TIPS, TRICKS AND HINTS

Its hard to imagine working through the lockdown without fast fibre internet connections and tools like Microsoft Teams.   There is nothing like an imperative to help us drive change and we have seen that with Teams evolving rapidly to meet market needs.  Here are our top FIVE recent enhancements.  How many did you know about already? 1. - you can now [...]

Coronavirus isn’t the only virus causing harm. Hackers have been busy trying to trick us into clicking on their fake websites and getting infected with Malware. They’ve had fake donation sites, particularly a fake World Health Organisation fund, fake COVID-19 maps loaded with Malware, or even email threats to infect you, or your family, with COVID [...]

How many working days are there in a month? For many of us doing budgeting, the number of days matter for either income or costs. For years, I have spent a few moments as part of our budget setting exercise to look through an annual calendar, count the days in each month, then take the holidays I can remember, and exclude them. There’s a [...]

Working from home is different.  Managing staff working from home is also quite different. Here are a few tools to assist: Do we know where they are and what they need?   How do we discharge our Duty of Care to our colleagues?  Introducing the Free Microsoft COVID-19 Crisis Communication PowerApp. Key features include: Employees can [...]

People are already feeling strain with the rapidly changing face of Covid-19.  Stress and tensions are naturally high and for many organisations this could be first time they have asked people to work remotely for extended periods.   It’s definitely not our New Zealand cultural norm.  Re-creating your culture with your people working remotely is [...]

Working remotely can be invigorating from time to time, but there’s a reason why we don’t do it permanently. If we’re forced to work remotely for a long period, how do we overcome isolation effects? Working together in an office has a number of social benefits. You participate in office banter which can be fun, and enjoy your office culture. [...]

It’s a point of pride among many users to immediately swap out their default web browser on Windows from Edge to something else.   To be fair, that’s because Microsoft’s past browsers have fallen behind the marketplace – other browsers are faster and more compatible with more websites.  In fact, we found some of the various support and admin [...]

(It used to be called ‘Insights’ ). It’s Excel’s attempt to make you look smarter and more thoughtful. Simply start with a table (not a pivot table) of data, and hit the idea’s button and see what comes. Based on my experimentation, it gets a little confused with formatting and ‘total’ lines in data, so you may need to [...]

We were reminded of the risks of messing up spreadsheets in a recent : The scary fact they quote is that are wrong! The consequences of relying on bad information as a result can be insane! That reminded me of a couple of lessons from years ago in terms of good spreadsheet design.   1. Check calculations It’s so easy, especially when [...]