Washington Works Blog

Windows 11 introduces a new look by centering the taskbar, similar to the style used in macOS. While some users may appreciate this fresh design, others might prefer the traditional left-aligned taskbar found in older versions of Windows.

Business cybersecurity is increasingly important for every organization in operation today, to the point where it could very well be the difference between your business’ survival or failure. While extensive things must be accomplished to ensure your overall business continuity, you have to start somewhere.

Let’s review some of the most essential things you can—and need to—do to keep your business secure.

The Android operating system offers a litany of additional features and shortcuts in most applications… all you have to do is long-press an application’s icon to pull up a contextual menu of shortcuts. Naturally, Google’s applications are no exception.

Let’s review some of Google’s application capabilities as they appear in these shortcut menus.

We live in a world where technology is central to everyday life, yet unfortunately it does not last forever. Eventually, your smartphone, laptop, smartwatch, or other device will reach its end of life, or EOL. This is when the manufacturer stops supplying critical updates—including security.

Nobody likes the thought of the device they rely on daily suddenly dying, leaving them without a phone, a laptop, a smartwatch, or whatever the case may be. This is why it is important to stay conscious of when these devices are due to reach their end-of-life date, or EOL, when the manufacturer will no longer support them or provide crucial updates.

Fortunately, there’s a resource that makes this monitoring far easier to manage.

As headlines shout about Hurricane Florence approaching the East Coast later this week, with Helene and Isaac also stirring in the Atlantic Ocean, it seems as good a time as any to discuss preparing your business for hurricane season; and, really any adverse weather effects that could negatively influence your business. Preparing your business for events like these is key to its survival, making it crucial that you know what your responsibilities are when awaiting a potentially devastating event such as a hurricane.

When disaster strikes your business, it can cause a lot of problems; and many of them aren’t a direct result of the disaster itself. It’s for this reason it’s important to prepare your technology for a potential disaster. Here are four of the best ways to get your technology ready.

Back in 2022, Microsoft coined the term “productivity paranoia,” referring to the fears that many managers have that remote workers aren’t working to their full productivity. However, as remote and hybrid work has continued for many companies, a different form has emerged: the feeling a worker has that they have to prove they are still productive while working from home.

Here are some tips to share with your team, so they can use them to avoid these feelings.

As much as we try to structure our productivity throughout the day, there are always those moments that seem to slip by—both at work and in our personal lives. It can be tough to find time to commit to projects whether your goal is personal or professional.

So, let’s go over some tips that help make this time easier to find. 

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.

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 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.

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 any business, the capacity to collaborate is critical to success. In order to do so most optimally, it helps to carry out a few preliminary and overarching practices. Let’s go over a few such practices to help bring your team’s collaborative activities together.

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 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!

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.

Let me tell you a deep, dark secret about some of your employees... one that you might be a little surprised to hear: 

They aren’t reporting issues to you.

This can snowball into much larger problems. Let’s discuss.

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.

Screenshots can be one of the most effective ways to share information, as it gives the people you are communicating to first-hand knowledge of what you’re seeing. Of course, different platforms have different means of capturing a screenshot. Let’s go over these methods to ensure that you can do so efficiently and easily.