Out of the Box Solutions Blog

Your keyboard sees a lot of use, probably more than any other piece of technology related to your computer. It’s how you interface and interact with it, and if you don’t take the time to clean it up every so often, it’s going to get pretty nasty. Let’s go over how you can clean your keyboard, as well as a couple of tips to keep it cleaner over the long term.

You use your keyboard more than your average piece of technology, and as such, it can quickly grow pretty gross. Today, we want to talk about how you can not only clean your keyboard, but how you can also keep it clean so you don’t have to go through the cleaning process nearly as often.

We’ve all found ourselves in a pickle due to a dead smartphone battery, and if not, you’ve been living with a charger perpetually on your person. What is it that kills a smartphone’s battery so quickly?

As it turns out, a lot of things impact your smartphone’s capability to hold and maintain a charge over time. Let’s run through the list of factors that you could encounter, and how you can address them.

If you’re an Android user, you probably have loads of applications on your device that make navigating it somewhat difficult. If you want to make navigation a bit easier, you can utilize shortcuts on your home screens for your most frequently used apps—including specific screens within those apps!

The out-of-office email is a great tool…provided, that is, that it is used to its full potential. Let’s talk about a simple adjustment you can make to the ones you send to ensure they are much more effective, and much less likely to be ignored as a result.

Microsoft Excel is a really useful tool for organizing data. Using something called a heat map strategy can help you get more out of the solution. If you actively use spreadsheets in your business to contextualize data, you will find this easy-to-use tip for using heat maps really useful.

Look, we know that thinking about disasters can be a nerve-wracking experience, but you need to acknowledge that your organization is constantly in danger of becoming subverted by challenges outside your control. While you might not be able to stop a disaster from striking, you can be prepared for when it does strike, as well as how you respond to it. Let’s go over some of the methods you can use to ensure you have a plan in place.

When you’re using the Internet, how often do you find yourself using so many bookmarks that the bar simply cannot display what you want it to? You can make things a bit easier by saving some space on your bookmark or favorite bar by only showing the sites’ favicons. Don’t know what a favicon is? We’ll cover that too!

Cybersecurity has never been more important. There are millions of scams sent out every day that are ultimately targeting you and your employees’ password-secured accounts. Today, we are going to give you some tips on how to create passwords that work best to protect your data and information systems. 

Nowadays, technology and business are intimately interconnected, the success of your operations and processes largely informed by the tools you have in place. Let’s go over three ways you can help boost your potential success even further by implementing the right methods.

Have you ever thought about password protecting a zipped folder so that only authorized individuals and users can access it? While Windows might not have built-in functionality for this type of protection, a free app called 7-Zip gives you the power to do so. Let’s go over how you can use 7-Zip to password protect a ZIP file on your Windows PC.

In the right hands, Microsoft Excel can be an incredibly potent data management tool. Unfortunately, scrolling down will leave your headers out of sight unless you take steps to freeze them in place. Let’s discuss how you can do this and be more productive with this tool.

We discuss security a lot. It’s really an important issue for businesses and individuals alike. We typically discuss the actions you can take to ensure you are doing all you can to protect your organization’s network and infrastructure from harm. Today, we are going to break down one of the most crucial parts of any cybersecurity setup: the antivirus. 

Sometimes you might be browsing the Internet on your phone and come across an interesting tip or page that you want to share with your other device to access later. On Android, you can easily send the webpage to your PC when using the Chrome browser. 

Google Chrome is a known battery killer, at least in the traditional sense. Since so many people use Chrome for their browsing needs, Google decided to release a new feature in Chrome 108 called Energy Saver. What does this feature do and why is it important to know about?

When it comes to technology, we all have our preferred ways of doing things. On a computer, you have several ways of accessing the Internet, and we are sure you have your preferred web browsers for accessing it all. Let’s go over how you can ensure that your computer knows what your preferred web 0browser is by switching the default browser settings for your Windows PC.

Sometimes you might want to download an email from your inbox. It might be for various reasons, such as documentation or otherwise. What file format works best for this type of purpose? A PDF is one that comes to mind, as you cannot easily edit a PDF, something which makes it great for sending documents that you want to preserve the formatting of, or those which you want to preserve the authenticity.

How often do you go about your day-to-day duties only to find yourself buried in opened tabs on your web browser? This isn’t unheard of, especially when you are pulled from one task to the next in quick succession. All browsers give you the ability to control your open tabs by closing all other tabs or by closing all tabs to the right.

During the holiday season, people are out of the office quite often, but unless this is properly conveyed to those reaching out to them, it could look like negligence on the employees’ part. To make sure you are as transparent as possible with your out-of-office time, be sure to set up a message. Here’s how you can do it in Microsoft Outlook.

Users of Android devices might notice that they have the option to make a call using their Wi-Fi in addition to using their mobile service or data. While there is certainly something to be said for using a wireless connection when you don’t have mobile service, there are circumstances when you might not want to default to using a Wi-Fi connection.