Avoid the Most Common PowerPoint Mistakes

PowerPoint presentations are the vacation slide shows of the business world: we’ve all sat through uninteresting ones that seemed to last forever. But there are several tips that you can follow to avoid creating a PowerPoint presentation that bores your co-workers. This is important: You create PowerPoint presentations to spread your message, promote products and achieve results. You can’t do this if no one’s listening to them.


Don’t Forget Creativity


PowerPoint is very easy to use, but this doesn’t mean you ought to be lazy where creativity is concerned. Try to come up with innovative ways to make your slides more interesting. Maybe use a memorable quote that pertains to your subject, or use a mnemonic device to help retention. Don’t just put a bunch of slides up that have bullet points on them.


Instead, use the slides to display the most crucial and useful data. Don’t just use them as a way to show all the graphs you made, while detailing what they mean.


Come with Solutions


You’ll also want to come armed with ways that your company’s employees can improve these sales numbers. Another mistake of many PowerPoint presentations: they provide information. But they don’t provide useful methods for how employees can use that information to better the company’s performance.


If your PowerPoint presentation shows that sales are down, be sure you follow up with your own belief on why sales have fallen and what the company can do to increase them. If sales are up? Provide information on how your company can maintain its momentum.


Don’t Get Too Fancy


While you should be creative when you make your slides, don’t opt for all the bells and whistles. A common mistake managers make is using excessive graphics and pictures, thinking this pop of color will draw the attention of the audience. What it generally does is distract. Additionally, many people simply read their slides to the audience, this is unnecessary and can bore, if not irritate, the audience. They will just read your points. Instead, focus on the most significant item and go in depth. Otherwise you could have just emailed the presentation to them and saved your breath.

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What to do if Your Lose Your Smartphone

Many if not most people own smartphones nowadays and they hold a lot of information. What happens if you lose it?

The security risk of lost smartphones

Researchers at Symantec found out that 96 percent of individuals who find a lost smartphone attempted to access personal or business data stored in the device. The study also found out that 45 percent of individuals who found a lost smartphone made an effort to access the corporate e-mail client on the device. This is certainly scary news. Naturally, smartphones are designed to be tiny. It is easy to misplace them.

Human nature and smartphone tech

The Symantec study was in essence studying human nature. 50 smartphones were left in large cities in North America; namely New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Ottawa. Many of the files the phones contained were fake and had enticing labels that include “online banking” and “saved passwords”.

According to the study results, 72 percent of people who found a phone tried to access photos, 57 percent attempted to open a file named "saved passwords," and 43 percent tried to open the "online banking" app. This absolutely should concern those who have the habit of losing their phone.

Protecting your smartphone

Fortunately there are a few steps people could take to shield themselves should they lose their smartphones.

The simplest way to guard the data on your smartphone is always to make a secure password. It may seem obvious, but you would be astonished at how many people don’t password protect their phones. There's also many apps that securely lock specific apps or files. A less obvious choice is to subscribe to a service that allows you to remotely wipe your smartphones memory. No matter which method you use, it’s crucial that you take some method of securing your smartphone in case of loss or theft.

Tricks to Extend the Battery Life in Your Smartphone

Smartphones are wonderful tools. But there's one weakness that virtually every smartphone shares: short battery life. This is a frustrating problem. As you're logging onto the Web, reviewing your e-mail messages, and making phone calls, you're draining your phone's battery. With many of the top smartphones on the market, you're fortunate to make it home after the workday with enough battery life left to fit in one quick call for take-out food.


The problem boils down to this: Smartphones do too much. And by doing so, they consume more than their fair share of power. There are steps, though, that you can take to enhance the life of your smartphone's battery. By shutting off some of your phone's extra features, you might be able to squeeze enough juice out of your battery to keep your smartphone humming the entire day.


Dimming that smartphone screen


You might not realize this, but keeping your screen at its full brightness setting drains the battery very quickly. An easy way to stop this rapid drain is to lower the screen brightness to a level that is still comfortable for you. Your screen need not be as bright as the sun.


Screen lighting


You can save battery power, too, by adjusting how long your screen stays lit after receiving an input like a screen tap. The longer your screen stays lit, the harder it is on your battery life.


Bluetooth


A Bluetooth device is an enormous drain on your battery as well. As it is continuously looking for outside signals, it is constantly draining your battery. So when you are in meetings or not anticipating calls, shutting it off can make your smartphone’s battery work for a lot longer.

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Get Rid of Spam With Filters

Do you get a lot of spam? You don't need to continuously put up with it; there are some steps you can take to get spam out of your inbox and your life.


The Power of Filters


You can create a whitelist filter. This means that you use the filtering options in your email to create filters that whitelist all your important emails, keeping them in your inbox, while delivering all other emails into a less important folder. Then you can check those folders once you have time to see what is coming in and if it is important or not.


A More Subtle Serving of Spam


Have you heard of bacn? It is a far more subtle type of spam compared to the discount Rolex emails. These are typically things you have opted into such as catalogs and coupons from stores you frequent. But, while you opted in at some point, you may not want to receive these anymore.


You can easily stop these newsletters from filling your inbox, though, by creating a filter that conveniently sequesters email messages with the word "unsubscribe" in it. This is effective because email newsletters must give users the opportunity to unsubscribe from them. Therefore, they all must include the word "unsubscribe" somewhere within their messages. Of course, you can manually unsubscribe from email newsletters, too. However, this will take more time and energy.


These two basic steps will help clear your inbox of its spam and they'll certainly make you a more productive computer user. So before you spend the next 30 minutes deleting the spam or bacn from your inbox, be sure to set up the filters that will ensure that your most important messages stay a priority.

How to Clearly Explain Problems to Your IT Department

Have you ever been in the midst of something important when your whole computer shuts down for no reason? Of course you have. We have all experienced computers freezing or the screen going blank. When these things happen, we must call in the IT professionals at our job to help and this can often cause stress.


It’s not always easy to communicate with your IT department staff. They are authorities in their field and it’s easy to feel ignorant in the face of individuals with such knowledge. Specially when the solution to your problem is “Turn it off, wait a few minutes, and turn it back on again.” It can also seem like they are speaking a different language altogether.


There are some actions you can take to make this communication a little easier. The tips below will not only make communication go more smoothly, they will also get your problem solved faster.


No Reason to be Intimidated


Do not be intimidated by their substantial knowledge. This does not help communication. If you're not confident, it will be harder to explain the problem even if you know the appropriate terminology. Also, remember while they are the experts in their field, you are a specialist in yours as well.


Screenshots


Secondly, take screenshots when possible. If you can show your IT personnel exactly what has gone wrong with your computer, they will be able to effortlessly tackle the problem. If you cannot do that, try to replicate the problem in front of IT workers when they arrive at your desk. If certain actions, for instance, cause your computer to crash, execute those actions while your IT workers are present.


A Written Report


Finally, keep a written report of your difficulties. If you notice that the same problems are taking place when you check your messages, write this down in a notebook. Make a new entry each time the issue reappears. This, too, will help you communicate your computing issues with your IT personnel.


Communicating with your IT department doesn't have to be a daunting or frustrating experience. Just follow these basic rules, and you'll be computing at full strength in no time.

Help Your Small Business With a Tablet Computer

You are doing all you can for your organization. You have a website and a blog. You are getting your name out there via social media sites. Now you hear that you need a tablet to truly help your business thrive. But tablets are costly and you are not even sure why you would need one or how it could be effective.


Reasons You Need a Tablet


There are actually many reasons why employing a tablet in your business can be helpful. It’s an excellent tool and here are a few reasons why it might be beneficial.


  1. Amazing presentations: Tablets allow you to have easy access to your presentation and portfolios. It is not necessary to wait for a computer to boot up. You can simply show your prospective client what you do. These un-wasted minutes could be the distinction between a new client and a missed opportunity.
  2. State-of-the-Art: Being up-to-date in the world of technology can impress possible clients. And, these days, tablets seem to be on the cutting edge of technology. This is applicable to most fields, but especially in the fields of marketing or technology. People are reassured when a person who works with technology is up on the latest and greatest.
  3. Information at your fingertips: If you need to have immediate information about something, such as, the cost of a house if you are in real estate, tablets give you immediate access to that information. Staying on top of information ensures that you can confidently provide clients with accurate information.
  4. Signing documents is a breeze: Thanks to the myriad of applications available on tablets, you no longer need to carry around files of paperwork. You can have all you need with you at all times and people can sign important documents right on the tablet. Furthermore, you can email the people who need those documents from your tablet without any difficulty. Tablets really do help you improve your processes.

The End of the Road for Some Gadgets and Technologies

When new technology is released, we snatch it up, and a month later we can’t visualize what life was like without it. But consider the technology that it replaced? We tend to forget about it as it fades into history. For instance, the telephone: our phones today do so much and landlines are swiftly getting eliminated. Yes, many people still use them but it’s not difficult to envision a near future where they'll be gone completely from households.


Here's a glance at various other key pieces of technology that were once significant and are now on their way to becoming obsolete. In fact, a number of these gizmos might become useless during the next 10 years.


Fax Machines: It seems like this should have been completely replaced by email a few years ago but it’s still hanging on. Most people can't stand sending a fax now-a-days, but there was a time when this was groundbreaking.


Newspaper Classified Ads: The Huffington Post recently listed newspaper classified ads as an endangered species. That's largely due to the online garage sale that is Craigslist. By providing people the ability to advertise their used futons for free, Craigslist delivered a fatal body blow to newspaper-classified sections across the nation.


Film-Based Cameras: It seems like film-based cameras are on their way out as well. People have a deep love for traditional film so it has taken a while for people to completely transition to digital. But with digital cameras, you can save all your pictures digitally and easily distribute them over the Internet without needing to save negatives. Even Kodak has seen the consequences of this change. There is no arguing that generally we are going to leave behind film-based cameras.


The Calculator Watch: In its short-lived life; the calculator watch was a well-loved item. It made it easy to always have a calculator handy when you needed one. When cell phones with built in calculators came into existence, the calculator watch went out the window. It’s pretty clear why PCWorld listed it as an obsolete technology.


The Video Arcade: The video arcade might be dying as well. Older gamers remember hoarding quarters so they could later feed them into Pac-Man and Space Invaders consoles at their local malls. Those days have ended, though. Gamers today prefer experiencing their video adventures from the convenience of their own homes.

Retina Display Advancements

The world of technology is continually improving. So to stay in the game, the leaders in the industry, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, are always improving their products.


The Power of the Retina Display


One recent example of a company who is doing this right is Apple. Apple’s new Retina display offers the clearest images and videos when compared with any other. This is due to its 2,048-by-1,536-pixel resolution. Digital Trends recently wrote an intriguing article about it, and it looks like Apple isn’t stopping there.


Arming the MacBook Pro with High-Tech Visuals


What does Apple have planned next? Evidently they are going to launch a line of MacBook Pros with a resolution of 2,880-by-1,800 pixels and a 15-inch screen. This is twice the clarity of the current MacBook Pro line. The idea is that by constantly increasing the pixel density the human eye will ultimately be unable to recognize the individual pixels. The human eye will then see the images as single continuous tones instead of a grid. This will make the images almost flawless.


Not a New Technology


An interesting fact is that this is not actually a new technology. The U.S. military has been utilizing it in their flight simulators for quite a while. And IBM uses retina technology in their massive super-computers. However, until now, the technology hasn’t been available on the mass market. You can bet that after this next advancement is released, consumers will be anxiously expecting the next advancement. So, Apple has the right idea to stay ahead of its competitors as far as screen technology goes.

Working From Home: The Grass is not Always Greener

Commuting to the office is a drag, and people who do it every day envy people who get to work at home. They don’t suffer from the hassle and cost of a commute. They don’t have to cope with a co-workers annoying habit of singing randomly and they don’t even need to get out of their pajamas if they don’t want to.


But working from home is not all chilling out in your pajamas and sleeping in late. The common trap that many of these people fall into is the inability to stop working. It’s hard to transition from work when you work from home. Often professionals who work from home will find that they are still working and it’s already midnight. Having a good work/life balance is crucial for everyone and when the lines are blurred between them, things can become ‘caddywhompus’.


Fortunately, work-from-homers can take steps to improve their work/life balance and retain their sanity.


  1. Set up a time for your “close of business”: And stick to it. Whether its 5 p.m. or 8 p.m. you should resolve to shut off your computer and close your office door for the night. Resist the temptation to write one more paragraph or make yet another sales call. Also, make sure that your workday is a normal 8 or 9-hour day.
  2. Do something for yourself: After you shut off your computer for the day, make sure you do something for yourself. This helps your mind transition between work and your personal life. It doesn’t have to be something grand. It can be watching your favorite TV show, or working out. Make absolutely certain you do something so you “reset” your day.
  3. Leave the house: It's easy as a work-from-homer to spend all of your time at home. You look up, see it's the end of the week, and find that the only time you left your house was to drive to the grocery store when you ran out of cereal. Don't become a work-from-home shut-in. It's simply not healthy.

Overwork leads to stress. Whether you work from home, in an office, or out in the field, the key to retaining your sanity is to reserve non-work time for yourself. But what if you can't force yourself to shut off the workday? Then it might be time to consider returning to the office, where there's always someone around to shut off the lights and chase you out of your cubicle.

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Google Patents: A Little Known Secret

Have you ever been curious, in this country of invention, what ideas are sprouting? Google has made it possible for you to explore this with Google Patents.


The Wonderful World of Google Patents


Haven't heard of Google Patents? You're not alone. This offering by the Internet search giant Google is an intriguing one. It lets you peek into the future – or at least a potential future – by viewing the numerous patents issued by the United States. As you may expect, the patents range from the serious – new ways of delivering vaccinations – to the absurd – an electronic pickle jar game. By merely plugging random words in the Google Patents search engine, you can dig through these useful and decidedly useless futuristic marvels.


Organizing the World’s Information


According to Google, Google Patents is one more step in the company’s mission to organize the world’s information. Google Patents gets its info from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). When a patent is issued in the U.S. it becomes part of the public domain so Google can distribute this information. One of the incredible things about Google Patents is the number of Patents it includes. The service displays patents issued in the United States from 1790 to the present. That is a lot of data that users can explore.


A Patent History Lesson


The site also provides an interesting history of technology advancements. You can see Alexander Graham Bell's 1880 patent for an automatic short-circuiter for telephones or a patent given in 1889 to Thomas Edison for the incandescent electric lamp. If you haven't yet been to Google Patents take a look. The site offers a good look at where we've been technologically as a country and where we are going.