Technology End of Service - 3 Myths. Cybercriminals can quite easily infiltrate your network if your software and hardware are not kept up to date. Keeping your estate up to date is crucial to keep your security in tip-top shape and reduce downtime. If you are using and continue to use unsupported systems, you are leaving the door unlocked for potential attacks and you may also be hindering your company’s success, growth, and reputation.

Running an SME can often seem like a never ending stream of crucial choices. You are the core decision maker, responsible for many things; growth, client success and ensuring project deliverables are achieved. With so much at stake and so many plates to spin, some things can often be overlooked and IT can fall victim. When you are so occupied with other tasks, the small warning signs or tiny changes in normally mundane maintenance tasks that normally serve as a trigger to take action are often missed by your busy eyes. Pro-active management of key infrastructure is critical to enabling smooth growth and overall success within your business. Here we briefly discuss some basic IT red flags to keep a lookout for.

As the hustle and bustle of Christmas kicks in, make sure you don’t fall prey to festive fraud! A recent report by Action Fraud found that last year 15,024 people were conned out of £11 million by fraudsters over the Christmas period!

Despite the ever-increasing amount of communication applications, email remains and is likely to remain the primary method of communicating important information between employees and customers. We use it to verify our identity, send our thanks or apologies, invoices, offers, and information amongst many other vital things. It is something we demand and depend upon if we are to interact smoothly with our partners and clients. Yet many of us don’t require or at least practice security standards that befit such an essential and often sensitive act. Startling is that the writing is on the wall when it comes to email security!

A popular fitness and nutrition app ‘MyFitnessPal’ has suffered the largest data breach of 2018 so far affecting 150 million accounts. Hackers got away with usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords.

2017 has been a big year concerning cyber security, positively and negatively. The rise of Ransomware into the mainstream news with global attacks on businesses and record numbers of data breaches such as Yahoo having one billion accounts accessed by hackers. IT security is one of the fastest moving industries, and it's vital that every business tries to keep up and stay protected.

Cyber security is of vital importance in the modern world and creating secure passwords is at the forefront of protecting your personal accounts. It's common knowledge that people still manage to use passwords such as ‘abc123’ and ‘password’ to protect laptops and computers with sensitive information available just by guessing the correct combination.

Time saving tricks in Microsoft Word can increase your productivity by reducing the time you spend editing documents. You may have seen these kinds of shortcuts and suggestions before, but we’re sure you’ll find something new in the list below.

Fifteen million UK internet users have undertaken a ‘digital detox’ in a bid to strike a healthier balance between technology and life beyond the screen, according to major new Ofcom research. The majority of internet users say they’re ‘hooked’, spending a day a week online and the Ofcom study revealed some of the effects of excessive internet use on sleep, school, family and relationships.

Excel Sparklines were introduced in Excel 2010 version. It is small line chart that could be easily embedded with the text and gives a great presentable output for easier depiction when aligned next to the tabular data. They are supported in Excel 2010 and above version only. Although sparkline’s design is not limited to lines they can also be represented as columns or win loss. The below example depicts how sparklines look: When to Use: Excel Sparklines can be useful if you have your data in a tabular format. You can place the sparklines next to each row to give a clear graphical presentation of the data selected in that particular row. How to Use: Below listed steps give a clear understanding on how to use excel sparklines: Click on the cell where you want to insert the “Sparkline(s)”. Go the “Insert” tab on the top ribbon. Select the Type of “Sparkline” (Line, Column, Win/ Loss), in this case we will take “Line Sparkline” as example. Line Type of Sparklines So, this was all about how to use excel sparklines. You can also do formatting, add markers, axis, etc to enhance the sparklines. Below section suggests on type of sparklines and their formatting. Type of Excel Sparklines: Line – These sparklines are displayed in the format of simple lines. You could change the style of line, sparkline color and marker color. Column – These sparklines are displayed in the format of bars. If the data is of positive value then the column would be lying on the upper axis. For negative data value the column would be below the axis. Likewise for zero value the column would not be displayed and an empty space would be left at that data point. In these sparklines too, you can change the style of column, sparkline color and marker color. Win / Loss – These sparklines are displayed in the format of bars like “Column” sparklines although these only represent profit or loss. If the data is showing profit (positive data points) then bars would be above the axis and if the data is showing loss (negative data points) then the bars would be inverted and will be below the axis. If the data is of zero value then the column would not be displayed and an empty space would be left at that data point, as shown in above figure as well. In these sparklines as well, you can change the style of column, sparkline color and marker color. You can change the type of sparklines for the whole group or for single row by un-grouping the sparklines first. Thus each row can have a different type of sparkline.