewalls to your device. Utilizing encryption tools will also assist you in keeping your private data as it should be… private.

2. …And Out

Of course, many people tend to focus on threats that are delivered digitally, but some cyber criminals do things the old-fashioned way. You should never leave your computer unattended and unlocked, especially if you’re working remotely and are out of the office environment.

Who’s to say that someone wouldn’t snatch your work laptop in your favorite coffee shop as you walked to the counter to pick up your freshly-made beverage? Even if they don’t try and access your data, that’s still a computer gone… good luck explaining that one.

3. Be Smart

Other attackers will try to fool you, and convince you that they’re someone else to gain your trust before exploiting it to their own ends. Phishing, where an attacker will send an email doing just that, has been the driving force behind many of the more successful recent cyber attacks.

Including a malware-riddled attachment to deliver the payload, the attacker will leverage their victim’s misplaced trust to their advantage. A similar tactic is often used with free, online downloads. Remember, few things in life are truly free, and if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

4.  Keep A Backup

Stuff happens. Whether you get bamboozled by a phishing scam or one of your employees leaves their laptop open at that coffee shop, there’s a chance that you’ll have to start fresh and wipe your network and/or device to get an unwelcome entity out.

However, without any of your data surviving the wipe, you’re almost in a worse position than before…  unless you maintained a backup solution in keeping with best practices. Your data should frequently and automatically be saved to a remote location, safe from cyber attack and the odd act of nature, to hopefully go unused.

5. Stay In The Know

Cyber security is far from a static, unchanging thing. New threats are constantly in development and familiar ones are always being improved upon.

Therefore, you need to stay apprised and up-to-date not only in your solutions, but also in your knowledge of the state of cyber security. Otherwise, you’re apt to be blindsided by some unforeseen issue. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to managing your information technology.

We’re here to help. Keep checking back to our blog for more assistance with your IT, including security concerns, best practices, and other useful tips. For more help, reach out to us directly by calling (877) 771-2384.

Tip of the Week: 3 Microsoft Office Programs Made for Collaboration

Tip of the Week: 3 Microsoft Office Programs Made for Collaboration

Microsoft is no stranger to improving collaboration with their solutions, as many of them were meant to do just that- improve collaboration.

Below, we’ll discuss three such solutions, and how you can optimize your use of them for collaboration purposes.

OneDrive for Business

While OneDrive for Business’ collaboration really shines when paired with Microsoft Teams, a user isn’t constrained to working within Teams exclusively. OneDrive also enables file sharing with someone external to the team in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. In the application, click Share, which can be found in the upper right-hand corner. You will be presented with a dialog box that gives you a few options. Either you can enter the person’s name or email to send it, or you can get a copy of the link to share with them through other means.

However, if you’re trying to share the document with someone outside of your organization,you will need to select the drop down at the top of the dialog box and say that Specific People can access your file.Once this has been done, these approved users can all edit the file at the same time, in real time, assuming that the link was sent with Allow Editing checked in the dialog box. Keep in mind, this is only for documents that are saved in OneDrive.

Outlook Email

I can already hear you: “Well, of course an email client will help with collaboration!” This is true, however, it is also true that Microsoft has augmented Outlook 2016 with Office 365’s Groups feature. As a result, Outlook has additional collaborative features, most notably, a shared space for a team to leverage for their collaboration. Essentially, Outlook Groups have access to a shared calendar, team inbox, and a document library. These tools allow groups to hold their own conversations, schedule meetings more efficiently, and generally communicate more effectively. Groups are also relatively easy to create, assuming that they have been enabled by your organization’s IT resource:

  • In the Navigation Ribbon, clickthe Home tab.
  • In the Groups section, click New Group.
  • Name your new group in the Choose a name field. The group will be given a suggested email address in the field immediately below, if it is available. Remember, your group name cannot be changed.
  • In the Description field, write a brief mission statement for your group, remembering that it will be shared in every welcome email sent to new group members.
  • Set your group’s Classification from the options provided by your organization.
  • Identify your group’s Privacy level. This defaults to private, where group content is only visible to approved group members, while there is a public option, where anyone in your organization can join and view content.
  • You also have the option to send all of the group’s conversations and any events to all members’ inboxes. They can later change this setting.
  • Once you click Create, you’re done!

Skype for Business

Again, yes, this is technically an application designed for communicating and collaborating, but it also integrates with Outlook to communicate a very useful detail: whether or not a person is available at a given time, depending on what a contact’s Outlook calendar dictates. Therefore, if you’re currently in a meeting, your Skype presence will reflect that you are unavailable. Of course, this feature also allows you to schedule a meeting, even allowing you to list out the topics that meeting will cover and the tasks that you plan to accomplish during a conversation.

Using these Microsoft solutions can help you improve collaboration and communication in your business. Tell us, do you use these tools already, or do you have a different set of favorites that allow you and your staff to collaborate?

Let us know what they are in the comments!

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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