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A database is an incredibly useful tool for organizing a lot of information in a relatively concise and accessible way. Did you know that you can use a relatively common program, Microsoft Excel, to generate a database for your business to use? For this week’s tip, we’ll walk you through this process to help you keep your data organized.

Step One: Enter Your Data
Opening Excel, your first step should be to enter the data that is to be included in your database - however, it is important that you do this correctly. If you are using a title, the only space between any of your inputs should be a row between the title and the data you are organizing. This includes empty cells, so you’ll want to make sure you determine a standardized placeholder to avoid any of your cells being unpopulated. This “no space” rule applies to the labels on your records and fields in relation to your data as well.

Records and Fields
In your new database, each row should represent an individual record, with each column serving as its own field.

• Each record should pertain to a single item in the database. Depending on what your database is organizing, this could be a specific piece of equipment in the office, or a particular employee… essentially, any single unit out of the contents of the database.
• Each field, on the other hand, dictates what information about the item is to be placed in the cell. This might be the price a certain item had, the date it was brought into the company, an employee’s middle initial… again, whatever piece of data should be the one in that particular column.
• Make sure you are consistent in how you input your data. For instance, don’t start by entering numbers as digits and suddenly transition to writing them out.

This will require you to set particular standards for data collection, as you will want to be sure that your records are as complete as possible. You will also need to stick to this organizational pattern, so you will want to make sure that you figure out what works for you early on.

Step Two: Convert Your Data into a Table
Now, you will want to create a table out of your data. To begin, highlight your data, with exception to your optional title and the placeholder space that separated it from the data. In the Home tab, open the Format as Table menu to select your choice of table.

This will add drop-down boxes to the field titles, allowing you to sort your data by the criteria you wish, without the concern that your data will be lost.

Step Three: Expanding Your Database and Putting It to Use
Of course, chances are that you will need to change the contents of the table, adding more records as your business continues. Excel makes it relatively simple to do so, with a simple click-and-drag interface.

To expand your table, simply hover over the bottom-right corner of your table, as indicated by a small dot. Your cursor should convert into the double-headed arrow icon. Click and drag downward to add the number of rows - or records - you have to incorporate into your table. Then all you have to do is add the new data in the proper fields, and your table has expanded.

Of course, as your database grows, it’ll become harder and harder to interpret due to information overload. At least, it would if Microsoft hadn’t incorporated a means to rectify this shortcoming as well. You can filter the data that your table displays, hiding the records that don’t apply to the criteria you set your filters to. Mind you, this doesn’t delete the data - you can easily display it again by clearing your filters.

To use your filters, click the drop-down arrow on the field category that you wish to filter through. You will see a few options, with a search bar and some checkbox options below it that specify each entry in that column. You want to uncheck the (Select All) option, and instead check the checkbox option that correlates with the data you want to view specifically. Once you’re ready to see your complete data, you can go back in and select the Clear Filter from option.

This is a very basic version of a database, but it can help serve you well in many ways. Are there any other uses you’d like to know about, let us know! Leave your questions in the comments, and for help with any of your bigger IT concerns, give us a call at (516) 403-9001!

Quick question for you: how many email accounts do you have? How many do you have to regularly check? How many different platforms do they utilize? If there’s too many, important communications are easy to miss in the ensuing mess of messages. Fortunately, there are a few ways that this can be avoided, which we’ll review for this week’s tip.

How Many Emails Do You Need?
Depending on your office’s organization style, there may be a fair chance that you have to juggle multiple email addresses. You may have one that you use internally, one that’s client-facing, and one to interact with your vendors. However, we do have to address how many messages this could wind up being. You and your team are responsible for more than just checking emails, after all, so you don’t have the time to log into each email account you have in order to do so.

Fortunately, your email platform of choice will have the capability to handle each of these emails from each provider. First, we need to set some terminology straight:

Understanding Email
When we refer to an email account, we’re talking about the individual address used. For instance, if your organization has a branded email address, “” and “” are two different accounts.

An email client, on the other hand, it the program that you choose to use to read your emails, like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail. If these clients are stored on a single server, you can use them more or less interchangeably, as all of your emails will appear in each client.

However, this doesn’t help you if you have too many accounts to keep track of… at least, not without exercising the capabilities of your chosen email client.

Utilizing Multiple Inboxes
Those responsible for developing these email clients understand that there are assorted reasons that a user isn’t going to be tied to a single email account or provider. As a result, email clients are now designed to support multiple inboxes. This means that, if properly configured, a user can access one email client and check multiple email accounts, dividing them into folders (or combined into one large group, if so desired).

Utilizing Multiple Personalities in a Central Inbox
Alternatively, if you don’t mind the idea of using a single inbox to hold all of your correspondence but still want to respond with multiple addresses, you can use a different method. This method will collect all of your messages into a single inbox, while allowing you to select which email address (sometimes known as a personality) your response comes from.

First, you will need to set up an email with an address that you never give out. This mailbox will be the central catch-all. Then, you need to set all of the accounts you have in use to forward to that mailbox (ask your internal IT resource for help). Pretty simple so far, right?

However, you still aren’t quite done. After all, you want to be able to respond to these emails with the address that they were originally sent to, right? This is where the personalities we mentioned above come into play. Basically, your email client allows you to change the address that appears in the From: box to whichever email address is appropriate for that correspondence.

Adding Inboxes and Personalities to Your Email Client
Of course, each email client has a somewhat different approach to adjusting these settings:

Gmail
To set up multiple accounts in Gmail, click on the gear to access your Settings, then select the Accounts and Import tab. To add inboxes to your Gmail, you should see a section labeled Check mail from other accounts. In that section, follow the prompts given after you click Add a mail account.

To add new personalities to your Gmail account, follow the same steps to the Accounts and Import tab. Under the Send Mail As section, follow the instructions provided when you click Add another email address. You can also select this email address as the default selection from here.

Outlook
Unfortunately, we don’t have the information required to provide a walk-through for setting up Microsoft Outlook, as there are too many versions to cover here. Make sure you check the documentation provided online for what Microsoft describes as “connected accounts.” Of course, we are always available to help, so feel free to give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

What other tips would you like to learn for your most-used solutions? Let us know in the comments, and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss anything!

There will never be a time that we are not committed to improving the security of businesses. To continue striving for this goal, we’re dedicating this week’s tip to describing some solutions that can assist in locking a business and its data down.

Access Control
One of the best ways to ensure the security of your office (and its contents) is to prevent threats from getting in at all. There are many overlapping ways to do so, ranging from a fence around the office to a magnetic door lock that requires both a password and biometric authentication. Controlling access to your resources means that you are more able to protect them from threats.

If something were to happen to these resources despite an access control solution being in place, they will keep a record of who it was that entered, and when, allowing you to narrow your investigation from the start.

Data Security Policies and Practices
Your data is valuable, whether it contains your clients’ financial details, your own business’ affairs, or internal documents of sufficient sensitivity. As such, you need to be sure that you are prepared to protect this data before something happens to it.

This will require a few different activities on your part, as there is a lot of ground to cover.

With the number of cyberattacks and data breaches today, many of which rely on businesses being unprepared to deflect them, you cannot afford for your business to be exposed. Furthermore, your team needs to be made aware of the many ways that an attack can sneak through, and how to properly stop them. As more and more attacks are leveraging human error to their advantage, educating your staff is paramount to your success.

It is also crucial to enforce the policies you put in place, embracing your leadership role. By holding your staff accountable to the rules they have agreed to abide by, you can potentially shore up a few vulnerabilities up front, minimizing the rest through implementing the various best practices we recommend. Reach out to us to learn more about these practices, and how we can help you to enact them.

Review Your Insurance
If you haven’t reviewed your commercial property insurance in a while, take the time to do so. Based on your business’ location and its environment, your data security (and your building itself) could be under threat from a variety of sources. From vandalism to theft to flooding to fire, there are plenty of circumstances that could put your business’ future into question. You may want to consider boosting your coverage against certain events based on your risk of them, but you need to make sure you are insured against the risks that your business would be subject to.

Audit and Identify Risks
One of the most effective ways to improve your existing security is to establish what about it leaves you vulnerable. If you can identify the inherent risks to your business and its data, you are better able to prioritize your upgrades and optimization strategies.

A complete audit of your technology is a great way to do so, as it will shine the light on the facets of your IT that need these upgrades more than others may. You should also audit your existing security policies to both ensure that your employees are following your processes, and if these policies are effective in improving your security. If either answer turns out to be “no”, you have an opportunity to resolve it - immediately improving your security with (ideally) minimal invested time and cost.

Lean on an Outsourced Provider
A provider of professional IT services, like MSPNetworks, can make any of these activities much simpler to complete without sacrificing your internal productivity. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more about how we can help.

Tell us, what other IT security tips have you heard? Leave them in the comments!

Are you a person that has traditionally written down things in notebooks? If you are, you probably have dozens of notebooks that are half filled with information, most of which you’ll look at sometime in the future and you’ll be reminded just how helpful that note would have been if you had it when you needed it. Today, digital notebooks offer the same helpfulness, with a few added features that make them (dare we say it) a little better than the traditional notepad.

Here, we’ll go over a few tips to using digital notebooks so that you can improve the quality of the notes you keep.

Selecting Your Tools
Your first concern, when you set out to take your notes, is having something to take these notes on, and with. For many, this has typically been a sheet of paper and a pen, but what kind of technology blog would this be if we stopped there?

Naturally, technology offers us other options, offering wider functionality. Laptops, tablets, and smartphones now allow us to take notes in different ways. Instead of chicken-scratched scrawls of shorthand, notes can be typed and recorded much more efficiently and neatly on these devices, depending on the preference of the user. Plus, many of these devices feature a variety of note-taking options that your pen just doesn’t, like linking to relevant online content or other notes, access to cloud storage, and the ever-critical spellcheck.

Furthermore, when using these devices, you have a selection of apps to choose from. Microsoft’s OneNote and Evernote are two prominent examples of such, each with their own advantages and capabilities, plus many lesser-known ones to leverage as well.

Explore Format Options
Of course, with many of these applications, your options don’t stop there. Just as with a free-form scratchpad, the right tools can allow your notes to take on a different voice than just row after row of bullet points.

For instance, you could incorporate graphs, images, and other visual elements into your notes to add confidence and context to them. This enables you to better associate meaning to your words; and, as a result, make your notes more meaningful.

Keeping Your Notes Organized
The other benefit of using a digital note-taking tool is the fact that organization becomes that much simpler to maintain. Most solutions out there today enable their users to adjust their notes to keep them concise, cohesive, and comprehensible. Making your notes searchable, organizing them by date or topic, and other qualifications can all help keep you on track.

MSPNetworks can assist you in implementing business tools to help with all of your organization’s particular needs. Learn more by reaching out to us at (516) 403-9001.

All businesses are part of their respective markets, and depending on that market, the business will implement technology solutions designed to help them best cater to their business. However, you should only implement technology that can yield a satisfactory return on investment, or ROI. We’re here to help you get the most return on your investment as possible.

Return on investment is basically a way of saying that whatever you’re investing in is actually creating results for your organization. It’s the difference between spending a considerable amount of time on a task with an expensive technology or spending even longer without one. It’s working smarter, not harder. It all comes down to calculating whether the investment you’ve made on a technology solution generates enough revenue to justify making the investment it in the first place.

Here’s how you too can calculate the return on investment for just about any technology solution your business might consider down the line.

Basic Return on Investment
At its most basic level, return on investment boils down to the following equation:

ROI = ((Net Gain) / Cost) * 100

Net gain is determined by a couple of factors, including how much you spend and how much you wind up with afterward. Therefore, if you spend $20 and make $40, your net gain would be $20.

ROI = (20/20) * 100 = 100%

This places the ROI at a 100%, effectively doubling the amount of money you’ve invested.

Net Gain and Costs Aren’t Always Easy to Determine
Of course, net gain for businesses isn’t always going to be this easy to figure out. You have all kinds of operating costs, implementation costs, payroll, opportunity cost, and so on, all of which can directly influence how much return on investment you will get from a particular solution. If you are thinking about implementing a new piece of technology, you’ll have to think about how much time is spent on a task now, how much time could be saved, and what the initial cost of implementation will be.

This might be overwhelming to some, but it’s not impossible to figure out. After all, you have the technology experts at MSPNetworks to rely on. For help determining if your next IT implementation will yield a positive return on investment, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Revenue is a key component of any business, crucial to the continued success and efficacy of it. However, in order to sustain an incoming revenue stream, a business needs to be able to operate efficiently enough to support it. In this week’s tip, we’ll review a few ways that you can build this efficiency in your own operations to assist your efforts to build a prosperous business.

Your business’ operational efficiency is largely in control of the employees who are driving these operations. With the right tools and motivation, there are a few ways you can encourage them to work more efficiently to the benefit of the organization as a whole. They include:

Automation
It only makes sense that allowing a machine to complete a task independently would be the more efficient route to take, as it effectively enables you to accomplish multiple tasks at once. As a result, it won’t be long before any time spent setting up your automated processes is reclaimed through using automation to save time on billing, procurement, business management, or just about any other task you could think of.

Communication
The link between efficiency and communication has been demonstrated definitively--the more effectively your staff can communicate amongst themselves, the more they are able to produce. You need to encourage these kinds of habits, making it clear that face-to-face communication is an option for them if miscommunication over digital means is a concern. Developing communicative habits among your workforce will only help to boost both the quality and speed of what they are accomplishing.

Many people hear the term “communications” and have their minds immediately jump to “meeting.” Meetings have developed a reputation for being time wasters, and if handled improperly, yours could follow suit. However, with brief, communicative meetings held at the beginning of the day, many meetings that would otherwise interrupt a workflow later can be eliminated. With improved communications, your workforce can meet smarter, not more frequently.

Communication can also assist you in rooting out the operational hang-ups that are affecting productivity. Encouraging your employees to bring up any inefficiencies they experience is a great way to leverage communications to assist you in optimizing your internal processes.

Limit Interruptions as Possible
Finally, how often have you found that your communications have actually gotten in the way of your productivity? Are you interrupted every so often by a bing announcing that a message that doesn’t concern you has been delivered, or worse, that a non-work-related app wants your attention?

There are certain applications that allow you to limit notifications of these kinds from delivering during certain hours, so you may consider requiring them as a part of your company’s Bring Your Own Device strategy, or even distributing work devices to your employees if your budget allows for it. The fewer interruptions to the workday there are, the more productive focus can be lent to the task at hand.

For assistance in implementing any of these measures, the staff at MSPNetworks is here. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 for more assistance.

The funny thing about some documents is how the data written on them can strongly influence how important they are. If, for instance, there were two pieces of paper on a table, there is objectively no difference between the two, and so they are objectively equivalent in value.

When Documents Aren’t All Created Equally
However, if one sheet has a picture of a cat on it, and the other one has the coordinates to the lost city of El Dorado, one page suddenly has considerably more value than the other. This happens all the time with documents in a business setting, and depending on the business, many of these documents can be basic text files. With the popularity of the Microsoft Office software titles, there’s also a fair chance that the go-to word processing software in your office is Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word offers many business-friendly features that many of its users don’t know about - including the capability to protect a document with a password. This allows a document’s creator to restrict access to only those other users who need to have this kind of access for review or collaboration purposes. Doing so is relatively simple:

Adding a Password

• In the File tab, select Info
• Select the Protect Document button and find Encrypt with Password in the drop-down options. You will be presented with the Encrypt dialog box.
• In the provided space, enter the password you want to use. These passwords are case-sensitive and cannot be recovered if forgotten. Keep this in mind before resorting to this option. Once you’ve settled on a password, click OK, confirm your password by typing it again, and click OK again.

Just like that, your Word document will require that password before it can be viewed. This process works whether you’re using Microsoft Word 2016 or Microsoft Office 365.

If you ever need to remove the password from this file, you will actually follow the same steps until you reach the Encrypt dialog box. You should see the password you chose in the provided space. Delete it and press OK.

Your document should now again be available for hypothetically anyone to access, assuming that they have the ability and authorization to do so. For more tips, subscribe to this blog, and for more solutions to assist your security and operations, reach out to MSPNetworks directly at (516) 403-9001.