As a small business owner you are probably always looking for ways to improve efficiency, whether you’re dealing with customer inquiries or developing reports. Here is a handy way to use the template feature within Microsoft’s ubiquitous word processing software, Word, to increase efficiency, consistency, and even save a little time while you’re at it.

Every time you start a new, blank document, you’re actually using a template. Word offers a number of premade templates to choose from, but they’re not really designed for business users. Instead, you can create your own custom templates. Here’s how.

How to create a Word template based off a current document

If you’ve created a document and would like to use the same layout and styling in other similar documents, you can turn the document into a template by following these steps:

1. Open the document in a new window. Be sure that you’ve saved any changes to the final document.
2. Now you need to update the document so that it is more like a “form” that you might fill out online. That is, instead of having an individual’s name and address in your template, you want to fill those spaces with indicators of what information should be placed there. For instance, you might use and instead of “Jane Doe” and “1234 Main Street.” Note: don’t save the document at this point, as any changes will be made to your original version.
3. Once you have made the updates, click File followed by Save As. Be sure to save the document in the Documents subfolder of the Libraries directory. This can be found on the left side of the Save As window.
4. Give the document a name that matches its purpose. It’s a good idea, but not necessary, to put “template” in the title. For instance, you might use “Sales Invoice Template” or “Monthly Newsletter Template.”
5. Finally, select Word Template from the Save as type field and click Save.

Your template will now show up as a selectable template when you start a new Word document. Click on My templates to access it. Be aware that whatever text and other content you have in the document when you create the template will be in every new document you create using the template.

If you realize you’ve made a mistake, open the template, make the changes and select Save As. Instead of entering a new file name, locate the original template, and click on it. Word will automatically apply the name of the file you’ve clicked. Press Save and confirm the overwrite. You can use this method to any template, including the premade ones. If you do make changes to a premade template, the updated version will be located in the My templates section.

There are many ways you can tweak Word to meet your needs, and templates are a great way to ensure similar documents will look the same, while saving you time. If you’d like to learn more ways you can customize Word, or any other program in the Office 365 suite, please give us a call.

Microsoft 365, the cloud version of Microsoft’s popular office suite, has some great features that help small business owners boost their communication effectiveness.

This is especially true for Outlook. One useful feature is the ability to conduct polls via email. Want to know what day of the week is best to have a meeting? Add a poll.

Here’s how you can create polls and votes in your emails using Microsoft 365’s Outlook.

1. Open Outlook, and click New Message. If you have an email you’d like to attach a poll to, and forward it to others, open the email and click Forward.
2. Click on Options, located at the top of the window you compose the email in. From the drop-down menu, select Tracking.
3. Click Use Voting Buttons.
4. Choose from the options.

If you choose Custom, you’ll be able to customize the names of the buttons. This is done by:

1. Follow steps 1-4 above, and select Custom.
2. A window called Message Options will open, under Voting and Tracking Options select Use voting buttons.
3. Delete the default names and enter the name of the buttons you’d like to use. Be sure to separate them with a semicolon, with no spaces e.g., Choice One;Choice Two;Choice Three.
4. If you want a read and delivery receipt sent to you, press the two respective boxes below Use voting buttons.
5. Click Close. You’ll notice the buttons show up in the area where you compose your email. Compose the rest of your email, and click Send.

You can review the results by opening the email you sent, usually found in the Sent Items folder on the left-hand side of the Outlook window. In the open email, press the Message tab followed by Show and Tracking. If there haven’t been any responses the Tracking option will be grayed out, and you’ll be unable to click on it.

Being able to include a poll in your emails is a great feature of Office 365 that can be used for many situations. If you’d like to learn how to use other features of Office 365 please contact us.

To stay competitive a company needs to be able to adapt to and change with their business environment. This includes updating computer systems to stay at least somewhat current. Updating systems can be expensive, so many companies are turning to cloud solutions to be able to do more with what they currently have. Microsoft’s Office 365 is one such solution and there are many positive benefits that go along with adopting it.

Here are four main benefits to using a cloud-based office suite like Office 365.

Prevent save disasters. It’s easy to do. Almost everyone has gotten caught up in their work and forgotten to save their document, only to have the program or computer crash and their document lost. By using Office 365, changes are automatically saved and synced with the cloud, so if something does happen, you’re less likely to lose any of your work.

Access from more devices. As Office 365 is browser based, you can access it on a tablet or smartphone. This means you don’t have to be on your computer to access and edit documents. If you give lots of presentations and have a tablet with a data connection, you just might be able to ditch the laptop all together.

Eliminate forgotten documents. It can be embarrassing to show up to an important meeting only to realize that you’ve forgotten an essential document back at the office. With Office 365, if this happens, you can simply log in and retrieve the document.

More storage. With computers, there’s generally a fixed amount of storage available, and when it’s used up, you have to free up space by deleting old files. This can be a problem, especially if you have to keep files and information due to legal requirements. Office 365 plans are flexible to allow your company as much storage as you need.

These are just four of the benefits to using Office 365 in your business. If you’re looking to move your office suite into the cloud, or would like to learn more about Office 365, please contact us.

Companies no longer operate in a local only location, with technology they can reach customers all over the planet. The same goes for their employees, they can be anywhere with an Internet connection, and still be a contributing and productive member of a team. This is made possible by software like Microsoft Office 365.

If you use Office 365 in your company, you can have online meetings through Microsoft’s messaging tool, Lync. Here’s how to start a meeting, and some features that make face-to-face meetings unnecessary.

How to start a meeting
In Outlook’s calendar, schedule a meeting and invite the participants. When it’s time for the meeting, simply log into Lync, go to your calendar and select the meeting. You’ll have the option to Join online meeting, click it and the meeting will start. If a colleague is online and you would like them to join the meeting, click on their name and drag them over to the meeting window.

Features you can use during the meeting
There are a number of useful things you can do in the meeting including:

• Video calls. If you and the attendees have webcams, you can turn the meeting into a video call by pressing the webcam button beside the attendees’ names.
• Share and share alike. Press Share (beside video) in the meeting window to get a dropdown menu with a number of things you can share with the participants. Say you are going to do a demonstration on your screen, you can share it with the attendees by selecting Main Monitor. You can also share presentations or programs.
• Change the presenter. If an employee would like to show something from their screen, or is going to present something, you can give them presenter status by right clicking on their name and selecting Make a Presenter.
• No interruptions. If one person is presenting, and another has a question, they don’t have to stop the presentation to ask a question, they can simply select IM and type the question. All participants will see it, and the presenter can answer the question when they are finished.

If you’re looking for an alternative to physical meetings, Office 365 has a great set of products that will allow you to do just that. To learn more about Office 365 or any of Microsoft’s other products please contact us, we’re ready to assist you.

One business tool that’s been slow to keep up with technology is the business card. If you were to look around your office there’s a high probability you have an abundance of them. A problem starts to arise when we get too many, it becomes easy to lose an important card. Users of Microsoft Office 365 have a solution: they can use Outlook to store and create electronic business cards.

Here’s how to create and share an electronic business card:

Create an Electronic Business Card

1. Open Outlook and select Contacts followed by Home. Click on New Contact.
2. When the Contact window opens, press Business Card and the Edit Business Card window will open.
3. You will be able to enter contact information into the relevant areas under the Fields box.
4. If you want to add an image or change the layout of the business card, press the Layout button located in the right side of the screen.
5. When you have entered the information, press Ok and the business card will be saved as a .vcf file which is readable by most email clients.

Add an Electronic Business Card to an Email
If you have saved a contact’s information as a business card, you can easily attach the card to an email.

1. In a message select the Contacts pane and search for the business card you would like to attach. When you find it, click it.
2. Select the Home tab, followed by Forward Contact. A drop-down menu will open, select As a Business Card.
3. You will see the business card as an attachment in the email.

Add a Business Card as a Signature
You can add a business card to your signature in any email.

1. When you create an email message click Signature and select Add signature.
2. Select the signature you would like to use, if you have one. If not, press anywhere in the white space below Edit signature.
3. Click Business Card beside the paragraph alignment buttons in the Edit signature field.
4. Select the contact name you use and press Ok. Your contact information will show up at the bottom of the email as a downloadable .vcf file.

If you’re a user of Office 365 and would like to learn more, or would like more information on Office 365 or other products, please give us a call.

One of the most useful business tools, no matter what industry you operate in, is the office suite. While there are a wide variety of choices available, the market is dominated by Microsoft Office. In the past year Microsoft has turned its eye from producing office software for the desktop to producing office solutions based around the cloud.

Microsoft’s cloud based office suite for businesses is called Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote – and Microsoft Server products e.g., Lync 2010 and SharePoint Server. All programs are accessed via a Web browser, offering users the ability to access the programs from the office, home or anywhere in between.

On March 14, 2012 Microsoft held a press conference announcing that the price of Office 365 subscriptions will be reduced by up to 20%. This decrease will apply to all new and renewing direct customers.

The price cut is a great advantage to many potential customers as it makes Office 365 more competitive with other cloud based office solutions such as Google Apps. This is also beneficial as many businesses already use the desktop versions of Microsoft Office. If they switch to Office 365, employees will be comfortable with the cloud version, as the software is exactly the same as the desktop version.

It’s the perfect time to look into Office 365 and see what it can bring to your organization. If you’d like to learn more about Microsoft Office 365 or other products from Microsoft, we are your go-to experts and will be more than happy to help.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time on our blog crowing about the benefits of Microsoft Office 365, but we just had to share this news.

Effective as of March 2012, Microsoft is now offering Office 365 for FREE to students, school faculty, and staff members! Offered as the Microsoft “A2″ plan, the free service includes the standard Office features you know and love like Word, Outlook, and Excel. But Microsoft ups the ante by the including power-packed applications Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync.

Microsoft is cutting prices for Office 365 across the board to make it more easily affordable for organizations of all types, and will be releasing a full Office 365 for education service this summer. But you can get the jump on it and get your faculty, staff members, and students using this great service today, free of charge.

For more details check out the full announcement from Microsoft.

Have questions about MS 365 and cloud-based computing? Just give us a call. We would love to hear from you.

Jeff Dettloff is the President and Chief Problem Solver for Providence Consulting, Lansing’s leading provider of advanced computer services and innovative technology solutions.

Cloud-based services such as Microsoft’s Office 365 are becoming popular with many small businesses due to its flexibility and cost effectiveness. And with its recent update, users are promised more compatibility with several platforms, as well as smoother communication and ease of use.

For many businesses nowadays, working while on the go is a necessity. This is why there is also a growing need for services and applications that allow people to work and continue to be productive even while they are mobile.

One of these services is Office 365, which is a package offering Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online. Office 365 is cloud-based, which enables people to access files and applications in a much more seamless and efficient manner. This kind of system is especially suitable for small businesses, not only because of its cost efficiency, but also its flexibility of use – which in turn helps members of smaller firms handle multiple tasks more effectively with no loss to productivity, even when they are out of the office.

Office 365 has also recently launched its first major service update, which makes it a more versatile tool for better communication and collaboration. The more than 30 new updates include support for Windows Phone 7, which allows people to access and edit their SharePoint documents from their Windows Phone 7 mobile device; new SharePoint Business Connectivity Services, which enable people within an organization to use SharePoint interface to connect to customer relationship management (CRM) or SAP software, which are common critical line-of-business applications; as well as new support for Lync for Mac, giving users the ability to use instant messaging, presence, and videoconferencing.

If applied and implemented properly, Office 365 can prove to be a very efficient tool for small businesses who want to be more cost efficient without compromising the quality of their output or their productivity. If you want to know more about how Office 365 will impact your business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.