As the seasons change throughout the year, we must adapt to the frequent changes in temperature and weather conditions. This might mean turning off the heat and opening the windows on a warm day, only to have to close them again the following day. Or you may find yourself donning and removing your jacket several times throughout any given day. Maybe you even put away your snow shovel and woke up the next day in the midst of a snowfall.

With software, these types of changes also need to occur; not seasonally, but by task. We have gathered some tips to help you get your software application windows to behave the way you want so you can quickly switch gears.

Tips compiled by PC Helps staff.

What Is the Windows Key Used For?

Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7

Have you ever wondered about that strange key between the Ctrl and Alt keys on the left side of your keyboard? It is commonly known as the Windows key, and can be used in conjunction with other keys to perform a variety of useful tasks.

First and foremost, it will open the Start menu; all you have to do is press it. Press it a second time to close the Start menu. Here are a few of its other uses: Read more…

Jenny Sweeney How To Excel, PowerPoint, Windows, Word

They say March Madness is the great workplace productivity killer. There’s a worse one: corrupted files. Often, when our callers reach us, they are just about to begin the onerous task of recreating damaged files from scratch. To that we say: “Hold on a minute!”

Here are some of the methods our tech support folks recommend before you retype:

They say March Madness is the great workplace productivity killer. There’s a worse one: corrupted files.

Using Open and Repair in Excel (2002, 2003, 2007, 2010)

If you open a file and notice something is amiss, or you simply cannot open the file at all, there might be a problem with the structure of the file itself. This is known as “corruption.” It is a generic term used to describe files that are no longer working correctly. If you think your file is shot, give the Open and Repair utility a try. It might save you from having to recreate the entire file.

Starting the process is slightly different depending on your version of Excel. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney How To Access, corruption, Excel, open and repair, PowerPoint, Project, Word

Hyperlinks make the world go ’round. They get us where we’re going more quickly and they help us present information in less time. Here are a few linking tips from our tech support consultants. Enjoy!

4 top tips for adding hyperlinks.

Creating a Hyperlink to Another Presentation or Web Page (Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, 2007, 2010)

During a slide show, you may find you need to either launch another presentation or access a web page. Here’s how you do it:

PowerPoint 2003 and older:

1. In your presentation, click an object or text that you want to use as the jumping off point or shortcut.
2. Click on the Insert menu and choose Hyperlink, or press Ctrl+K.
3. Enter the Web address or path and filename.
4. Click OK. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney How To, Time-Saving Tips Excel, hyperlinks, PowerPoint, Word

Although I truly cherish the Martha Stewart Makes Cookies app for iPad, it’s not quite up there on the list of top apps for business productivity. If you are using your iPad for work, you are more likely to need software like Keynote and Pages. The key to using these apps is knowing how to get your documents from Point A to Point B; that is, from iPad to main computer or vice versa.

Here are some tips:

Export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC

1. Connect your iPad to your PC or Mac. In iTunes, select your iPad from the Devices list.
2. Select the Apps tab from your iPad Settings window.
3. Scroll down to the File Sharing section. Select Keynote from the apps list. You will now see a list of all the Keynote presentations on your iPad. Select the one you want to transfer to your computer, and click the Save To button.
4. Browse to the folder on your hard drive where you want to save the presentation. Select it and then click the Choose button.
5. Your file will be copied.

Import presentations to Keynote on iPad

1. Connect your iPad to your PC or Mac. In iTunes, select your iPad from the Devices list.
2. Select the Apps tab from your iPad Settings window.
3. Scroll down to the File Sharing section, and select Keynote from apps list. In the Keynote Documents section you’ll see a list of presentations available in Keynote on the iPad.
4. Select the Add button.
5. Navigate to the presentation you want to copy to your iPad to edit or view in Keynote for the iPad. Keep in mind that with Keynote for iPad, you can edit only Keynote 2009 or PowerPoint presentations.
6. Select your file and click Choose.
7. Your presentation will now appear in the Keynote Documents section.
8. Launch Keynote on your iPad and tap the icon that looks like a down-pointing arrow and a square bracket (it should be at the bottom of the screen in the center). Choose “Copy from iTunes.”
9. Select the PowerPoint presentation you just uploaded to your iPad.
10. Keynote will now import your uploaded presentation.
11. Depending on the presentation, you may get a warning about incompatible fonts or other features that will slightly change the look of the presentation. Click “Done” to get past the screen, and check your presentation to be sure.

Import documents to Pages on iPad Read more…

Jenny Sweeney How To, iPad, Time-Saving Tips cookies, Keynote, Martha Stewart, MS Word, Pages, PowerPoint

Christmas came early for me — in the form of an iPad, which I get to play with for two weeks thanks to my employer. It’s not all playtime; the whole point of borrowing it from my employer is so I can learn how to use it and thus offer tech support for it. I’ve had worse assignments.

I’m accustomed to a full keyboard, and my ham hands haven’t worked well with the touch keyboard.

I was giddy when I heard I was getting my mitts on it. I’ve resisted buying one, convincing myself that throwing down $500 to $800 for something just because it’s “neat” is not reason enough. I’m not in the sales or medical fields, either. My jobs — tech support and writing — do not require that I own one, but I suspect I will soon find reason enough to.

With this is mind, I begin my experiment. I’m taking a week-long trip (for pleasure, not business) and I am leaving the laptop at home and instead conducting all my work-that-I-shouldn’t-be-doing-while-vacationing solely on the iPad. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney iPad, Mac iPad, Keynote, PowerPoint

If there’s one thing to be said about Microsoft Office 2010, it’s that it’s poised to be a success. The year 2010 isn’t even over and corporations already are upgrading to the new version. (History has shown that a new version usually takes a few years to catch on, especially in business.)

In reality, business cannot be put on hold while users adjust to a new software version.

At PC Helps, the Office 2010 calls have quickly increased from a trickle to a stream. Most are coming from customers whose IT departments skipped an Office 2007 migration and were holding out for 2010. As with 2003-to-2007 migrations, 2003-to-2010 promises to throw a few challenges the way of end users and IT departments. Adjusting to the new ribbon interface is often the first obstacle. Once users adjust, plenty more follow.

Below we present the top five end user challenges so your IT department knows what to expect during the migration crunch. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney migration, Mobile Devices, Office 2010 Access, computerworld, Excel, Gartner, IT department, NetworkWorld, Outlook, pitfalls, PowerPoint, the Ribbon, user interface, Word

One of our consultants at work.

Our help desk handles many “how to” calls, which often have straightforward solutions. Sometimes, however, the requests that come in require a little more creativity from our consultants.

On a recent call, consultant Bradley Lyman found an ingenious way around a potential hurdle.

Lyman received a call from a customer asking for help copying a YouTube video for a presentation. There was one snag, however; the customer did not have rights to use the video. His presentation, which he was scheduled to show to an auditorium full of people, would be incomplete without a video of a juggler.

The presentation was due, and getting rights would have been a challenge.

Lyman wasted no time, and tapped fellow consultant Jorg Freiberg and team leader Ken Wilson for help. Lyman remembered seeing Freiberg juggling on his breaks and knew that Wilson had just bought a new iPhone with a video camera. The result was a copyright-free juggling video, which was produced and delivered to the customer in under an hour. File that under “Above and Beyond.” (Jen Darr)

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

Jenny Sweeney Consultant Spotlight, Customer Service above and beyond, iPhone, juggling, PowerPoint, YouTube

Consider the following scenario: The entire staff of an elementary school was recently upgraded to Office 2007. When Teacher A began creating a new lesson in PowerPoint, which is something she does on a regular basis, she couldn’t figure out how to align her text.

After more than an hour of trial and error Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Computer Literacy, Office 2007, ROI, Worker Productivity Cat Stevens, Help Desk, Office 2007, PowerPoint, ROI, software support, Worker Productivity

The Obama Administration today announced that it has appointed Edward Tufte to the US Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. Tufte, a Yale professor and author who is probably best known as a PowerPoint hater, will serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, which will track and explain to the masses just what is being done with the $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds.

PowerPoint style “routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content.”

This is good news for the obvious reasons – because he believes in transparency and accountability – but also because he is such an information purist. Perhaps some of his presentation principles will rub off on corporate workers.

A little background: Tufte’s article, titled “PowerPoint is Evil” and published in Wired in 2003, should be required reading for the c-suite, if not business majors. In it, he laments the fact that PowerPoint doesn’t serve as a supplement to presentations, as it promises; rather, it has replaced them.

Tufte continues by saying that the PowerPoint style “routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content.” He even compares it to Stalin.

He offers a colorful metaphor:

“Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.”

Tufte’s piece is funny, and you could say it’s a bit impassioned, but think of the presentations you have sat through, or the ones you’ve forced upon your colleagues.  Many workers would benefit from a little PowerPoint training, at the very least.

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

Jenny Sweeney PowerPoint, This Week in Tech News c-suite, CIOs, Edward Tafte, IT leaders, PowerPoint, President Obama, Wired, Yale

Every workplace has an office tech expert. Someone who knows how to use Excel formulas, can put up a good fight with a gnarly mail merge, and knows what temp files are and why they should be cleared.

They’re valuable people to have on your team. If only more of your employees were so clever with the computer, your business would hum.

Shadow support may seem harmless, but it’s actually taking two employees away from their jobs. That’s double-downtime.

Unfortunately, not everyone’s strength is software or logic — and that’s just fine. (I can’t do my own taxes; that’s why I outsource it to my mother.) However, you cannot continue relying on the office computer guy forever. As much as he saves your office’s collective rear-end on a regular basis, the time he’s spending doing something other than his job is costing you dearly.

There are two types of downtime: unavoidable and avoidable. Unavoidable downtime includes hardware malfunctions or network connectivity problems — problems that will always exist and are really just part of running an IT infrastructure.

Avoidable downtime is where the office expert comes in, and includes shadow support, self-help, and no help at all. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney ROI, Worker Productivity Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, downtime, Excel, mail merge, PowerPoint, productivity, TCO