Directive Blogs

Spoiler alert: a business that lacks productivity is unlikely to see any amount of success. One of the best ways to ensure your productivity is to practice patience. How can patience improve your productivity?

Windows 11 takes a page out of Apple’s design playbook and features a taskbar that, instead of being off to the side, is smack in the middle of the toolbar. While some may like this change, others may not.

Fortunately for these others, a simple setting change can return the taskbar to its familiar place like on older versions of Windows.

Have you ever had one of those projects where you struggle to make meaningful progress because it just feels impossible? While reflecting and thinking through how to approach a challenge is helpful, it’s not always in your best interest to slow down. Sometimes, it takes a little brute force to push through and complete an important task.

Two-factor authentication has become a must-have for any online-connected account that relies on password protection. The benefits of the technology are pretty straightforward. Instead of just filling out your password for authentication, a user needs to have another method in order to access an account. In this month’s newsletter we thought we would take a look at how to enable 2FA on your Microsoft account, which includes Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

Google Lens lets you do some cool things with your mobile device, even if it sometimes feels a bit niche. Google Chrome also has functionality that allows you to use Google Lens to search for anything visible in the browser. For example, it can detect images and text, or still images captured from video, to return results.

Today, we want to highlight how you can use this neat functionality!

It isn’t a secret that working with different times in a spreadsheet can be a real pain… even if you’re just trying to add them all up. Fortunately (and a little unsurprisingly), this is because these programs have a specific function to accomplish this.

Let’s review the process you should follow in your spreadsheet program, whether you use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

Being scammed—in either the professional or personal sense—is a scary thought. To avoid this outcome, we must be vigilant all the time now.

Of course, it also helps to know what to look for.

Let’s take a few minutes to go over a few warning signs and red flags that something is likely a scam.

Network security is hard. That’s why so many businesses struggle to implement the solutions they so desperately need to stay safe and relevant. Today, we want to demystify some of these components and lay out in clear terms what your highest priorities should be for your business’ network security.

A disaster can strike when you least expect it. It doesn’t matter how small or large your business is; there is always the possibility that your company could have to deal with the technological fallout of a disaster. Here are four ways you can prepare for that inevitable day.

Have you ever seen the file types that look like normal folders, but they have a zipper on the icon? These are ZIP files, and they are helpful for a variety of reasons. We’re sure you have encountered zipped files throughout your time using technology, and today, we want to demystify them a little bit and show you how to use them effectively.

Keyboard shortcuts are undeniably useful—to the point that some are almost ubiquitous. However, there are a lot that aren’t, and they are just about as useful. We wanted to introduce you to these shortcuts so you can incorporate them into your workflows.

Back in 2022, Microsoft coined the term “productivity paranoia,” referring to the fears that many managers have that remote workers aren’t working to their full productivity. However, as remote and hybrid work has continued for many companies, a different form has emerged: the feeling a worker has that they have to prove they are still productive while working from home.

Here are some tips to share with your team, so they can use them to avoid these feelings.

As much as we try to structure our productivity throughout the day, there are always those moments that seem to slip by—both at work and in our personal lives. It can be tough to find time to commit to projects whether your goal is personal or professional.

So, let’s go over some tips that help make this time easier to find. 

Back in April of this year, Google announced that the Android platform would be given the capability to archive unused applications to help preserve the precious storage space on the devices…provided that the device was almost out of available space. This auto-archive feature is now available to all users, regardless of the storage left on their device.

Phishing is a very real, very dangerous threat to modern businesses, which makes it extremely important that you and your whole team are prepared to spot and mitigate it. One simple framework to do so is known as the SLAM method, so let’s take a few moments to review some tips for using it.

Your network is a crucial part of your business, insofar as it is quite literally what powers your operations and enables you to work productively… at least, most of the time. Unfortunately, there is always the risk of a network bottleneck, or a limited capacity for data to move due to a lack of available bandwidth. So, how can these bottlenecks be avoided?

As a manager, some of the administrative work can be, if not the worst part of the job, easily the least engaging. For instance, having to create all the different folders for the employees under your purview, projects, and other organizational needs. Fortunately, Microsoft Excel offers a relatively quick and easy way of doing just this.

Everyone has their own preferences for their workstation, down to the size of the icons on their desktop. Let’s talk about how you can easily adjust the size of the icons on your display to your own preference.

Microsoft Excel is a great way for data to be visualized, particularly as it offers various features to highlight the context of the data you’re trying to communicate with. Today, we wanted to walk you through how you can use one such feature—People Graphs—to do so particularly impactfully.

Microsoft Excel is an extremely capable spreadsheet creation and management tool, made all the more powerful through the inclusion of many handy shortcuts and features. We wanted to share one for a common enough function that you are effectively sure to find a use for it: quickly adding up the values in a single column.

There are many ways that Google can be a hugely valuable resource for a business of any size. One way that you may not have thought of before: an automated insights collector.

Let’s talk about how you could be using Google Alerts to keep yourself up to speed on basically whatever you want.

Do you have a file or folder on your PC that you always seem to access, yet you have to dig through countless folders or files in your organizational hierarchy to find it? Windows makes it simple to add a new shortcut to your PC. Here’s how you can make a shortcut to a file, folder, or program on your Windows computer.

If you’re looking to maximize your productivity, then having the web-based resources you browse to everyday is a must. You can take this idea one step further by assigning a shortcut icon to a specific web page you frequent. Let’s discuss the process for how you can do this.

Both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets offer a plethora of features to those who know how to use them, many of them with really niche applications to businesses. For instance, there is one function that allows you to easily calculate the time between the current date and a specified  day that, if applied properly, could easily provide businesses with some serious utility.

One of the big advantages that Mac computers have had over the traditional PC is that they “don’t get viruses,” but how true is this claim, really? Research conducted by Elastic Security Labs proves that this is certainly not the case, discrediting the prior claims of ads arguing the former.

It probably isn’t hard to think of a time when you’ve stumbled across something that would be useful for work while you were doing some personal browsing. What if I told you there was an easy way to send a website to your browser to view later? Thanks to Google Chrome, this is the case.

Microsoft Excel is a great tool for keeping data and figures organized…until, that is, you need to scroll down at all, leaving some important headers out of sight. Fortunately, there is a way to keep your headings in view: freezing the panes they are present in. Let’s go over how to do so.

How often have you been browsing the web on your phone, only to find something that would be legitimately useful for your work—maybe it was a tip you wanted to try out, or a bit of information that would be helpful to know—so you wanted to be able to access it from your workstation? There’s actually a very easy way to make this happen, thanks to the multi-platform nature of the Google Chrome browser.

If you want to optimize productivity, then you’ll want to take a look at the startup page for your Google Chrome web browser. If you change this setting, you can shave off countless minutes every week while you fumble around trying to find your favorite or most frequently visited page.

How often do you receive emails from someone written in another language? We bet the answer is “not often,” but you never know when being able to translate an email might come in handy—especially if you ever do business overseas. Let’s go over the built-in translation functionality that comes with Gmail.

How often does this scenario happen to you? You’re going about your workday and are being quite productive, when all of a sudden you close the wrong tab in your web browser, putting an end to your productivity. This isn’t crippling downtime or anything, but it’s an inconvenience that we know you can do without. Thankfully, modern web browsers let you reopen closed tabs or windows to get back to where you left off.

It’s a great feeling, being able to download something, but also being able to download it as a PDF file. In cases where you want to save something as a PDF rather than its original image or web page file, you can do so relatively easily in order to make printing and other tasks easier. You can do all of this right from your web browser.

We are major advocates for multi-factor authentication, but it’s also important to understand that it’s not a catch-all solution. In fact, it has forced cybercriminals to be even more innovative to find alternative methods of attack. One method hackers use to gain access to your systems is to use what’s called MFA fatigue to their advantage.

We’ve all accidentally swiped away an important notification on our mobile devices, but not all of us know that Android devices give us the opportunity to go back and check them. For this week’s tip, we’re going to go over the process of how you can retrieve these notifications.

Sticky Keys—the Windows accessibility feature that keeps modifier keys like Shift and Ctrl active after you’ve pressed them—have a legitimate and necessary purpose for some. However, those who don’t need Sticky Keys can find them immensely annoying. Let’s go over how to deactivate sticky keys if you don’t need them.

If your mouse moves slowly, so does the rest of your computing experience. If you change a couple of settings, you might find that your mouse speed and sensitivity can make a mountain of change for your productivity. Here’s how you can adjust these settings in Windows 10 or 11.

In any business, the capacity to collaborate is critical to success. In order to do so most optimally, it helps to carry out a few preliminary and overarching practices. Let’s go over a few such practices to help bring your team’s collaborative activities together.

Google Workspace is a great tool that allows you to get a lot done, but sometimes you might find yourself in a position where you need to download the files and take them with you or send them to someone. In these cases, you might not want to share the link. Instead, you can simply download them as whatever file format you might need!

There is one key on the keyboard that might seem a little odd: PrtScn. It’s not immediately obvious what this key does or why you would want to use it, but we assure you that it is an extremely helpful keyboard shortcut once you understand how it works and why you might want to try it out. In reality, the PrtScn key (on some keyboards it might just be PrtSc) is important for taking screenshots on your Windows device.

Because of the protection it can offer your organization, data backup is a necessary tool for you to have—that is, provided it has the requisite security and reliability you’ll need should you ever have to lean on it. Let’s go over a few guidelines to help you be sure that your backup is trustworthy enough to stake your business’ future on.

Windows has no shortage of capabilities to offer its users, with many of these tools coming with an associated Windows shortcut. Since keeping track of all of them can be a challenge, we wanted to assemble a list of most of them for you. This blog will serve as that list, so make sure you add it to your browser’s favorites for quick reference!

Okay, so first off: when it comes to taking a screenshot, today’s user has a lot of options baked into Windows. Of course, there’s the Print Screen key on most keyboards—but that only allows the user to literally take a screenshot of their entire display and edit it down in some other program.

Marketing is an integral part of the business process. If your business isn’t allocating any time to marketing, then your business isn’t growing. However, if you allocate too much time to marketing, you take time away from other aspects of the business process. You can escape this trap by utilizing your time marketing effectively and efficiently.   

Here are 4 ways you can optimize your marketing to save time!

Let me tell you a deep, dark secret about some of your employees... one that you might be a little surprised to hear: 

They aren’t reporting issues to you.

This can snowball into much larger problems. Let’s discuss.

When looking to present an idea, the first two options people think of are often to use a video, or to use a slideshow (typically, citing Microsoft PowerPoint). Our question is, why pick? Let’s go over how simple it is to embed a YouTube video right into your next PowerPoint presentation whether you’re using PowerPoint 365 or PowerPoint 2016.

If it is going to remain the most common Internet browser, Google Chrome always needs to have new features added to it to make it the preferable choice for most users. Recently, Chrome Actions was implemented, likely contributing greatly to that goal. Let’s look at what Chrome Actions are, and how they could prove useful.

Microsoft Word has a lot of time-and-effort-saving capabilities baked in. For instance, did you know that you can paste the same text—down to the formatting—across numerous documents? This makes it simple to replicate text without having to fix it each time, and to make changes everywhere the text appears all at once. Let’s go over how to do so.

Windows 10 has long played nice with the Android platform, but did you know that there is a way that you can actually use the same apps you would find on your mobile device on your PC? For this week's tip, we'll go over how you can enable this capability.

Screenshots can be one of the most effective ways to share information, as it gives the people you are communicating to first-hand knowledge of what you’re seeing. Of course, different platforms have different means of capturing a screenshot. Let’s go over these methods to ensure that you can do so efficiently and easily.

Social media platforms—like Facebook and Instagram—are a great place to communicate with people, as many political campaigns are now taking advantage of. With an election on the horizon, political advertisements abound on these platforms. Of course, not everyone wants their feeds cluttered with these ads… especially if these ads don’t align to their own politics.

When creating an office’s network, wireless functionality has become a necessary element to include. Of course, this is usually easier said than done, as wireless signals can be notoriously persnickety. That’s why we’re offering some tips to help you make the most of your business’ wireless network setup.

The password is the core element of both data security and user authentication. This makes the construction of them extremely important to protecting digital assets. Unfortunately, not everyone understands how to construct passwords that actually work to protect the information on the other side. Today, we will discuss how to build a solid password that works to keep your digital resources safe.

If you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, eye strain can be a big problem. Staring at a screen for too long can be irritating, and some even experience headaches and exhaustion from it.

Fortunately, a lot of common applications have been deploying dark or night modes. Microsoft Word’s take on this has been, well, less than desirable. We’ll show you a way around it to help save your eyeballs a lot of strain.

Collaboration is critical for a business’ success, but with more teams than ever split amongst their homes, it is arguably even more crucial to their operations. For this week’s tip, we’re going over three ways that your team can collaborate more effectively while making remote operations work.

Worldwide, we’re a good few months into dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, with many nonessential businesses shutting their doors for the time being. Even those industries that can’t just stop their operations are seeking alternatives, leading many to turn to implementing as much of a remote workforce as possible. Many still have questions about doing so, however, so we want to do our best to help answer some of the common questions these business people might ask about remote work.

Nowadays a lot of accounts give you the option to set up two-step authorization; and, most of the time you probably should. The security and privacy benefits that your business can gain are substantial. Today, we’ll describe how to enable what Microsoft calls two-step verification. 

With email being such a huge part of doing business, phishing has become a favorite tool of many scammers. To fight back, it is key that you know how to recognize a phishing email, so we’re dedicating this week’s tip to doing just that.

Businesses have a variety of communications to manage, including their internal ones. For many, this may be put on the back burner, as they prioritize their operational and sales-encouraging communications. However, internal communications are just as crucial, which is why we’re going over some of your options here - and how you need to use them.

Like many mobile devices, iPhones don’t have a slot for an external memory card, which means the device can easily become too full to use. When this happens, pictures can’t be taken and some apps just won’t work. If you’re experiencing this issue with your iPhone, just rent a movie. It works. Seriously.

Not all Internet search tools are created equal. For example, sometimes you may use a website’s search feature, only to discover that it doesn’t provide the quality of results you’re used to getting from a major search engine like Google Search. When finding yourself in such a predicament, you’ve got a few options to help narrow down your search.

One would think that a program called System Restore would be one that would be prioritized as one to get right. Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case, as utilizing one of your restore points after performing a Windows Update can cause some serious issues. For our tip, we’ll go over how to avoid these issues with a workaround.

It only makes sense that you would want your staff to know what they are doing as they tackle their daily work responsibilities - otherwise, there isn’t really the chance for very much work to be done. This is why training your staff is so important - it’s practically a prerequisite for productivity.

Microsoft Excel has a lot of moving parts… assuming you know how to move them, of course. For this week’s tip, we’re going over a few shortcuts to help you make the best use of some of these parts.

As unfortunate as it is to hear, science has pretty definitely kyboshed the notion that multitasking works. However, while multitasking may not actually have any true benefits to productivity, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any ways to accomplish more in less time. Today, we’ll give you a better option than multitasking, a process known as parallelism.

Windows 10 has a lot of features to offer a user, and more are being added all the time. We don’t want you to miss out on any, especially if they could help to streamline your business’ processes or your users’ experience. Here are four that you might find particularly handy.

If you use Google Drive as your preferred cloud provider, you know that it’s a dynamic service that offers everything from word processing to spreadsheets to file storage. However, there are many other ways to use Google Drive that you may not even be aware of. Here are three secret tips that can help you get a little more value out of Google Drive.

Running a business is never easy. There are so many moving parts to juggle and decisions to prioritize, it can be easy to skip over key steps on the path to success. While good business savvy is obviously a key requirement for this success to happen, there are certain things that can be done to give your business an extra push in the right direction. Today, we’ll go over three such seeds of success.

As headlines shout about Hurricane Florence approaching the East Coast later this week, with Helene and Isaac also stirring in the Atlantic Ocean, it seems as good a time as any to discuss preparing your business for hurricane season; and, really any adverse weather effects that could negatively influence your business. Preparing your business for events like these is key to its survival, making it crucial that you know what your responsibilities are when awaiting a potentially devastating event such as a hurricane.

If you've used a USB flash drive or other USB devices like cameras, smartphones, and external hard drives, you've probably seen Windows request you to safely remove the device as opposed to simply unplugging it from the PC when you are done. How important is this? Very.

Last time we spoke about creating your contact list in Excel when performing a mail merge. Of course, you can also use your Outlook contacts, and if you are running any sort of CRM software it is pretty likely it exports its own spreadsheet that can be used in a mail merge. Let's go over how to perform a mail merge now that you have your list.

Want to send out a large number of documents that are almost the same aside from a few specific areas? One example would be a letter to all of your existing clients about a new product or service, but you want each letter to address the recipient's name and company. This looks like a job for the mail merge!

Microsoft Office and Windows 7 provide many keyboard shortcuts that can improve your ability to multitask and get things accomplished quickly. Most of these shortcuts will work in previous versions, like Windows XP, Vista and the Microsoft Server Operating Systems as well. Give them a try, and the next time your tech comes by, be sure to show off your new skills.

Recently we mentioned Evernote as a great note taking app that is supported across multiple operating systems and mobile devices. We compared it to Microsoft OneNote as a lighter alternative that is easy to set up and sync across a plethora of devices. However, diehard fans of OneNote probably don't want to make a switch to a whole other platform. Today we're going to talk about ways to mobilize your OneNote notebooks as well as some other features that are exclusive to OneNote that you might not know about.

Like any Microsoft product, Outlook 2010 has a lot of neat features that get stepped over. One of these is the Quick Step box, which is found along the top on the Home tab in Outlook 2010. Utilizing Quick Steps can shorten the time it takes you to manage your inbox.

Most digital cameras produce very high resolution images, which is fantastic for printing, but higher quality image files means larger file sizes, and these days images aren't quite as portable as they used to be. Fortunately, Outlook has a great feature to reduce the size of image attachments for you.

Are you the kind of person who takes meticulous notes? Do you carry around a pen and pad with you so you never forget a single line item from meetings, presentations, or your grocery list? Enter Evernote, a free application that gives you an easy-to-use note taking solution that syncs your notes across multiple devices.

Want to look like a PC Pro and get more done faster? With these simple tips, you'll have the skills to impress your co-workers with a few keystrokes. The Windows 7 Taskbar is the menu bar that stretches along (typically) the bottom of your screen. These are some lesser-known productivity tips to streamline your Windows 7 experience.

Microsoft's Excel may look daunting, but it can be incredibly useful for presenting and organizing massive amounts of data. While it is capable of letting you put together advanced formulas, much of the time it's just nice to see a sum of a column of figures.

Email is a huge part of day-to-day business, and it can take a lot of time out of your day to manage it. Fortunately, Outlook has a lot of great features that will help you manage your inbox and effectively handle your email as efficiently as possible.

Unfortunately cell phone service providers are discovering that smartphone users love their bandwidth. With the majority of carriers dropping unlimited data plans, when a user goes over their limit massive charges can apply. Let's cover a few tips to limit the amount of bandwidth you use on your smartphone.

Do you work in an office and sit in front of a desk all day? Chances are, you have experienced back pain or tight shoulders. Maybe you get headaches from staring at the computer all day. Well today we will discuss some tips on how to reduce the negative effects that office work can have on your body. Working these tips into your day can have a dramatic effect on your mental and physical health and you will feel all the better for it.

Social Media is a far-reaching, extremely valuable tool for advertising and marketing. That is, well... until it isn't. Being able and prepared to handle negative online criticism can be the difference between a small but unfortunate event your company can learn from and 'irreparable damage that your company may never recover from.'

Wi-Fi can drastically increase your mobility around the home and office, and over the past few years wireless technology has become faster and incredibly reliable. Unfortunately, the signal only goes so far, and can be obstructed by walls, metalwork, and other features throughout the building. If you want to boost your signal, you can try out some of these tips.

PowerPoint has been, for a long time, the staple of presentation software. The last few incarnations of Microsoft PowerPoint (especially 2007 and 2010) have some great tools to spiffy up your presentations quickly and easily.

Last time we went over how to dress up your PowerPoint presentations with SmartArt, a feature in many Microsoft Office applications. Today we're going to be showing you how to create charts to display various types of data in PowerPoint, but like before, these will work much the same in other Office products such as Microsoft Word.

Whether using email for work or pleasure, it is important to ensure that we receive the messages we want while avoiding spam and other junk. Furthermore, it is extremely useful for your email to be presorted into the appropriate folder for review. Here's how to create filters for one of today's most popular email services, Gmail:

If you use Microsoft OneNote for jotting down quick meeting notes, phone calls, and personal memos, you've probably had information you needed to share with other co-workers in your OneNote Notebook. This quick walk-through will show you how to set up a Shared Notebook that others can access and modify.

Like most business owners, you probably have a Facebook page set up for your organization. Like most people, you likely also use Facebook to communicate with friends and family. Here's a simple method for doing so seamlessly.

The Internet is without a doubt the largest collection of information humanity has ever seen. The trick is getting the information you want quickly. That's where search engines come in, and no search engine has received more recognition than Google. These 10 tricks will help you master your Google searches like a pro and get you to the information you seek faster, and you might be able to impress a colleague or two.

Email has integrated itself into the way we do business.  If you use Outlook as your primary email client, there are plenty of tricks you can do to increase your productivity and practice better email etiquettes.

Plenty of Upstate New York businesses use the Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools. From Office 2007 and on, Microsoft has made it extremely easy to dress up your documents and presentations. These tricks will typically work with most Office products, from Word to Power Point, even Outlook; although in some apps the options might be in different places. Today's tutorial will focus on Microsoft Word.

Twitter is a fantastic networking resource for professionals, brands, and businesses. Having a strong presence on Twitter can mean more traffic to your website and an easy way to get in touch with customers and prospects. The hardest thing about diving into social media is knowing what to say. Here's a quick list with a few ideas to get you started.

Most companies have to have a workforce, generally one of considerable size. Unfortunately, the more users you have, the more potential risks you run into. Of course, your workforce doesn’t collectively intend to be a security risk, but the digital world is a complicated place, with threats around every corner and malicious programs just waiting for your employed end-users to slip up. Here are ten such honest slip-ups to watch out for:

Let's face it, no matter how quickly you can type, there is only so much you can accomplish without the use of keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps you never cared to learn them, or maybe you never had the opportunity. Now that you own a small business, your productivity and efficiency is at stake. Thankfully, some of the most useful shortcuts utilize one common key: the Control key.

Most people think of Microsoft Word as a normal word processor, and to an extent, that's exactly what it is. But did you know that Word 2013 has a built-in citation mechanism for your research needs? Say you are writing a white paper for marketing use, and you took specific statistics from a website. You want to make sure you cite these facts. Why? Because if you cite them, it makes your business look professional, and it looks good when you know how to credit someone else's work.

The computer mouse makes navigating your PC easy. However, the mouse isn't always the most efficient way to get computer work done. By taking advantage of keyboard shortcuts, you can shave precious seconds off your workflow and wow your coworkers with your computer prowess. Here are five time-saving keyboard shortcuts to get you started.

The Internet is a place of wonderment where you can find almost anything you can imagine, but you have to know how to find it. How good are you at online searches? Anybody can type a query into Google, Bing, or Yahoo, but a simple search like this may not yield the best results.

Improving your computer's startup time is a great way to get more productivity out of your work day. Studies have shown that people are most productive during the early hours of the day; therefore, you don't want to waste your best hours waiting for a PC to load. Here are three easy tips you can do to improve your PC's boot up time.

Everybody loves a pat on the back, especially after contributing to a great project. When you end your next PowerPoint presentation, don't just list your sources, give thanks to those who helped you in your research by epicly animating their names, movie credit style!

Sometimes, you just need to take a closer look at the Internet. For this article, we are not referring to a search engine; instead, we're talking about literally taking a closer look by using your Web browser's zoom feature, and it's as easy as giving your mouse click wheel a spin.