MSPNetworks Blog

Whether it's a personal challenge or a necessity, keeping productivity high is good for an individual’s career growth and overall self-worth. Unfortunately, staying on top of your game can be difficult. We thought we would give you three things to consider that will work to keep your productivity levels high.

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.

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.

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.

Productivity Paranoia is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Let’s explore the phenomenon for a moment.

Let’s say that Jane Q. Public is one of those employees who has shifted to remote operations, and while it hasn’t impacted her productivity, she has heard that her bosses have been grumbling about “some people” working remotely not pulling their weight.

Uh oh. What if “some people” includes Jane? Suddenly, Jane feels super self-conscious about the work she’s doing and how her higher-ups are viewing her. These thoughts are pretty understandably distracting, and before long, she’s starting to feel pretty disengaged from the work she’s doing and burnt out.

When all is said and done, Jane ends up actually being unproductive, when she would have been fine otherwise… and it’s all because the idea that she wasn’t pulling her weight was introduced to her.

Putting a Plug in Productivity Paranoia

The truth is that everyone in an organization will have some part to play in terms of eliminating this toxicity.

Managers need to maintain open communications with their remote employees so that expectations can be established and progress can be evaluated. This will help them see the productivity that these employees can—and hopefully do—accomplish, and if they aren’t, they can more effectively address it. It also helps to establish career-based goals with your remote employees. What is it they want from their work? What would you like to see them accomplish? What would they like to see themselves doing in the future for the company?

As for your team members, they can come to these meetings with ideas ready to contribute. Furthermore, there are software tools that your team can use to keep track of their productivity more clearly, but these should be provided and managed by your company and its IT team.

Working together, you and your team members can come to an understanding and create a healthier working environment that ultimately gets more done.

Reach Out to Us for the Tools You Need

We help businesses around New York with the technology their operations demand, and we’d be happy to help you too! Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more!

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. 

The Truth is, the Time is There… You Just Need to Be Ready for It

Most people underestimate the amount of time they actually have available to them—although, to be fair, this time is often hiding in plain sight. Do you find yourself sitting through a long bus trip to get to work, or relegated to the back seat in an uncomfortably silent carpool arrangement? When working from home, how much time do you spend in the morning waiting for your coffee maker of choice to produce your preferred cup (or pot, no judgment from me) of joe? 

The fact of the matter is that in these little moments we chalk up to time wasted, there’s the opportunity for productivity. Small as these moments may seem, nobody said that productive work has to be of a certain duration. By taking advantage of the spare moments before a meeting starts, or when your usual breakfast is cooking, or any other time that would otherwise be lost to the ether, you can accomplish that much more.

How often do you find yourself having some of your best ideas during these moments?

You Just Need to Be Ready for When These Moments Arise

By having the right tools and strategies prepared, you’ll be in a good position to take advantage of every spare moment. Chances are good that you regularly have access to a mobile device with some form of a note-taking app. Get in the habit of quickly typing up your ideas.

If you’d rather rely on a low-tech option, make sure you’re always carrying a pen with you. Everything from a receipt to a napkin can be used to quickly store a thought until you have the opportunity to more permanently record it.

Furthermore, it is important that you manage your expectations. It’s very unlikely that your quick notes will be an earth-shaking idea. Much more likely, it’ll just be the first draft of many ideas that eventually become a real strategy or initiative.

While We Can’t Give You the Inspiration You Need, We Can Give You the Tools You’ll Need to Act Upon It

Reach out to us to learn more about our IT services and support options, and how we can help you and your team accomplish more. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to get started.

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.

Let’s walk through the process.

How to Use Excel to Mass Generate Folders (and Even Subfolders!)

Rather than manually going through, creating and naming each folder you need, Microsoft Excel enables you to automate the process somewhat. The trick revolves around you creating a Windows Batch file—a type of file that contains a script that executes predetermined commands in a specified order.

The process is as follows:

• In one column, list all of the names your different folders need to have, whether that’s a month and year, each of your team members’ names, or your different departments.
  
  
• To turn this into a batch file, you first need to add a second column that formats this data in a very specific way. Let’s assume that you wanted a folder for each month of 2024, for instance.
  
  
  
  • Your first column will be your list of months, January, February and so on, with cell A1 formatted as “2024 - January” to help avoid Excel auto-formatting your data.
    
    
  • Your second column will have the batch command filled out. This will require the following formula to be used:
    
    ="MD "&""""&A1&""""
    
    Dragging the bottom corner of your top cell down will populate the rest of your list, referencing the proper cell in the first column to complete the formula.

• This will give you a list formatted as MD “2024 - January” and so on. Copy and paste this data into your Notepad application.
  
  
• Once your batch commands are copied over, save your Notepad file as a .bat file format wherever you want your folders to be saved. Clicking this file will generate the folders where the .bat file was located.

Hopefully, this will help you to more quickly create the folders you require for your assorted needs.

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.

What are People Graphs?

People Graphs are a Microsoft Office Add-In that allows you to create a quick data visualization. While the default icon included in the People Graphs is, predictably, a person, the graphs can be customized to display different icons—from a star, a heart, a clock, a bag of money or various others.

Let’s go over how you can create these simple graphs to present simple data points to your advantage.

Creating a People Graph

First, you need to have the data you want your People Graph to depict in your spreadsheet. Let’s assume that you wanted to share some statistics concerning the work/life balance habits of today’s workers. In one column, list out the stats you want to share, and in the next, list out the numerical values associated with these statistics.

Select this data range. Then, in the Insert toolbar, select People Graph under Add-Ins. A premade graph will appear on your sheet. Select the Settings option, which will appear in the top-right corner when you click on the graph.

From there, you can customize what your graph looks like, its color scheme, and the shape of the icon itself.

Once you’re pleased with the appearance of your graph, you can then select the grid button that appears next to the settings option. From there, you can customize the title and select the data that your graph pulls from.

Once you’ve selected the data, click Create, and your People Graph is complete.

Hopefully, you find plenty of use out of this capability!

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.

Keep Stock of Your Network and Its Protections

When you consider how many potential access points an attacker has to target your business’ network with ransomware—or any other threat, for that matter—it can be really concerning, really quickly. In short, there are a lot of ways that your business could be targeted, so you need to take the time and ensure they are all sufficiently protected. All internet-facing applications need to be fully up-to-date, every endpoint needs to be locked down, and your team all needs to be educated to help lock down security further.

The key is that you need to be aware of these needs in order to do anything about them, so make sure you’re paying attention.

Protect Your Data Through Backups

Your business relies on its data, and as such, your data is a prime target for cybercrime. The entire point of ransomware is to take advantage of this reliance, cutting off your access to it in order to coerce a payment out of you—a payment that you’re more motivated to make as your business drags to a halt without its essential resources. However, this all hinges on the fact that you wouldn’t have access to your data. If you maintain your access to this data (by keeping it safely backed up, for instance) you’ve eliminated what makes ransomware so effective, allowing you to purge the infection and start fresh.

If you aren’t sure how you should be handling your backups, you don’t have to worry. All you need to do is call (516) 403-9001 for our help.

Train Your Team

One extremely common way that ransomware is spread is through various means of manipulating your business’ users, like phishing messages, malicious attachments, and infected downloads. You can help minimize your risk by educating yourself and your team members on how to identify risks and avoid them appropriately. Remind them not to open or click on unexpected attachments or links, not to plug in random devices they’ve found, and generally act in a more secure way.

MSPNetworks can not only help keep your business productive, but secure and resilient as well. Learn more about what we can do by giving us a call today at (516) 403-9001.

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.

Let’s discuss how you can use Chrome’s multi-platform nature to your advantage to access the same web page on different devices.

Chrome Users Have a Few Options to Push Web Pages Between Devices

First off, simply being signed into the same Chrome account gives you the option to access a page from your history, as activity from all devices will be tracked. All you have to do is access Chrome and open History by pressing Ctrl+H when using a computer, or accessing Recent tabs from the three-dot menu in the Chrome mobile application.

If you’re in the process of reading something, however, and want to proactively have it ready on another device to continue viewing it, Chrome also supports this. When using the desktop, there’s a small icon in the address bar that looks like a corner with an arrow emerging from it. Clicking this icon, or alternatively right-clicking on the browser tab’s title will give you the ability to Send to your devices, with a list of all devices you’re signed into appearing for you to select from. If you’re on an Android device, access the three-dot menu and select the Share option. You’ll be provided a variety of options, including one to Send to your devices.

We’re committed to doing anything we can to help make your time in the office easier, whether it's through tips like this or through our comprehensive IT services. Learn more about the latter by giving us a call at (516) 403-9001 today!

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.

How to Reopen a Closed Tab or Window in Google Chrome

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll use Google Chrome for our examples, but know that the other popular web browsers have similar functionality, and the process is similar if not identical to perform the same tasks.

First, close out one of your other web browsers. Go ahead, do it. We’re confident you can get it back, as long as you’re not filling out a form or there is other sensitive content on it that must be re-entered. After you’ve closed the tab or window, right-click the Plus icon as if you were going to open a new tab. You’ll see an option for Reopen Closed Tab. This will reopen the last closed tab, just like it says. You can even do this multiple times for multiple tabs, too.

For a quick reference, you can use the keyboard shortcut as well: Ctrl + Shift + T.

Reopen a Closed Window in Google Chrome

But what if you accidentally close the entire window without realizing it? Thankfully, Chrome has functionality for this, too, and it’s just as simple. Go ahead and open up a new window for testing purposes. Next, close out of it by clicking on the X button in the top right corner of the window. Go back to your current browsing session and right-click the tab bar at the top of your screen. If the last thing you closed was a different window, you’ll see the option for Reopen Closed Window. Go ahead and click it. Your closed window should reappear.

The keyboard shortcut for this is just as easy: Ctrl + Shift + W.

That’s all there is to it! It’s a simple but helpful tip to be just a little more productive with your day.

What other tips would you like to see us write about on our blog? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe.

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.

Make Your Expectations Clear

In simple terms, you should make sure your team knows what you want them to be doing. Set the prerogative for your team in no uncertain terms. Emphasizing the focus you want them to commit to teamwork and designing your workplace processes around this goal will ensure they know how they are to proceed.

Equip Your Team with the Right Tools

In addition to making it clear what you want your team to do, it is important that they have the technology needed to do so effectively. Various platforms and standalone software solutions exist that make this cooperation far more easy to accomplish. Acquiring and training your teams to fully utilize these tools will only make it easier for collaboration to make its way into their processes.

Use Various Methods to Collaborate

Speaking of tools, having a variety available for your team’s use—especially those that feature different modes of communication—also makes it more convenient for them to do so. With that kind of accessibility, collaboration can become a more natural reaction to workplace needs.

Understand and Appreciate the Hurdles Your Team Will Face

Finally, you need to take a moment to acknowledge that the adoption process may not go smoothly. Old habits are tough to break, after all, and a lot of people are finding normal work processes more challenging to get through. “Zoom fatigue” is now a recognized thing as well, so accepting whatever feedback (yes, even some complaints) they have to offer will show them that their thoughts matter.

We Can Ensure that Your Team Has the Means to Collaborate

Reach out to our team to find out how we can equip your team with the tools they need. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

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.

Windows has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but PrtScn is perhaps one of the easiest to carry out. When you hit the PrtScn key, Windows will take a screenshot of your computer’s monitor, allowing you to save it as an image.

There are many practical reasons for taking screenshots, many of which you might not have considered. Let’s go over your options for taking screenshots on your Windows device.

Why Take Screenshots?

Screenshots are incredibly helpful for a variety of reasons, one of which is to help IT support determine what the root cause of your technology troubles is. Basically, it lets them see what you see on the screen so they can check off boxes for more common fixes before diving into more technical issues. Screenshots are also helpful for documentation purposes, allowing you to put together guides for workflows and processes for more visual learners.

The PrtScn Key

When you hit the PrtScn key, you might notice that there are no pop-ups or anything that appears on-screen to show that you have taken a screenshot. Basically, the PrtScn key captures an image of your desktop screen and copies it to the clipboard as an image. You can then paste it like you would if it were copied or cut text. The problem with this is that it takes a screenshot of the whole screen, not just one part of it, so for more focused screenshots, you have to get a little more creative. You’ll also want to make sure sensitive information isn’t displayed on your screen if you plan on sharing the screenshot.

Snip & Sketch

This solution is built right into Windows 10 and allows you to snip specific parts of your screen for a screenshot. To use Snip & Sketch, use the keyboard shortcut Shift + Windows Key + S. There are some options here: Rectangular Snip, Freeform Snip, Window Snip, and Full-Screen n Snip. Pick whichever you think best suits your needs. Your selection will then be saved to the clipboard in the same way as PrtScn, allowing you to paste (Ctrl+V) it into an application or edit it in the Snip & Sketch tool.

Third-Party Services, Applications, and Extensions

There are some third-party tools and applications that you can use to take screenshots that let you capture specific parts of your screen in much the same way the Snip & Sketch tool allows. These other solutions may be perfectly effective for taking screenshots, but you should clear any of them with IT first just to make sure that the solution is one that is allowed on your network. Plus, you might already have better tools available to you, so it never hurts to confirm with IT before going all-in on a screenshot tool; and, of course, you have us to fall back on as well!

So, how are you going to use screenshots to take your business to the next level? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe for more great tips and tricks.

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!

Let’s get into it.

The ABCs of Windows Shortcuts

Naturally, almost every letter of the alphabet on the keyboard has a shortcut assigned to it:

• WinKey + A opens your Action Center.
• WinKey + B highlights your notification area.
• WinKey + C launches Cortana in listening mode.
• WinKey + D toggles Show Desktop and the previous state.
• WinKey + E launches File Explorer in the Quick Access tab.
• WinKey + F opens the Microsoft Feedback hub.
• WinKey + G opens the Game Bar tools, if that’s how you spend your time at home.
• WinKey + H opens the Dictation toolbar.
• WinKey + I opens your Settings.
• WinKey + K opens the Connect pane to connect to wireless displays and devices.
• WinKey + L locks the device.
• WinKey + M minimizes all open windows.
• WinKey + O locks the device’s orientation on tablets and mobile devices.
• WinKey + P opens the Project pane.
• WinKey + Q opens Search.
• WinKey + R displays the run dialog box.
• WinKey + S launches Cortana in typing mode.
• WinKey + T cycles through the apps on the taskbar.
• WinKey + U launches the Ease of Access/Display Center to manage your screens.
• WinKey + V opens your clipboard app to view things you have copied to your clipboard with Ctrl + C.
• WinKey + X opens the advanced, Secret Start menu.

Adjusting Your Open Windows

Some of Windows’ shortcuts are designed to help the user arrange their display to the appearance that best suits their needs. For instance:

• WinKey + Left/Right Arrow will take the active window and adjust it to fill the left or right side of the monitor it is displayed in. 
• WinKey + Shift + Left/Right Arrow will move the active window over to another display.
• WinKey + Up Arrow will maximize the active window. 
• WinKey + Down Arrow will minimize the active window.

There are, of course, many more Windows shortcuts to take advantage of, as well as plenty of other tips to help make your workday more efficient. We often share them in this blog, so make sure you come back often to check in!

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.

This simply isn’t a convenient enough option for today’s productivity-focused workflows. Instead, let’s go over how to use Windows’ integrated Snip & Sketch tool, which gives you greater functionality at comparable ease.

Using Snip & Sketch

Snip & Sketch is a utility that offers four options for you to use in terms of your screenshots and can be easily called up by pressing Windows Key+Shift+S. There, you’ll have access to four different screenshot format options at the top of your screen:

1. A basic box selection, where you click and drag to encompass your selection
2. A freeform selection that allows you to draw out your boundary
3. Window snip, which allows you to select an active monitor to screenshot
4. Fullscreen snip, which takes the place of the Print Screen key and allows you to take a picture of all your monitors simultaneously

Any of these can be useful in the right situation, and these situations are only too common in the workplace.

Hopefully, this will help you communicate more clearly in the office, using images to help get the message across. For more handy tips and other useful IT information, make sure you check back here every so often—and don’t forget to give our team a call at (516) 403-9001 for more direct assistance from us!

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.

In PowerPoint 2016

Here is the process you’ll need to follow to embed a video into your presentation:

1. Navigate to YouTube and find the video you want to include in your presentation. Find the Share option and select Embed from the menu that appears when you click into it.
2. You’ll see a preview of your chosen video’s thumbnail, along with a series of code and some other options that allow you to control the point from which the video starts, whether your embedded video will provide viewers with controls, and the ability to enable a privacy-enhanced mode (which pertains more to videos that are posted on a website). Copy the code in its entirety.
3. Back in PowerPoint, click into the Insert tab and select Video. Select Online Video from the provided drop-down.
4. A box will appear. Paste the code you copied into the From a Video Embed Code field. Alternatively, you could attempt searching for the video you wanted to use using the YouTube search field.

In PowerPoint 365

PowerPoint 365 requires a similar process:

1. Find the video you wish to embed on YouTube and copy its URL from the address bar.
2. In PowerPoint, click into the Insert tab and select Video, then Online video…
3. Paste the URL into the Online Video dialog box.
4. You can also add various effects to the video preview (not the video that plays) via the buttons in the Video Format tab.

Whichever version you use, Microsoft PowerPoint has historically been an excellent tool, provided you know how to use it properly. The same can be said of most business applications available today.

MSPNetworks can help you acquire these solutions, along with the rest of the business technology management services we offer. To learn more about what we can do for you and your operations, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

Getting tickets to see Hamilton was difficult before the global pandemic. The last time I had checked, ticket prices were over $600 on the low-end, and that was to reserve them 9 months early. With the pandemic, well, it’s just best to stay home.

Fortunately, on July 3rd, Disney released the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical on Disney+. You no longer have to Wait for It. What if you want to watch Hamilton with your friends while still practicing social distancing? We Know, and we’re about to show you. Best of all, your friends won’t need to be In the Room Where it Happens. We’re probably not going to stop with the Hamilton song title puns either.

What’s a Watch Party?

A Watch Party is where you gather some friends or family to stream a show or movie together, from different locations. Some services, like Amazon video, have adopted this to help us get through the global pandemic. 

Here’s What You Need to Host a Hamilton Watch Party

Everyone Needs Disney+
First of all, all parties involved will need their own Disney+ account. Unfortunately, Disney+ just stopped offering the free trial. I think they said “You’ll Be Back,” to everyone who let their subscription lapse after The Mandalorian was over.

Just log in to https://www.disneyplus.com/ and subscribe. Verizon has a promo right now, so if you recently bought a phone or signed up for Verizon Internet service, you might want to check to see if you are eligible.

Everyone Needs to Install a Browser Plugin
Next, all parties involved will need to install a Chrome browser plugin. If you only care about doing a watch party with Disney Plus, you can use the Disney Plus Party plugin. If you want to host watch parties with Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, and Hulu as well, you can check out Vemos.

Either way, as the host, you’ll want to pick one, install it, and ensure everyone else gets it before the show starts, to avoid technical issues. 

Both plugins allow you to sync up the video with your watch party and includes the ability to chat with each other during the movie. Once the Disney Plus Party plugin is installed, click the icon it adds to the top right of your Chrome browser and create an account.

Once you’ve followed the steps to create an account, start up Disney+ in Chrome and start a movie. Then click the Disney Plus Party button and Host a Movie. It will ask you to create a name for the room.

Your friends will need to install the plugin, create an account, and click Join a Movie and type in the name of your room.

From there, the host will be able to play the movie and it should sync across everyone else’s device. You can pause it (so nobody asks, “What’d I Miss?” if they Take a Break), or you can watch the whole movie Non-Stop. There is one caveat though… as of right now, Disney Plus Party is only free for the first four hours per week. Hamilton’s run time on Disney Plus is just under three hours, so it’s a good way to try out the plugin before committing to spending money on it.

We hope everyone in your watch party is Satisfied! 

Want more tips and tricks? Stay tuned to What Comes Next by subscribing to our blog. If you need a Right Hand Man for your IT, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

I think we did a pretty good job with the Hamilton song title puns, but feel free to take a shot in the comments!

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.

Dark mode and Night mode options have been showing up a lot lately, especially in mobile apps. Twitter, Amazon Kindle, Evernote, Gmail (on Android 10), and Firefox (on iOS) have all deployed a mode that makes the background of the application dark, and the text light.

For most, this makes it easier to view your screen in a dimly lit area without straining your eyes. For those of us who spend a lot of time in front of screens, it can be a huge difference.

I was using Microsoft Word the other day, and working on a long document and I was starting to feel a headache coming on. It reminded me that Word had some settings for changing the theme, and I wondered if they had finally added a dark mode.

(Note that I’m using the PC version of Microsoft Word, not the mobile version)

While in Word, click File and go to Options. On the General tab, under Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office, you can change the Office Theme to Black.

I got pretty excited because it seemed like that was exactly what I was looking for, but to my chagrin… 

Alright, so changing the office theme only makes the surrounding area (including the tool ribbon) darker. That’s a start, but the brilliant bright white of the document area was still burning away at my retinas. I wasn’t totally content with this, but I found a trick that takes this one step further.

The Trick for a Real Microsoft Word Dark Mode

I totally understand why Microsoft Word doesn’t let the office theme change the background and font color of the document. Afterall, a lot of documents get printed or sent as PDFs, and they want you to get a feel for what the document would look like if you were to print it. They don’t want the user getting confused and thinking that it will actually make them print a full sheet with a black background and white text.

This rationality wasn’t doing much for my headache, and I was determined to find a fix for it.

It’s actually really easy too!

NOTE: I want to point out that I definitely do not want to print my document with a black background and white text, I only want to view the document that way when I’m editing the document.

Go to the Design tab on the tool ribbon at the top of Word and click on Page Color.

If you don’t see Page Color, try clicking on the Magnifying Glass at the very top of Word towards the right, and type Page Color instead.

From there, choose one of the darker colors. You’ll notice your document will change as you hover over the different color options. The lower values tend to make the text light. I usually choose the second option from the bottom in the second column, as indicated above.

If you ever want to switch it back, go back to the Page Color option and just choose the white box on the top left of the color grid.

Keep in mind that this only changes on the document you are working on, and doesn’t affect your other documents. If you save the document and share it, and someone else opens it, they will also see the dark background.

Before Printing, Be Sure to Preview

I had no problem printing my document after changing these settings, but older versions of Microsoft Word might not behave the same way. Let’s say you did want to print this document, but obviously didn’t want to waste a ton of ink by printing a black background.

In my experience, you just need to print the document normally, but just to be safe, you can either go back to Page Color and set the color back to white, or before you print, review the preview Word shows you.

If the preview is white text on a black background, you’ll need to either go back to Page Color and switch to a white background, or you can tell Word to always ignore your background colors.

To do this, click on File and Options. Go to the Display tab and look for the Printing Options area. Make sure Print Background Colors and Images is unchecked, and click Ok.

Then, you never have to worry about wasting a ton of ink when you print your document.

Hope this tip helped! For more great tips, keep coming back to our blog!

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.

So, this is really happening, isn’t it?

It sure is. When people are at least strongly encouraged to remain at home (with it becoming enforceable by law in some places if symptoms reveal themselves) and keep even their family members at a distance, you know we aren’t in a great situation.

It also doesn’t help that there are countless organizations and businesses of all shapes and sizes making the effort to implement remote working practices and strategies. It’s a bit of a mess, but it’ll help to “flatten the curve”--basically, help to make sure we don’t exceed the number of simultaneous, hospital-needed infections that our current systems can support. This will help keep the worst-case scenario more manageable to deal with.

Is remote work really worth all the effort?

Given the current situation, it is more or less the best way for essential businesses to do what they can to help minimize the spread of COVID-19 while still providing their necessary services. As states across the country have suspended on-site operations, businesses that can operate remotely can continue to do so, allowing their employees to continue supporting their families and making this shutdown much easier to sustain for a prolonged period of time.

Business recovery statistics being what they are, 40 percent of businesses that shut down in the face of any disaster never reopen, and of those that do, 25 percent of them fail within a year. Furthermore, overall trends show that 90 percent of businesses last less than two years after a disaster has struck. 

So if remaining open in some form helps you avoid becoming one of these data points, remote work is definitely worth it.

What are some of the biggest concerns and challenges?

Of course, there are plenty of obstacles that you will face, starting with your own hang-ups. We’ll get more into these shortly, but we may as well address some of the other, more external challenges now. 

You may be surprised to find out how many of your employees may initially resist the idea of adding remote work capabilities, as the structure of the workplace and the way they communicate will have to change. Anyone in a management position in your organization may be particularly resistant, as it may seem to them that you are removing the point of their title. 

Some employees may also not have the resources at home to effectively do their job, just in terms of equipment. Even if the willingness to work is there, it becomes exponentially more difficult to perform if lacking the technology to do so. 

Are my employees actually going to do their jobs from home?

More than likely, yes. We’ll get into this more below, but chances are a good employee will continue to take their work seriously. With so much of the workforce being unemployed right now, individuals are probably feeling the pressure. They don’t need that pressure from their employers or managers. If you feel like you have certain individuals that aren’t pulling their weight, it’s probably likely that they weren’t pulling their weight under less trying times.

As a manager or small business owner, it is your responsibility to check in and tackle the challenges of remote work with your staff.

Okay, so what do I need to do to avoid these challenges?

As an employer, there are a few steps you can take.

Provide the Equipment and Infrastructure

In order to permit remote capabilities and other collaborative necessities, your employees will need a reliable means to perform their work-related duties, while at the same time maintaining the security of your infrastructure and its data.

There are a few different ways that this can be accomplished. If they use a laptop in the office, rather than a desktop, their laptop can simply be brought home (assuming it has been equipped with the necessary security features and identify verification requirements) for work to be done on it. Otherwise, secure remote access tools can be used from their approved personal workstations in order to effectively complete their tasks.

The cloud also enables many of these capabilities, as an employee could use their credentials to access data from a cloud storage solution, and use a cloud-based application to complete their tasks from their approved personal device.

Maintain and Update Processes

If you have processes that exist within the office, these processes (or some adaptation of them) should be in place as your employees are working remotely. Don’t cancel meetings because a remote worker is involved--figure out a way to tie them in and incorporate them into your proceedings as usual. If your current processes aren’t a good fit, see what needs to be done to tailor them to be.

It may also help your out-of-office employees stay engaged if you start a new process of reaching out to them directly to check in with them, whether it happens individually, as a group, or some combination of the two. This leads us to our next recommended step...

Insist on Inclusive Communication

As we have established, it is fairly common for remote workers to start to feel isolated and dissociated from their coworkers without sufficient involvement with their activities. Make sure all of your employees know about (and are using) the communication tools available to them during this time. If you have generally strict guidelines for their use, you may even consider temporarily lifting these restrictions and allowing your employees to use them for an increased amount of non-work-related communication with their cohorts. This will help to keep your team working cohesively, despite the distance.

Trust Your Employees

On the topic, don’t assume that your employees need to be babysat in order to effectively work from home. While many employers and managers may assume the opposite, most workers can perform just as well in their home as they could coming into the office itself… if not overwork to accomplish just that much more at home. Unless you have a reason to distrust a member of your staff and are working to address that, make sure that your team doesn’t have to jump through any more extra hoops than are necessary to complete their responsibilities from home. Work with them to make it happen.

What should I tell my employees to do?

When discussing all of this with your team, we recommend that you do the following:

Encourage They Form Habits

Schedules, rituals, whatever they want to call them, set patterns of behavior can help make their transition to remote work easier on them while improving their productivity as they do so. Encouraging a “new normal” for them will be best for the time being, and in trying times, some level of predictability is a welcome thing.

Socialize and Collaborate with Coworkers

As we discussed before, one of the biggest threats that remote workers face is a feeling of isolation, which can have significant influence on their personal lives and professional performance. Keeping your coworkers involved with one another’s work and digitally connected can help counter these feelings.

Insist on Being Involved

Remind your employees that, even as the boss, you are part of the team as well. Reach out to your team members on an individual basis and check in personally if that’s an option for you. Showing that you care may not help the situation much, but it is so much better than doing nothing. A little support can go a surprisingly long way.

In the meantime, MSPNetworks is always here to help support you as your remote team works to keep your business operational. For any IT assistance or collaboration recommendations, don’t hesitate to give us a call at (516) 403-9001.