Tip of the Week: Microsoft Word Features You May Not Have Known About

 If your business utilizes Microsoft Word in any way, shape, or form, there’s a good chance that you aren’t using it to its full capabilities. Let’s go over just a few of the features that the software offers that can assist you in excelling (whoops… wrong Office application) in your day-to-day responsibilities, and how to put them to use.

Focus Mode

There are times that the Microsoft Word interface—packed with utility and features as it is—can be a distraction to your workflows. Fortunately, Microsoft Word has a means to remove this source of distraction from your display: Focus Mode.

Activating Focus Mode effectively wipes away the interface from the top of your screen, allowing you to focus exclusively on the content that you are producing. In the View menu, go to the Immersive section and click on Focus to activate Focus Mode. Your interface will disappear leaving only the document you're working on. When in Focus Mode, you can also change the background of your document workspace to a color that better suits your needs.

To exit out of Focus Mode, simply hover your cursor near the top of the screen to call the interface back up. Selecting Focus again will return your display to normal.

Immersive Reader

The Immersive Reader button appears right next to the Focus button and is intended to make reading a document more accessible by temporarily changing text size and formatting to suit the reader’s unique needs. You can even have your text automatically broken up by its different syllables if need be.

Of course, some people comprehend what they are reading better if they can listen to it, which Immersive Reader also enables through its Read Aloud functionality. With full control over the voice that is reading, what in the document is being read, and how quickly it is being read out, this makes it much simpler for people with different productivity styles to succeed the way they do best.

Inserting an Online Video

Sometimes, multimedia is just what a document needs to be particularly engaging, and if you have a video on YouTube or Vimeo in mind that you want to include, Word provides a simple means of doing so. Under the Insert Menu, you’ll find Online Video. Clicking this will enable you to paste in a link to insert the video clip into your document.

This video can be moved around and resized as you see fit and can be played within the document itself.

Admittedly, these capabilities may not be the ones you use the most out of what Word has to offer but can certainly be helpful to know at the right time. What other programs or solutions would you like to see more tips about? Let us know in the comments!

The Internet is Very Different From Place to Place

 While it seems decidedly commonplace nowadays, the Internet is undeniably a miracle of the modern age—shrinking the world in a way never seen before. Of course, this has complicated things considerably in terms of the rules that the Internet must comply with, based on regional regulations. Let’s reexamine the impact that these laws, regulations, and restrictions have had on how the Internet appears across the globe.

How the Internet is Dictated by Politics

Geopolitical considerations have had a ton of influence over the way that the Internet has been shaped—something that runs more or less counter to the foundational idea of the world wide web. Seeing as how critical the Internet is to modern society, is it so surprising that some governments want to impose their own will over it?

Of course not, which is why we see the following events and more happening all the time:

• The United States government has considered blocking TikTok and WeChat, as they are hosted in China.
• The Indian government has blocked dozens of applications (including these two) for similar reasons and are now looking critically at Twitter.
• The Australian government was at odds with Facebook over a proposed law, leading to Facebook changing its functionality in the country until an agreement was struck.

These Internet companies and the disputes they have with these governments have made it so that the Internet is notably different depending on the region you are accessing it from. The global spread of nationalism over the past decade has only made these differences even more pronounced.

The Changes

Consider Facebook: when it first went global, so many people were given a taste of freedom that some societies had never had—only to have some nations (like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China) immediately restrict this access. Regardless, Facebook spread around the world at a pace rarely before seen.

However, all these years and countless Facebook-inspired headlines later, many countries are clearly having second thoughts about these companies having so much influence and actively working to rein them in.

Let’s consider the situation in Australia. When the country’s government passed a law that was meant to require technology firms and social networking platforms (notably, Facebook) to pay for the privilege to share certain content, many news organizations and charities found their ability to use the platform hindered. While a short-term solution was agreed upon, the underlying concerns regarding Internet governance remain.

Could Global Regulations be Incoming?

Many have taken up the call for a unified standard in terms of Internet use and regulation, but any progress towards this end has been slow. It certainly doesn’t help that the Internet is a more critical aspect of everyday life in some countries over others, and so there are financial motivations in play to complicate whatever standards may be suggested.

But what do you think? Should the Internet be treated as a global resource, standardized by one set of rules? Should individual nation-states have different amounts of power over the use of the Internet within their borders? Let us know what you think so we can keep the conversation going.

A.I. Can Sell Pastries and Diagnose Cancer

 Artificial intelligence is one of the most intriguing technologies that has come down the pike. For the small and medium-sized business, it may seem more like science fiction than a solution to their business’ operational problems. Today, AI is more accessible for the SMB than ever, and today, we thought we would share with you a situation where the technology—designed to help out in a bakery—is being used to diagnose cancer. 

Why Would a Bakery Use AI in the First Place?

In Japan, where the technology was developed, they have a lot of cafeteria-style restaurants. An AI-aided software was developed to automate the role of cashier. Instead of having a human cashier on staff to count out the shopper’s selections at checkout, an attendant simply instructs customers to place the baked goods they want to buy out on the counter. Once they are ready to check out, the whole process takes seconds. The AI effectively identifies the pastries, calculates the price owed and calculates a total for the customer. This allows each customer to be rang up much more quickly.

By streamlining the process with automation, these Japanese bakeries, which usually carry large selections of items, were able to check out more people and it increased their revenue. It also cut down on the packaging required as the AI would identify each individual pastry. The development of this AI-integrated application was spearheaded by BRAIN Co. Called BakeryScan, it is now in over 400 retail establishments in Japan and costs around $20,000 to deploy. 

By the way: if you’re worried about the prospect of unwrapped baked goods being sold in the past year or so, the technology has since improved to recognize pastries through protective wrapping just as accurately.

This technology has obvious benefits for retail organizations, but what you won’t expect is that nearly the same software could find another use: Diagnosing cancer.

A doctor at Kyoto’s Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research saw a segment on TV and the connection was made. Turns out that some baked goods look similar to some cancer cells observed through a microscope. Making an association with the utility of the BakeryScan AI, it was repurposed as AI-Scan, a medical tool. 

AI-Scan can spot differences in cancerous urinary cells with its Cyto-AiSCAN offshoot (with accuracy measuring over 99 percent), and has been adopted for many other purposes. Today, organizations are using it to distinguish pill types, one company uses it to identify bolts and other fasteners that may have some problem. Toyota has also started using the technology to help design more effective airbags. 

This gives you a good idea about how AI is being adopted to further the technology used to improve the outlook for humanity, but it can also be used to help your business. Today, there are a number of software solutions that have integrated an AI or machine learning system that can help you streamline processes or, like AI-Scan, change the way you view your business.

Why Every Business Should Seriously Consider Virtualization as an Option

 Business hardware is never a small investment to make, so for a business to make the best use out of their invested funds, their hardware needs to be seriously considered. One way to do so is to use a virtualized environment, whether that environment is hosted onsite or in the cloud. Let’s consider the inherent benefits of virtualization.

The Shift in Business Computing

It wasn’t all that long ago that a business’ options were limited. Smaller businesses that wanted to expand their infrastructures had to purchase a new server and use it for a specific purpose. Given the hardware, data, and application control this gives the organization, it makes the most sense for a business with an IT support team onsite—assuming the business has a budget that can support it.

This is because a server used in this way doesn’t make use of its full capabilities. With each server dedicated to a single, specific purpose, there are a lot of resources potentially going to waste each time. However, in a virtualized environment, this hardware can be used for multiple processes, helping to vastly reduce the investment needed to support them all.

How Does Virtualization Work?

Instead of dedicating an entire server to each application you’re hosting, several virtual servers can share the resources on one piece of hardware. This means that the same processes that would once require four separate servers could now be accomplished with one.

Some Benefits of Virtualization

While virtualization does bring some significant up-front costs, the overall reduction in hardware costs can make these expenses worth it for many organizations, with the added accessibility this strategy provides serving as a nice externality. Not only can you reduce the infrastructure required to support your processes, but you can also reduce the need for your entire team to congregate into one place. These factors can combine to help result in hardware cost reductions ranging from 40-to-60 percent, with the cost of management, business utilities, and maintenance also reducing.

Businesses can then take these cost savings and reinvest them into forward-thinking initiatives while also making use of their improved capabilities. With new environments able to be created in mere minutes, and backups and security management consolidated substantially, efficiency is gained.

Cloud-Based Company Benefits

A virtualized environment can also be hosted in a bigger virtualized environment, as cloud resources are now more accessible, affordable, and secure than ever before. Pairing the benefits of cloud and virtualization can deliver even more substantial advantages for the cost of a modicum of data control.

Profiting Off Your IT Investments

 Revenue generation is the name of the game for every business and sometimes technology is looked on as more of a hindrance to profitability than a tool to cultivate it. To turn this notion around, a business needs to make strategic investments that will return some type of benefit, whether that be the availability of alternate revenue streams, a boost in productivity, improved collaboration, and more. Today, let’s take a look at some ways that businesses can invest in their IT and improve their profitability as a result. 

Using IT to Boost Operational Efficiency

One of the things technology is great at doing is making inefficient systems more efficient. Today, many of the problems small and medium-sized businesses have are that they lack the efficiency in their human resources to make gains on the balance sheet. Automation can change any business’ fortunes in this regard.

Think about it this way, one of your employees has to produce something in order to be viable, right? If half of that person’s job is working on the business, whether it be small mundane and repetitive tasks that waste their focus or their time, or if they are being asked to support the same product they are charged with creating, they won’t be nearly as productive as they should be (or they would like to be). Go on like this for a while and anyone can be frustrated.

By automating some of the things they do--that is, using computer-run systems to take over those mundane and repetitive tasks--they will be able to truly focus on the job you hired them for, and therefore you can expect a happier, more productive person. Additionally, all those little tasks that kept them from being more productive will be done without error, every time, building efficiency and keeping downtime to a minimum. 

Subscribe to Business Services

The technology your business uses is expensive, this much is true. Servers, workstations, networking: they all cost an arm and a leg to purchase, but also to monitor and maintain properly. One way that the modern SMB can avoid these massive capital expenditures is to utilize the numerous IT-related services at their disposal. 

Considering cloud computing is a great way to start. Today there are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings that require next to zero capital expense. You can get all the computing and services from cloud vendors and you will pay per month or per gigabyte for them. This means that your business’ computing resources can be an operational expense, easier to budget, and available from anywhere on nearly any device. 

For those companies that like to have their IT onsite, outsourcing your IT support and management to a managed service provider (MSP) is a great way to get all the value of having a dedicated IT staff, at a fraction of the cost. Not only does the MSP keep your technology running effectively, minimizing downtime, it also offers a myriad of useful services including backup and disaster recovery, patch management, vendor management, and more. If you want to take a chunk out of your IT support costs, while maximizing your business’ ability to function by reducing downtime, managed IT services are a great option for any SMB.

Considering the Current State of Phishing

 We will never pass up the opportunity to draw attention to the importance of cybersecurity awareness, as it is a crucial element for any business to consider. One serious issue that has caused significant stress amongst businesses is phishing. Let’s consider some recent statistics to evaluate where we stand right now, specifically in terms of the prevalence of phishing attacks.

What is Phishing, Again?

Let’s break down the basic idea of a phishing attack (if only briefly):

Rather than relying on fancy coding or malware, a phishing attack targets the user to try to fool them into handing over their credentials, financial information, and other valuable and sensitive data rather than undermining their technology in some way.

These attacks are, in a word, effective… and in another word, prevalent. After all, around the world, a full 88 percent of organizations experienced a direct phishing attack (known as spear phishing) in 2019—which actually marked a decline in phishing’s popularity amongst cybercriminals. In 2020, phishing resurged once again to make up approximately one of every 4,200 emails or so sent, and Google has registered over two million phishing sites as of January 17th of this year (compared to just over 1.6 million at the same point the year prior).

These attacks have resulted in lost and stolen data, compromised accounts, malware and ransomware infections, and of course financial losses.

Unsurprisingly, Phishing Has Exploded

While phishing has always been an issue, the events of 2020 made it particularly impactful. 75 percent of organizations worldwide were targeted by phishing of some kind over the year, while 74 percent of United States organizations were successfully attacked. Considering the cost that phishing attacks can incur for a business—$3.92 million on average—and the variety of ways that these costs are incurred, phishing can safely be referred to as one of the biggest issues that businesses face on a regular basis right now.

Naturally, this is not good, and strongly suggests that more needs to be done to help prevent successful phishing attacks from taking place.