Washington Works Blog

Whatever your industry, there are going to be processes that need to be followed, and this will require no small amount of organization to keep all the moving parts in tandem with each other. Fortunately, tools that can help with your project management needs are readily available, so long as you take advantage of their capabilities.

Take Google Sheets, for instance.

With the full power of Microsoft Excel at your disposal, you can accomplish a lot of great things and streamline your data management and analysis. However, it doesn’t take an Excel wizard to use today’s tip, which focuses on the Auto Filter feature built right into the program. Let’s look at how even this small feature can provide a lot of value for your business.

As a manager, some of the administrative work can be, if not the worst part of the job, easily the least engaging. For instance, having to create all the different folders for the employees under your purview, projects, and other organizational needs. Fortunately, Microsoft Excel offers a relatively quick and easy way of doing just this.

When it comes to exclusive user features, one of the better-known ones on the Apple side of the house is FaceTime, a video chat platform. Apple has however made certain features of FaceTime available to Android users, but they come with a catch. Let’s go over how an iPhone user can FaceTime with an Android user, even if some of the features are not quite there.

Microsoft Excel is a great way for data to be visualized, particularly as it offers various features to highlight the context of the data you’re trying to communicate with. Today, we wanted to walk you through how you can use one such feature—People Graphs—to do so particularly impactfully.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that the better your relationship is with your employees, the more your business will benefit. Despite this, many businesses today lack trust between their organizational levels. Let’s go over a few simple tips that you can use to help maintain positive feelings amongst your team.

Email groups are remarkably useful. Instead of sending a copy of an email to each individual recipient, you can effectively create a simple forum post that everyone can participate in—a feature that certainly helps when collaboration is a priority. Let’s go over how you can quickly and easily create a group in Gmail.

We are always writing about how useful technology is, but it’s surprising how little even the most committed techie knows about the options that are available to them. In this week’s blog we decided to go through three features in the Windows OS that can be a big help. 

We talk a lot (and we mean a lot) about cybersecurity, with ransomware getting a lot of our focus…and for very good reason. Ransomware is a huge threat that today’s businesses need to be prepared to deal with. In light of this, we wanted to share a few tips to help you avoid the negative ramifications of ransomware.

Anyone who wants to prioritize their privacy should be aware of the role the cache plays in such a thing. Your Google web browser—even on your smartphone—will store information about what you search so it can personalize your ads and recommendations, but if you would rather not have it do this all the time, you can clear your Android device’s Google search cache and set it up to auto-delete after a set amount of time has passed.

Setting up a router used to be a much more complex process than it is today. Thankfully, innovations in the technology have made it simpler and easier for consumers and businesses alike to do, to the point where some Internet service providers just let users do it themselves with guided instructions. Let’s go over how you can get the most out of your wireless router.

It doesn’t take much to get us to start ranting about the dangers of phishing, and it’s a topic that we won’t stop talking about for some time. Unfortunately, phishing comes in enough forms that it isn’t always so simple to spot. For this week’s tip, we just wanted to run through the different formats phishing can take, focusing on how to identify each type.

It probably isn’t hard to think of a time when you’ve stumbled across something that would be useful for work while you were doing some personal browsing. What if I told you there was an easy way to send a website to your browser to view later? Thanks to Google Chrome, this is the case.

It’s easy to open up far more tabs on your web browser than you need, especially when so many tools are cloud-based. If you find yourself in need of a quick way to close all other tabs besides a handful or so, we’ve got just the tip for you. You can close all open tabs to the right of your preferred window, or you can close all tabs outright.

The holidays are fast approaching and that means people are going to miss work for one reason or another. If you can get away from the office for a little bit, you’ll want to set up an out-of-office message to ensure that others know you will get back to them when you get back to the office. Here’s how you can set up an autoresponder for an out-of-office message in Microsoft Outlook.

How often does this scenario happen to you? You’re going about your workday and are being quite productive, when all of a sudden you close the wrong tab in your web browser, putting an end to your productivity. This isn’t crippling downtime or anything, but it’s an inconvenience that we know you can do without. Thankfully, modern web browsers let you reopen closed tabs or windows to get back to where you left off.

In today’s business, sharing files is easy and something many workers take for granted. Unfortunately, not all file-sharing methods are secure. When efficiency is prioritized over security, it can often lead to extremely troublesome situations. For this week’s tip, we thought we’d go through a half dozen practices you can take to ensure your files get to where you need them to get safely and securely. 

Modern mobile devices are a bit of a double-edged sword for today’s businesses: on the one hand, they are critical for the productivity that is required of today’s organizations, but on the other, they also come with the very real chance of security issues. The permissions you give (or don’t) to these applications can have an impact on this risk.

Passwords are just one part of a comprehensive security strategy, but they are a crucial one. You must make sure that you are investing adequate time and effort into making sure your passwords are secure. This is easier said than done, but by the end of today’s short blog article, you’ll have all the information you need to craft excellent passwords for your accounts.

Everyone has a smartphone, but only a fraction of people use it productively. Instead of using your smartphone for wasting time, you could be using it to stay productive and get more done, reducing your stress levels and creating a better work life. Today, we’ll give you three useful tips  on how to change the way you use your smartphone.