Here in our post-Google Docs world, a growing number of business owners are making the decision to forego Microsoft’s pricey Office suite in favor of the Big G’s comparable (and totally free) alternatives. And why not?
But if you’re going to make the leap, it’s important to make sure that your accounting system is set up to work without Excel. Here’s how to integrate Google Docs with Xero.
Read MoreAdobe Spark Post is a free online design interface for quickly creating crowd-pleasing social media graphics. A previous article — Quickly Create Attention-Grabbing Social Media Graphics with Adobe Spark Post — provides step-by-step guidance on using Post to design and use custom graphics. But you can take your memes even further with Spark Post’s creative and fun inspiration tools for text. Here are some tips on how to easily transform your social graphic’s message into something snazzy that leaves a lasting impression, giving a brand-recognition boost to your social media posts.
If you closed out of Adobe Spark, the graphic you were working on was automatically saved. You can find it in the My Projects page. If that isn’t the first screen you see when you log into Spark and open Post, then click on My Projects in the menu at the top of your screen. In the next screen, click on the thumbnail of the graphic you wish to edit.
Do you have a shared worksheet in Microsoft Excel 365 containing important data or carefully-constructed formulas you don’t want altered, accidentally or deliberately? Perhaps it’s the standard hourly rate. Maybe it’s equipment part numbers, or a shipping-cost calculation. Whatever it is, people should just keep their hands off it!
Fortunately, Excel makes it possible to prevent people from changing things. The following steps show how to protect critical data while allowing users to enter information in only the fields you want them to access.
Keep in mind that protecting worksheet data is different than protecting a workbook with a password. The latter security measure is to ensure no one can access a workbook without the proper credentials — a key to get in. Protecting the cells in a shared worksheet means that the cells or range cannot be modified.
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We asked the team at Google to give us their best tips for making your year more productive using Google Calendar. Click here to discover some lesser known tools that they shared with us and how to get started using them.
Keeping track of expenses is a hassle, plain and simple. You can buy special scanners or box them up and ship them off to different services to scan. Or, you can just sign up for Evernote.
Social media has turned advertising on its head. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other popular social networks have become the most pervasive, powerful and — if you do it right — the potentially most effective channels for sharing your brand and message with an enormous and growing market.
The key phrase is if you do it right. Your graphics have to be impactful and memorable to capture the imagination of the millions on social media. What’s more, today’s cost and time budgets — and social media’s short attention span — require that you move quickly, without getting bogged down in production.
A great new online tools for creating cool attention-grabbing graphics for social media is Adobe Spark Post — and it’s free to use. Here’s how it works — and how easy it is to create a graphic suitable for sharing on social media.
Read MoreKeeping track of expenses is a hassle, plain and simple. You can buy special scanners or box them up and ship them off to different services to scan. Or, you can just sign up for Evernote.
For each business receipt I receive, I use Evernote’s mobile app on either my iOS or Android device to snap a photo of the receipt and dump it into an Evernote notebook marked by year say, “2016 Expenses.” Sometimes I tag the photo, too, but mostly, I just snap the photo and upload.
When you set up a Google Voice account it will automatically implement a screening system for your callers. Voice will ask the caller to say their name, which is repeated to you before the call is allowed to go through. But you can turn off this feature easily.
On a computer, open Google Voice. Then, click on the Settings icon and click on Settings from the dropdown menu.
I asked the team at Google to give me their best tips for making your year more productive using Google Calendar. Here are some lesser known tools that they shared with me and how to get started using them.
Did you make some New Year’s resolutions for your business? Google Calendar Goals is the way to track them. The tool asks you a few basic questions, then sets up a schedule to help you achieve your goal.
To get started, just tap on the red + button on the bottom right of the screen and click on Goals. Then, follow the instructions on the screen.
Monotonous. Repetitive. Excruciatingly boring. Reconciling expenses in your accounting software is a critical, but painfully dull and time-consuming part of successfully running nearly any business. Thankfully, a little-known Xero trick can turn an hour’s worth of punching away at individual fields into just a few seconds of work.
First, go ahead and log into your Xero account. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see all of your various accounts laid out on the homepage.
Read MoreWe all trust cloud-based file storage services to keep our data safe from prying eyes, right? Maybe we shouldn’t. In the summer of 2015, an exploit was discovered that let baddies get into Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive accounts without knowing your password. As the ZDNet story about the problem pointed out, “The so-called ‘man-in-the-cloud’ attack is said to be a common flaw in most cloud-based file synchronization services.”
Of course, that particular security hole has been closed by now — we hope. But even if it has, another one always seems to come along. So it’s probably a good idea to encrypt any information we store in the cloud, especially since it’s easy to do — and free, as well.
