Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office 365 software is a solid choice for businesses.

Microsoft Office Suite Software has been around for years and even decades. While it’s come a long way since 1990, Microsoft Office 2016, 2019 Enterprise, and Office365 have become the mainstream. They’ve even become more popular to use in recent years. While some businesses still have the older versions that aren’t supported anymore (Office 2013 and earlier). Either way, the abilities you can have with a powerhouse document editor, slideshow presentation creator, website and file publisher, online note backup, and more are better than you can get with any other business software suite that’s off-brand. They’ve become pretty much the standard.

Adobe Acrobat (Pro for Businesses)

This cheat sheet may be from 2015, but Adobe Acrobat hotkeys are still the same. Access to Adobe software is sure to help any business of any size.

Adobe Acrobat has been one of the dominant platforms for reading official documents since it emerged in 1993 as an original and new file format for documents. However, it’s come a long way since then, and the reader alone doesn’t allow you to edit them professionally. Therefore, it’s essential that if you’re in any business, you use Adobe Acrobat Pro and learn it. It may sound hard to believe, but it isn’t that hard to use. The more you use it, the easier it gets to learn! We’ll cover that with a tutorial sometime for you later on.

QuickBooks

QuickBooks software is a dream if you’re keeping track of your expenses.

Accounting is a huge deal. Whether you’re a corporation or a self-employed business, you want a reliable solution for accounting and tracking money. QuickBooks is a great and convenient way to do so. Everything is primarily automated if you use the online platform, and you have even more functionality than on the desktop platform. Of course, if you have a financial advisor or accounting department, you can always use QuickBooks Desktop Pro and manually do things.

Website CSM – WordPress

WordPress is the most used web builder software, and there are many reasons why.

Whether you’re operating an internal website or a regular website for a business, WordPress is not only the most powerful blog out there but also one of the most standardized and widely used web design platforms. Sure, you can achieve greatness with something like a website builder. You can even use plain old HTML, CSS, and Java. While these are great, they often require extensive maintenance and need to be continuously rewritten and updated. Failure to do so will leave your website looking like it just got out of bed. It’s also mobile-friendly, so your company can end up at the top of Google searches.

With WordPress, you can choose templates to do all of these and customize things on the fly. Have a new page? Boom. Link it to the main page. Want to have a blog post? That’s easy too, and you can choose to have your blog as a separate section of your website altogether, giving you excellent opportunities for landing pages.

Backup Services – Cloud Storage is Better

Cloud storage software is an excellent way to stay connected with colleagues, share documents, and create backups.

When you’re operating a business, you want the best data backup and recovery solutions possible. That’s why you have to realize that you want your local backups of everything, and you’ll also want some cloud backup service that can help protect your information and data.

Google Docs – Cloud Sharing Documents

If you aren’t using Google Docs to your advantage or don’t know how to use it, we can help you and show you how.

The Google Cloud featuring Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the rest of the plethora of “Google Cloud Services” is an excellent solution for sharing information quickly. Another thing to utilize in your business, primarily if you’re operating a sort of intranet and allowing remote connections, is Google Drive.

Antivirus – SentinelOne, Avast Business, or Kaspersky

Not only does SentinelOne stop malware, but it can also stop stalkerware. So, if you’re in the market for antivirus software, you might want to look at SentinelOne.

In the past, AVG Security, McAffee, and even Norton used to take the cake. There are still businesses operating slow and sluggish computers with these overbearing antiviruses. When you utilize an antivirus for your business, you want it to offer maximum security. Still, also it can stack onto Windows Defender and do a better job, not hog your computers. That’s why we use SentinelOne. SentinelOne is an AI-driven security powerhouse that finds problems before they even get to your computer. SentinelOne is an all-in-one cybersecurity platform that’s performance is unmatched in the industry.

The Best Software Solutions for You

Even the smallest businesses need to have viable security solutions, back up their files, and have secure ways to communicate over secured connections. Therefore, you want to look for a one-stop source for your connectivity needs.

Excel Tip #1: The Search Bar

Excel tip number one: use your search bar.

The search bar in the Microsoft Office suite has become much more powerful, especially for Excel. It used to be that using the search functions in Office would only net you some built-in help articles or templates from the Microsoft Store. That’s no longer the case.

The new search bar can find any and everything Office-related. If you need to learn how to use a pivot table, type that into the search bar. If you forget a formula, the search bar will give it to you. If you can’t find a setting, the search bar will find that as well.

The new search bar in Excel has become very powerful. Don’t be afraid to try using it.

Excel Tip #2: Save to OneDrive

This is more of an Office tip than an Excel tip, but learn how to utilize OneDrive.

Many businesses don’t push the benefits of OneDrive enough. OneDrive is an excellent tool to both share and backup files. One of the more powerful features that OneDrive offers, though, is version control.

OneDrive can track changes in your files. It also can keep older copies of files. This is by far one of the best ways to protect your data. It’s also one of the easiest tools to use.

Configuring OneDrive isn’t difficult.

If your organization hasn’t already set it up on your Windows profile, you’ll find a configuration wizard on your PC. Just click the Start Button in Windows and type in OneDrive. Windows Search will find the configuration wizard for you.

That wizard will create a folder in your user profile labeled OneDrive. Once this folder is created, make sure to save any documents to that folder. You can also drag and drop existing documents to this new folder to sync to OneDrive online too.

Once your documents are in that OneDrive folder, you can view them online. You will need to go to the OneDrive website and login with your Office 365 account information. If you have Office 365 through a business, it will most likely be your business email account.

Once your files are saved to OneDrive, the online syncing app will automatically start working. Anytime a file is changed, OneDrive will track that change and make a new copy of that file. This means that if you get struck by Ransomware, you can easily roll back your files to a working version in OneDrive and restore them. If one of your Excel files stops working properly, then you can find the last known good copy in OneDrive and restore it.

Of course, all of this only works if OneDrive is configured on your PC and you are saving data to that monitored sync folder. So, make sure you are doing this.

Excel Tip #3: Get Data Functions

Excel tip numero tres is to learn how to use the “Get Data” function.

The new ‘Get Data’ functions in Excel are great tools for CPAs, programmers, Sysadmins, doctors, etc.… They are great for everyone. Here’s why.

The Get Data functions will pull data in from a ton of different sources. You can pull data from a website, a JSON file, a text file, an XML file, etc.… Excel does a great job of parsing this data, too.

On import, Excel will do its best to separate data as well as it can. Just in case, though, Excel will walk you through a quick wizard to make sure that it is using the proper demarcation points before converting that data into a spreadsheet.

Excel Tip #4: DBAs and App Developers Take Note

This tool is amazing for converting large data sources into structured files to import into databases. It can be challenging to convert JSON or XML data to database tables. The Get Data functions are great for this!

Import your data using the Get Data functions in Excel. Excel will turn the data into a 2-dimensional spreadsheet conceptually like a database table. Make sure your data is proper and normalized.

Most database admin panels have a way of importing CSV files into databases. So, save that table you just made as a CSV file. Then access your DB admin panel, such as PHPMyAdmin, and import the data into your table.

We hope you enjoyed these Excel tips. For more Excel tips and tricks to make your life easier, please send us a message.