MSPNetworks Blog

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.

As unfortunate as it is to hear, science has pretty definitely kyboshed the notion that multitasking works. However, while multitasking may not actually have any true benefits to productivity, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any ways to accomplish more in less time. Today, we’ll give you a better option than multitasking, a process known as parallelism.