Directive Blogs

Financial management and accounting are two business needs that apply to all organizations of any size or industry. Fortunately, these organizations have access to tools like Intuit QuickBooks to help them fill these needs in a way that is accessible and convenient.

Let’s review some shortcuts to help you be more productive in managing your business finances via QuickBooks.

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.

Windows 11 features a robust desktop environment with a lot of neat tricks and customizations to work more effectively. Controlling your Windows desktop experience can enhance productivity and streamline the way you interact with your computer. In today’s blog, we give you four tips to help you customize and manage your Windows environment more efficiently.

Does your business use Google Workspace for its productivity solution? If so, we’ve got a tip for you—several, in fact, as we explore the various shortcuts available to expedite your productivity. Let’s take a look at some of the lesser-known shortcuts and how your business can use them to power up its efficiency.

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.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and it is making data more valuable than ever. This is because AI platforms rely heavily on data to function effectively. Many platforms and services collect data from their users to fuel these algorithms. LinkedIn has recently been found to do this—by default—without properly informing its users or updating its terms of service.

Collaboration is key to modern business operations, and that often involves sharing files of various sizes. Historically, sharing large files has been a challenge, but technology has made this process much easier. Here are some simple ways to share large files with your team.

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.

If you are a Gmail user, you might have noticed the different inbox categories available. This makes it much easier to reach “inbox zero.” With the “priority inbox,” you can achieve this feat without so much as breaking a sweat—unless you count sweat from how much you’re laughing at how easy this tip is to pull off.

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.

Google Workspace is an effective business platform for your productivity suite, but Google Drive on its own has some merit as a cloud storage and file-sharing platform. Today, we want to discuss how to use Google Drive to share large files.

You can do everything in your power to secure your social media accounts and lock down your privacy settings. Still, at the end of the day, social media users expose themselves to a torrent of information and content every time they log on. As a civilization, we’ve never really had something like this before. These platforms curate content that the user wants to see to keep the user coming back and staying longer. It’s inherently designed to be enticing and addicting, which is dangerous for certain individuals.

Then, there are scams and an endless stream of grifts that pose a wide range of additional problems for users.

Let’s talk about ways you and those you care about can be safer on social media.

Social media is constantly evolving, and if the big social networks had it their way, it would be the only place people go when they log onto the Internet. Whether you have strong feelings for or against social media, or perhaps you are indifferent, it’s important to understand how to protect yourself when using social media.

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.

While AI is far from perfect, I always love discovering ways that it can help do something mundane and speed up a workflow here or there. I’m no expert in Photoshop either, so if I need to edit something, I usually depend on someone with a little more experience, but this was a really neat trick I was able to do in just a few minutes!

Note taking apps are really useful and Microsoft OneNote is one of the most available and feature rich apps on the market for this use. You are probably familiar with the sticky note. They are notes that give a solid visual representation of items that workers need to be cognizant of for all types of processes. In today’s blog, we will go through the process of creating “sticky notes” in OneNote.

There will always be times when you have to invite guests and other external users to your Microsoft Teams meetings, especially if you want to take advantage of the many collaboration options offered through the platform. However, you need to be very careful with guests and external users–especially in today’s cybersecurity-centric world.

Technology plays a massive role for most organizations nowadays, and not everyone always grasps the importance of it. Most of the time, there is so much built into today’s enterprise software that it can often be overwhelming for workers to use it effectively. Today, we will give you three tips on how to help employees get a grasp of the technology their productivity depends on.

There are several reasons to use a form to collect data for your business, from customer impressions and service needs to employee feedback about internal matters as a means of collaborative decision-making. The trouble comes when it is time to compile all the responses… unless you know how to use the tools at your disposal.

For this week’s tip, we’re walking through the process of creating a form that self-populates a spreadsheet using Google’s toolkit.

Small businesses are presented with the challenging prospect of monitoring and policing various IT-related policies that you might have for your network infrastructure and workplace technology use. The difficulty of this notion does little to lessen its importance, however. You need to take action to protect your assets, data, and reputation from the countless threats out there, and ensuring that your employees are properly using technology is paramount to this endeavor.

It is important to keep modern computers clean, and laptops are no exception. However, a laptop's different form factor makes cleaning it much different from cleaning a traditional desktop computer.

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.

We could go on and on about the benefits of using Voice over Internet Protocol (also known as VoIP) for your business telephone needs. However, it is important that you do everything you can to prepare your network for this kind of utilization. Let’s review a few tips to help make sure your network is properly optimized for VoIP.

PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format, is a type of file that business professionals are all too familiar with. While most are aware of and appreciative of this file type, they likely are not aware of some of the more fun and useful features afforded to them. Let’s explore just what PDFs are capable of, including how to make and edit them.

From smartphones to laptops and everything in between, our devices are constantly exposed to dirt, dust, and germs. Keeping your technology clean ensures a longer lifespan for your devices and promotes a user’s health. Today, we'll explore four practical tips to help you keep your technology clean and functioning at its best.

The laptop is an excellent piece of office equipment due to its portability and its power to meet the needs of most of today’s workforce. When in the office, however, many prefer the much larger screens that are more typical of the traditional desktop. Let’s talk about how you can get the best of both worlds by plugging your laptop into a set of peripherals and using it while it's closed—effectively turning it into a PC’s tower.

In the relatively short time it has been around, social media has fully ingrained itself into our lives, personally, professionally, and socially. While there are considerable benefits to be had in all of these areas, it is also undeniable that social media can easily become overwhelming and negatively impact us. For this reason, occasionally taking a break from social media isn’t a bad idea. Let’s go over a few ways to make this break as successful and effective as possible.

One of the nice things about software platforms is how well the applications within them interact with one another. Take, for instance, the applications contained within Google Workspace.

Because of the interconnected nature of the Google Workspace platform, there’s a lot that the different programs can do in tandem. As an example, let’s consider how the word-processing application Google Docs can be used to generate events in the associated account’s Google Calendar.

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. 

There are few technology solutions that have been as transformative and important for businesses as email. Unfortunately, however, it’s remarkably easy for a hacker to gain access to an email account to cause all kinds of chaos for a business. Let’s consider ways you can protect your business’ email accounts and, by extension, the rest of your organization’s infrastructure.

Whatever your industry, there are going to be processes that need to be followed, and this will require no small amount of organization to keep all the moving parts in tandem with each other. Fortunately, tools that can help with your project management needs are readily available, so long as you take advantage of their capabilities.

Take Google Sheets, for instance.

You know that a software has made its mark when its name becomes synonymous with the type of software it is. For instance: PowerPoint.

This element of Microsoft 365 is well-known enough to often be used as a catch-all phrase for any presentation software. Less well-known, however, are some of the cool features and functions that PowerPoint has to offer. Today, we’re sharing a few of these features with you.

Effective time management is crucial for productivity and achieving your goals. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to be efficient. In today’s blog, we offer three very useful tips to improve your own professional efficiency.

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.

With the full power of Microsoft Excel at your disposal, you can accomplish a lot of great things and streamline your data management and analysis. However, it doesn’t take an Excel wizard to use today’s tip, which focuses on the Auto Filter feature built right into the program. Let’s look at how even this small feature can provide a lot of value for your business.

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.

When it comes to exclusive user features, one of the better-known ones on the Apple side of the house is FaceTime, a video chat platform. Apple has however made certain features of FaceTime available to Android users, but they come with a catch. Let’s go over how an iPhone user can FaceTime with an Android user, even if some of the features are not quite there.

It’s important that you are able to communicate with the people you work for, with, and over; and a big part of this is ensuring that your points are heard. Let’s go over a few strategies and techniques that can help you ensure that those around you are apt to listen to what you have to say.

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.

Productivity is always a primary focus for a business today, which makes any effort to improve it a welcome one. We wanted to take a moment and introduce you to a simple concept to make it easier to develop productive habits: something called habit stacking.

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.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that the better your relationship is with your employees, the more your business will benefit. Despite this, many businesses today lack trust between their organizational levels. Let’s go over a few simple tips that you can use to help maintain positive feelings amongst your team.

Email groups are remarkably useful. Instead of sending a copy of an email to each individual recipient, you can effectively create a simple forum post that everyone can participate in—a feature that certainly helps when collaboration is a priority. Let’s go over how you can quickly and easily create a group in Gmail.

Have you ever struggled with storage space on your Android device? For individuals who have, we bet that downloading applications that you ultimately don’t end up using very often is a major culprit here. To help you clear up storage space on your device, Android will receive an auto-archiving feature that can save you significant amounts of storage space by archiving your unused applications.

We are always writing about how useful technology is, but it’s surprising how little even the most committed techie knows about the options that are available to them. In this week’s blog we decided to go through three features in the Windows OS that can be a big help. 

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.

We talk a lot (and we mean a lot) about cybersecurity, with ransomware getting a lot of our focus…and for very good reason. Ransomware is a huge threat that today’s businesses need to be prepared to deal with. In light of this, we wanted to share a few tips to help you avoid the negative ramifications of ransomware.

Your Google Calendar is an important part of your productivity practices, but with the help of some additional calendars, you can make managing daily tasks easier than ever. Let’s consider how you can use multiple Google Calendars to be more productive, as well as how you can get them set up.

Anyone who wants to prioritize their privacy should be aware of the role the cache plays in such a thing. Your Google web browser—even on your smartphone—will store information about what you search so it can personalize your ads and recommendations, but if you would rather not have it do this all the time, you can clear your Android device’s Google search cache and set it up to auto-delete after a set amount of time has passed.

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.

Wi-Fi connectivity is a remarkable technology when you really think about it, and it has fundamentally changed how we work today. What hasn’t changed, unfortunately, is that hackers and cybercriminals will try to use this technology to their own advantage. Therefore, let’s discuss a few relatively simple ways that you can improve your wireless network’s overall security.

Setting up a router used to be a much more complex process than it is today. Thankfully, innovations in the technology have made it simpler and easier for consumers and businesses alike to do, to the point where some Internet service providers just let users do it themselves with guided instructions. Let’s go over how you can get the most out of your wireless router.

It doesn’t take much to get us to start ranting about the dangers of phishing, and it’s a topic that we won’t stop talking about for some time. Unfortunately, phishing comes in enough forms that it isn’t always so simple to spot. For this week’s tip, we just wanted to run through the different formats phishing can take, focusing on how to identify each type.

A lot of the time, user productivity is just about getting down to business. Sometimes, however, there are simply just too many different tasks to complete and it can bog down the production process. One way that users can use Windows to help them manage tasks is through the use of virtual desktops. Users can utilize multiple desktop experiences to separate the myriad of things they need to do. For today’s tip, we tell you how to utilize multiple virtual desktops in Windows 11. 

Social media can be remarkably overstimulating, and for some users this is a problem which is difficult to navigate without giving it up entirely. If you want a nice middle-ground to terminating your account entirely, you can instead curate your news feed by unfollowing accounts that don’t enrich your day. Let’s go over how you can do this.

If you have ever invested time and effort into an Excel spreadsheet, then you know how irritating it is to move all of that data to a different sheet. Thankfully, you can easily and accurately copy this data using a simple technique. Here’s how you can do it.

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.

Have you ever found yourself in a position where you wanted to download an email from your inbox? Whether it’s documentation or a different reason, there is a way to download your messages into a PDF. PDFs make for great file-sharing formats, as the document type preserves formatting and makes editing difficult, preserving authenticity. Let’s go over how you can download an email from your Outlook inbox as a PDF.

Google Chrome, used by about two-thirds of Internet users, is an infamous battery hog…or at least, that used to be the case. Google recently released Chrome 108, and with it, a feature called “Energy Saver.” Let’s talk about how to enable it.

It’s easy to open up far more tabs on your web browser than you need, especially when so many tools are cloud-based. If you find yourself in need of a quick way to close all other tabs besides a handful or so, we’ve got just the tip for you. You can close all open tabs to the right of your preferred window, or you can close all tabs outright.

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.

The holidays are fast approaching and that means people are going to miss work for one reason or another. If you can get away from the office for a little bit, you’ll want to set up an out-of-office message to ensure that others know you will get back to them when you get back to the office. Here’s how you can set up an autoresponder for an out-of-office message in Microsoft Outlook.

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.

When working in your browser, we know how efficiency is extremely important. Like many other pieces of software the developers at Google have baked some keyboard shortcuts to make getting around their browser easier for the average user. Let’s take a look at some of the most useful shortcuts. 

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.

If you use Android mobile devices, then you’ll know that updating your device is routine maintenance to keep it safe from threats and security breaches. Not only that, but updating your device can resolve various bugs which impact functionality. Let’s go over how you can update your device to the latest version of its operating system.

How much paper does your office waste on printing, and it’s all because someone printed out a large multi-page document on single-sided paper? It’s very easy to forget to check these settings, but sometimes people don’t even know they exist. Let’s go over how you can print on both sides of the paper and take full advantage of the prime real estate that can be found on the flip-side of your documents.

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.

In today’s business, sharing files is easy and something many workers take for granted. Unfortunately, not all file-sharing methods are secure. When efficiency is prioritized over security, it can often lead to extremely troublesome situations. For this week’s tip, we thought we’d go through a half dozen practices you can take to ensure your files get to where you need them to get safely and securely. 

Modern mobile devices are a bit of a double-edged sword for today’s businesses: on the one hand, they are critical for the productivity that is required of today’s organizations, but on the other, they also come with the very real chance of security issues. The permissions you give (or don’t) to these applications can have an impact on this risk.

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.

Passwords are just one part of a comprehensive security strategy, but they are a crucial one. You must make sure that you are investing adequate time and effort into making sure your passwords are secure. This is easier said than done, but by the end of today’s short blog article, you’ll have all the information you need to craft excellent passwords for your accounts.

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.

Everyone has a smartphone, but only a fraction of people use it productively. Instead of using your smartphone for wasting time, you could be using it to stay productive and get more done, reducing your stress levels and creating a better work life. Today, we’ll give you three useful tips  on how to change the way you use your smartphone.

Updating your technology is one business task that needs to happen if you want to optimize your operations. Some companies, however, still rely on legacy systems that could be holding them back from peak performance. It’s difficult to update legacy systems without comprehensive IT knowledge and proficiency, which is why you have us!

Microsoft Excel is a great tool that can provide loads of value to power users, but oftentimes users just don’t have the know-how to make the most of it. Thankfully, you have power users like us to guide you through some of the more intricate processes in the spreadsheet software. Let’s look at one such process: removing duplicate values in columns.

When all is said and done, being a manager is a far different experience than being an employee. So, when you promote one of your team members to this position—or perhaps you’ve recently been promoted to management yourself—it is important that a few practices are incorporated into their new workflow. Let’s go over these practices, and how the right IT can help.

Despite hearing about a constant stream of cyberattacks over the past few years—most of which cause millions of dollars of damage to businesses—it might still be difficult for you to justify spending a lot of money on your business’ cybersecurity plans. There is a finite amount of capital to go around and many times CIOs and network administrators will be rebuffed by management when asking for money to spend on cybersecurity. Today, we thought we’d discuss three ways that you can spend on cybersecurity initiatives and not feel like you are throwing your money down the drain. 

One of the fastest-growing services in healthcare is telehealth. If you aren’t familiar with this concept, it is basically a virtual meeting designed to provide faster and more direct healthcare consultations and stabilize the ever-rising costs of healthcare. With health information being one of the most attractive to hackers, it is important to be mindful to do everything you can to protect your data. Today, we will go through four tips to help you successfully navigate the risks inherent with telehealth.

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.

Microsoft Office is a super useful collection of software that serves the purposes of just about any business, at least to some degree. Since it is so popular—taking up almost half of the office productivity software market in February 2022—we figured it would be helpful to share a few tips to help speed up some of the things you may be spending time on now.

Computers allow businesses to do so much, but eventually a time comes to purchase new hardware. Thankfully, you can stave off this need pretty well by simply taking care of your existing technology. Here are some tips you can implement to make sure that your computer lasts as long as possible before it kicks the bucket.

While protecting the credit card data you collect from your customers and clients is obviously important, you likely also have a line of credit for your business’ use that you need to think about as well. Let’s turn our focus to that card for a moment and discuss some tips and best practices to keep this company resource safe.

Microsoft Teams is a video communication and collaboration platform that your organization can use to great success, but it helps to have a couple of pointers so you can make the most out of the software. Here are five ways you can maximize the value you get out of your Microsoft Teams software.

Businesses are rarely successful with just one person doing all the work; rather, businesses are largely successful when a group of people are working together toward the same goal. To promote this type of collaboration within your organization, we suggest you keep the following tips in mind.

Typing on your keyboard is something that you do every day, but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. You can give your hands a break and use Microsoft Word’s dictation feature; this lets you use your voice to write in the software. Let’s go over how you might use the feature on a desktop, web browser, or mobile device.

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!

Change, whether you’re referring to that of your technology or any other business process, is often a point of contention between management and the rest of the business. Let’s explore this resistance to change that so many feel, and how you can help them overcome it

Bookmarks are an essential part of being productive with your Internet browser, but what happens when you switch to a different one, like Google Chrome? Do you have to manually add all of your bookmarks back to the browser? Nope! Let’s go over how you can import your bookmarks directly to Google Chrome and save some time.

It’s quite possible for employees to overwork themselves, even in a remote environment. Let’s take a look at some ways that you can minimize remote overwork for your employees, especially as the boundaries typically set in place by the morning commute are eroded and work/life balance blurs.