k_Street Consulting, LLC Blog

k_Street Consulting, LLC has been serving the Washington area since 2009, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

Tips of the Month: Five of the Best Computing Tips

Tips of the Month: Five of the Best Computing Tips

Business is an increasingly digital experience. Let’s face it, we spend a lot of time on our computers, so why not use them like a pro? Here are seven simple tips to make your computer life smoother, faster, and less frustrating.

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Tip of the Month: Create Better Passwords

Tip of the Month: Create Better Passwords

Think about how many online accounts you have. With so many accounts, it’s important to make sure they’re secure. Creating strong passwords is one of the best ways to protect your accounts from hackers. Here’s how you can create passwords that are hard to crack and keep all your online accounts safe.

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Tip of the Month: Setting Up a Powerful Wi-Fi Network

Tip of the Month: Setting Up a Powerful Wi-Fi Network

Every business has to choose how they network their office. Most businesses choose the ease and convenience of wireless networking to allow their employees the freedom to use their mobile devices, IoT tools, and other devices. This month, we look at some of the best tips for setting up your organization’s Wi-Fi network. 

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Tip of the Week: Use Google Lens for Greater Search Functionality

Tip of the Week: Use Google Lens for Greater Search Functionality

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!

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It’s Summer and You Have to Take Care of Your Tech

It’s Summer and You Have to Take Care of Your Tech

Summer is here, and sometimes, your technology pays the price. In today’s blog, we’ll discuss some ways to protect your tech as you travel and enjoy the nice weather.

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Properly Cleaning a Laptop

Properly Cleaning a Laptop

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.

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Explaining Shift Shock: Why Younger Employees Leave Good Jobs

Explaining Shift Shock: Why Younger Employees Leave Good Jobs

You might have noticed that some of your younger workers are leaving your business much earlier than you might expect them to. This could be because of a phenomenon called “shift shock,” which examines employee engagement and satisfaction. Let’s consider how shift shock could potentially harm your business.

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Here’s What We Recommend for SMB Network Security

Here’s What We Recommend for SMB Network Security

Network security is complicated, and as such, you need to have considerable knowledge of it to ensure that your business is as secure as possible against the plethora of threats out there. Thankfully, you don’t have to do it alone. We want to give you some insight into the dos and don’ts of network security.

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Tip of the Week: Use Auto Filter to Sort and Filter Excel Data

Tip of the Week: Use Auto Filter to Sort and Filter Excel Data

Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool for organizing and analyzing data, and its ceiling for mastery is incredibly high. Thankfully, you don’t need to know every little thing about Excel to get value out of it, and thanks to built-in features like Auto Filter, you can still get plenty of value out of it even if you’re not a power user. Let’s go over how you can use Auto Filter to more effectively navigate spreadsheets filled with data.

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Put Your YouTube on Repeat

Put Your YouTube on Repeat

Have you ever wanted to put a YouTube video on repeat for an inordinately long amount of time, perhaps looping on a kiosk or on a conference room tv in the background? There are several ways to do this, including a feature built into YouTube itself and third-party websites. Let’s take a look at both options.

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Tip of the Week: Unfollowing a Facebook Contact

Tip of the Week: Unfollowing a Facebook Contact

Social media can be difficult to navigate due to how overstimulating it can be. Sometimes it is beneficial to unfollow people or pages that are either no longer relevant to you or are not doing anything for your mental health. To help you detox your social media feed a little bit, let’s discuss how you can unfollow someone on Facebook.

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Tip of the Week: Adjust Your Screen Size in Android

Tip of the Week: Adjust Your Screen Size in Android

Sometimes you just want to look at your phone without squinting at the screen to read small text. In cases like this, you can change the display size of your Android’s screen. To get started, simply follow the directions in this blog article. Before you know it, you’ll be browsing your phone without having to strain your eyes.

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Tip of the Week: How to Hide or Remove Desktop Icons

Tip of the Week: How to Hide or Remove Desktop Icons

Your Windows desktop can often get cluttered with icons, so it is helpful to have the ability to show or hide them so you can keep your focus on the task at hand. Let’s discuss how you can do this with your Windows PC.

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Tip of the Week: Useful Google Chrome Shortcuts

Tip of the Week: Useful Google Chrome Shortcuts

We know that time is of the essence, especially in today’s fast-paced work environment. To help you fully leverage the technology at your disposal, we recommend that you read through this list of Google Chrome keyboard shortcuts and take them to heart. You never know when they might come in handy.

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Tip of the Week: Alter Your Download Location in Chrome

Tip of the Week: Alter Your Download Location in Chrome

Normally when you download a file from the Internet, it can be found in the Downloads folder. There are ways you can adjust this setting, though. You might not mind them going to Downloads for a short while, but there are other locations you might consider sending your files, like where they might actually belong. You can change the default location of your downloaded files to take one small step out of the process. We’ll show you how to do it with your Google Chrome web browser.

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Tip of the Week: An Easy Way to Remove Duplicate Values in Excel

Tip of the Week: An Easy Way to Remove Duplicate Values in Excel

How much do you know about Microsoft Excel? There are loads of features that most users aren’t aware of, one of which is the ability to remove duplicate values in columns. Let’s walk you through this process so you can more easily compare data sets between two or more columns within your spreadsheets.

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Learn to Get Through Distractions to Be More Productive

Learn to Get Through Distractions to Be More Productive

Productivity can be a challenging thing to measure and maintain, especially in a world full of distractions. Sometimes the distractions come from the nature of the work itself, and understanding this can become the key to overcoming them. Here are five tips you can use to overcome any workplace distractions and become more productive in the workplace.

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It’s Important Not to Overdo Things When Working from Home

It’s Important Not to Overdo Things When Working from Home

Contrary to what many might assume, remote work is commonly associated with overwork—employees working longer hours and having difficulties disconnecting from professional life during their personal time. This can have some serious consequences if not offset in some way, so let’s discuss how this can be accomplished.

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Tip of the Week: Keep a Clean Computer

Tip of the Week: Keep a Clean Computer

If you think about it, a computer is a machine that is full of complex parts and components. Therefore, if you want it to operate at maximum efficiency, it must be taken care of, like being kept tidy and clean. Let’s discuss how you can make sure this happens for your business technology!

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Tip of the Week: Take the Strain Off Your Eyes with Dark Mode

Tip of the Week: Take the Strain Off Your Eyes with Dark Mode

Sometimes the last thing you want to do is stare at a bright computer screen and have the white glare bother your eyes. While we know that staying away from computers and devices is particularly hard, especially in the office environment, a dark mode option can make your device easier to tolerate for extended periods of time.

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Tip of the Week: Zipping and Unzipping Files

Tip of the Week: Zipping and Unzipping Files

Large files like videos aren’t exactly the ideal attachments for something like an email. There are also cases where you have to send multiple files, some of which may be large, attached to an email, but when the files are too large, this just won’t work. Thankfully, there are some ways around this, one of which is to compress files into a .zip file with a tool found in Windows 10.

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Windows Shortcuts to Help Boost Your Efficiency

Windows Shortcuts to Help Boost Your Efficiency

Some keyboard shortcuts work within applications, but there are others that work all throughout the Windows operating system. To help you be as productive as possible throughout the workday, let’s go over some of the most common keyboard shortcuts that work not only within your applications, but whenever you are just navigating your operating system. If you use these effectively, you can dramatically improve your productivity and look like a Windows master!

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Breaking Down the Konami Code

Breaking Down the Konami Code

Those born in the 80s (as well as some others) will likely recognize
“Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Select-Start” as the Konami Code, a famous cheat code that first appeared in 1986. Since then, the Konami Code has spread, now being featured in software titles and websites. Let’s consider the origins of the Konami Code, and how it has been featured in the zeitgeist.

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7 Technology Terms That End Users Should Know

7 Technology Terms That End Users Should Know

No matter what role you are in at your company, be it management or otherwise, there are certain terms related to technology that you are going to want to be familiar with. Doing so will not only help you make the process of asking for help when it’s needed easier, but it will also help you stay current on business technology in general, leading to more awareness of what goes into a successful business technology strategy. Let’s discuss some of the important technology terms for everyday business operations.

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Tip of the Week: Politely Protect Your Data with Android Guest Mode

Tip of the Week: Politely Protect Your Data with Android Guest Mode

For many people, their mobile device contains a mixture of sensitive information and personal details. In some cases, some of the data isn’t even theirs—instead, it belongs to their workplace. Naturally, this makes many people less inclined to share the use of their device, but most people also want to avoid being rude.

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Tip of the Week: Highlighting Certain Outlook Messages

Tip of the Week: Highlighting Certain Outlook Messages

While no email platform is immune to mismanagement, Microsoft Outlook can quickly become filled with outdated and redundant messages that detract from the communication that it is meant to provide. Fortunately, there is a bit of a hack that you can use in Outlook to help prioritize your most pressing messages. Let’s dive into it.

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Tip of the Week: Essential Information Technology Practices

Tip of the Week: Essential Information Technology Practices

Information technology is a critical tool for many businesses today, which means \\it is crucial that your IT is compliant to a few key best practices. Let’s go over these practices so that you have a roadmap to ensure that your operations can remain secure and productive.

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Tip of the Week: Keeping Track of Changes Made in Excel

Tip of the Week: Keeping Track of Changes Made in Excel

With today’s software solutions, the fact that collaboration is possible has helped many business processes move more efficiently. Despite this, there is also the potential for these solutions to contribute to confusion within your business. Take, for instance, changes people make in Microsoft Excel. Fortunately, Excel offers a means for you to track changes made.

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There’s Scheduling, and Then There’s SMART Scheduling

There’s Scheduling, and Then There’s SMART Scheduling

A schedule has long been the tool of choice for businesses to uphold their productivity, despite the challenges that managing everyone’s schedule can often present. Fortunately, today’s cloud solutions provide a means to overcome these challenges. Let’s explore the idea of smart scheduling and how it can make your entire process so much simpler.

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Tip of the Week: How to Effectively Task Out Goals and Assignments

Tip of the Week: How to Effectively Task Out Goals and Assignments

There is a lot that needs to be done in the typical business each day, and with so many steps involved in each process, it can be difficult to stay on track. Without the right information, it is basically impossible to remain productive. To help keep up your productivity and morale, we’ve put together a guide to help you task out your objectives for this week’s tip.

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Tip of the Week: 5 Ways to Maximize Productivity, According to Experts

Tip of the Week: 5 Ways to Maximize Productivity, According to Experts

In most workspaces and offices, “productivity” is always present on the list of goals. Why settle for one task completed in a set time, when multiple tasks can be completed in the same amount of time without sacrificing the quality of the result? This goal is popular enough for many experts and consultants to have weighed in on. This week, our tip will involve a basic overview of some such strategies so you may consider them.

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Tip of the Week: Working with PDF Files

Tip of the Week: Working with PDF Files

Portable Document Format files (better known as PDFs) have become incredibly common as a means to save documents in a constant and consistent format that can be viewed on just about any device. They also allow users to make some simple changes to make it even easier to review the data they contain. Here, we’ll go over a few options for this year’s first tips.

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Tip of the Week: How to Utilize Your Business’ Email

Tip of the Week: How to Utilize Your Business’ Email

Email seems to be a pretty basic workplace tool, but like any tool, there are many ways to use it. From sending emails to managing tasks and messages from your inbox, let’s discuss a few tips and best practices to help you use your email like a true professional.

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Tip of the Week: Enabling Smart Compose on Gmail for Android

Tip of the Week: Enabling Smart Compose on Gmail for Android

As we have opened our lives to technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, it would seem that the beneficial predictions made in science fiction are more likely to become fact. Many of these technologies have actually manifested in some of the smallest, but most useful, ways. For this week’s tip, we’ll learn how to leverage Gmail’s predictive Smart Compose feature on Android.

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How to Use YouTube’s Full Capabilities for Your Business

How to Use YouTube’s Full Capabilities for Your Business

We all know how to use YouTube… find video, click video, watch video. Simple, right?

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Tip of the Week: 4 Tech Questions, Answered

Tip of the Week: 4 Tech Questions, Answered

Have you ever thought about why we use certain techniques to get the most out of our technology? Believe it or not, there is often a rhyme and a reason for why certain tactics are most useful for business technology solutions. We’ll try to get to the bottom of some of the strangest questions you might have about how to use your business technology.

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How to Get the Right Cloud Solution for Your Business

How to Get the Right Cloud Solution for Your Business

As technology has become a greater part of today’s working environment, the need for a business to have somewhere to procure the requisite devices from has increased. This is why many businesses serve as vendors, the go-between for the producers of these devices and the businesses looking to purchase them. For obvious reasons, these vendors are essential to the success of many businesses.

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Tip of the Week: 4 Really Simple Tips for the Computer Novice

Tip of the Week: 4 Really Simple Tips for the Computer Novice

If you work with a computer, you know that if you can find shortcuts, you use them. Not only do they help you be more productive by making your tasks easier to complete, they can actually help you be MORE effective at completing those tasks. Today, we have four simple tips that can help you build better computer skills.

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Tip of the Week: How to Replicate and Relocate Text Easily

Tip of the Week: How to Replicate and Relocate Text Easily

Sometimes, things are written in the wrong place. Fortunately, there are means of moving them if they happened to be written using a computer. These processes are relatively very simple and are so commonly used that the shortcuts are right next to each other on the keyboard. For today’s tip, we’ll review how you can cut, copy, and paste content in effectively any program you use.

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Tip of the Week: Three Pro Business Tips

Tip of the Week: Three Pro Business Tips

While running a business can be quite rewarding on a professional level, it can be extremely challenging, with countless obstacles to overcome--particularly in regard to technology and its management. Thankfully, there are ways your business can minimize the pain of managing technology. Here are just a few of them.

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Tip of the Week: Using Templates in Evernote

Tip of the Week: Using Templates in Evernote

The note-taking application Evernote is a favorite of many users, as it allows them to keep extensive notes in an organized fashion. Its true utility goes beyond that of a digital scratch pad, however, as it has additional features that offer much more. For this week’s tip, we’ll review one particularly useful feature: templates.

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Tip of the Week: 2 Free Tools That Will Read Your Text for You

Tip of the Week: 2 Free Tools That Will Read Your Text for You

For the busy business owner, audiobooks are a godsend. They’re the perfect way to intake information while performing a must-do task that doesn’t require you to think, like commuting or folding laundry. But what’s an audiobook aficionado to do if they’ve got a book or document that they want to listen to that hasn’t been made into an audiobook?

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Tip of the Week: How to Use Tabs to Their Full Potential

Tip of the Week: How to Use Tabs to Their Full Potential

Tabbed browsing--it’s so commonplace that some might not even think about what it was like to use the Internet before tabs became a thing. Believe it or not, even this seemingly simple feature has a lot of depth to it. There are all sorts of tips and tricks that you can use to better use the tabbing features of your favorite web browser.

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Tip of the Week: 10 Technology Practices To Improve Business As Usual

Tip of the Week: 10 Technology Practices To Improve Business As Usual

In a business, some jobs belong to certain people: managers make sure that work is done when it needs to be, human resources make sure the workforce is accounted for, and so on. However, some jobs belong to everyone in the modern workplace who works with technology, For our tip of the week, we’ll go over some of these shared responsibilities.

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Tip of the Week: Drag and Drop Between Android and Windows

Tip of the Week: Drag and Drop Between Android and Windows

Smartphones have proven to be excellent devices for enhancing an employee’s ability to be productive while mobile. However, this approach often means that company work is now on an employee’s mobile device, instead of on your network. This issue can be easily resolved if the mobile device in question runs the Android OS. We’ll go over how for this week’s tip.

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Tip of the Week: Using Your Smartphone More Effectively in Five Ways

Tip of the Week: Using Your Smartphone More Effectively in Five Ways

It’s getting to the point where most people have a smartphone, even if they shouldn’t necessarily have one. If you go all-in on a device like this to boost your productivity and efficiency, then you know how difficult it can be at times. We’re here to provide you with some tips to help you better take advantage of your smart device.

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Tip of the Week: How to Transfer Apps to a New Phone

Tip of the Week: How to Transfer Apps to a New Phone

There is little that is more satisfying than obtaining a new phone. However, this sense of satisfaction is often undermined by the need to get your applications and data to ensure that your new device has everything you normally use installed. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a method of making this process easier on an Android phone.

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Know Your Tech: Breadcrumbs

Know Your Tech: Breadcrumbs

A trail of breadcrumbs can be a useful thing, whether you’re using it like Hansel and Gretel to find their way back home, or you’re using it in computing to find your way back to a page you were previously on. Today’s tech term is dedicated to the latter.

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The Best Way to Approach Data Backup

The Best Way to Approach Data Backup

All businesses hope that they’ll never have to use their data backup and disaster recovery plan, but the point stands that each business should have one, just in case of a worst-case scenario. For a small business with a limited budget, the prospect of investing in a solution they might never need is daunting. To help you get started, we’ve put together a couple of basic backup practices that you should keep in mind for your business.

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Tip of the Week: 4 Social Taboos Smartphone Users Should Never Break

b2ap3_thumbnail_bad_cell_phone_etiquitte_400.jpgCellphone etiquette goes hand-in-hand with common sense. Here are four cellphone etiquette tips that every device owner should know.

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Tip of the Week: How to Save Your Keyboard After Spilling Your Drink On It

b2ap3_thumbnail_keyboard_cleaning_400.jpgYou know that you shouldn’t keep a beverage near your computer, but how good are you at actually abiding by this best practice? Due to the busyness of our modern lives, it’s likely that most office workers eat more meals at their computer than away from it. Inevitably, this will lead to a drink spilt on your keyboard, which can put you in a rather sticky situation.

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Tip of the Week: Adjust Windows 10’s Privacy Settings to Keep Your Information Secure

b2ap3_thumbnail_windows_10_privacy_400.jpgIt would be prudent to begin by saying that Windows 10 is far and away the most refined version of Windows ever created. In a lot of ways, it's like using a souped-up version of Windows 7, with a sprinkling of Windows 8/8.1 metro on top. Beneath the surface, however, is a vast information-collecting infrastructure that has many users left worried about their privacy. There are even conspiracy theories suggesting that Windows 10 is a vessel used by the NSA in order to collect all the information on every user.

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Tip of the Week: Freeze an Excel Row for Easier Spreadsheet Navigation

b2ap3_thumbnail_excel_sheets_400.jpgMany office workers feel like they live in Microsoft Excel, spending hours using spreadsheets to enter data and crunch numbers. By taking advantage of tools like Excel’s freeze feature, workers can make the most of their time by navigating a spreadsheet more efficiently.

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Tip of the Week: 3 New Tricks to Teach Your Old Computer Mouse

b2ap3_thumbnail_mouse_wheel_click_400.jpgThe computer mouse has been a staple in the modern office for many years. Despite its proven usefulness, it’s now threatened by the growing adaptation of touchscreen devices in the workplace. Are you considering trading in your trusty mouse? Before you do, consider these three mouse scroll wheel tricks that make your boring old mouse more useful.

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Tip of the Week: 5 Ways to Power Up Your WiFi Signal

b2ap3_thumbnail_boost_your_wifi_signal_400.jpgA strong WiFi signal is imperative to the success of your company. If your business has a reliable signal in every part of your office and home, let the productivity commence; but if it’s spotty in some areas of your office, you might want to consider a signal extension. It could make working much easier for both yourself and your entire team.

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Never Lift a Style Guide Again With Microsoft Word’s Built-In Citation Machine

b2ap3_thumbnail_Microsoft-Word-Logo.jpgDespite what many people think, Microsoft Word is far from a normal word processor. Microsoft has thrown all sorts of nifty new toys in there for its consumers to enjoy, such as a built-in citation machine for all of your research needs. When writing a white paper, you want to use specific examples and you want to give others credit when it is due. That's the only professional way to do it.

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5 Awesome Keyboard Shortcuts that Nobody Knows About

b2ap3_thumbnail_scuts400.jpgThe computer mouse is a great tool that has made our operating system navigation much easier. However, our dependence on the computer mouse has naturally led to an independence from its counterpart, the keyboard (aside from everyday word processing). Here are a few awesome functional keyboard shortcuts that everyone has forgotten about.

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