Earned value is a powerful tool for monitoring project scope, time and cost, and it can help give you a picture of the total project performance.

Microsoft Project 2013 allows you to analyze and manage earned value, and in this video, I'll show you how!

You may be asking, "How can I make my team as productive and efficient as they can be and make the most of Microsoft Office 365?" Ultimately, you want to learn ways to maximize functionality to increase efficiency. Well, that's exactly what Office 365 is built to do!

Make your SharePoint team sites sparkling clean

As you're building, creating, and managing your organization's SharePoint team sites, it's critical to do some planning. Big-time planning. Even planning on evolution, which may be why you're asking how you can create a logical and strategic setup for a team site that's already getting overwhelmingly difficult for users. How do you organize your SharePoint team sites for optimal results? Well, that depends on how you're using SharePoint, the size of your organization, and how much freedom users have to make changes.

Changing your work or school account password in Office 365 for business is pretty easy! If you’ve completely forgotten your password and you need to reset it, use the self-service password reset tool (if your admin or workplace technical support has enabled it). Otherwise, you’ll need to contact them for help.

Have you ever received a .pdf from someone and needed to make comments for review or edit text in a .pdf just like you do in Microsoft Word? Adobe Acrobat Pro DC allows the user to have lots of control over their documents. Productivity and efficiency are improved with the multitude of features! In this blog post, however, I’ll focus on how to add text to a pdf and how to add comments to a .pdf.

How to use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to add a comment to a pdf:

Click Tools and then Comment.

What is the key to a successful SharePoint migration? I think that we can all agree that a successful migration depends on a team of individuals who understand how it works! 

You may ask yourself, “Should I get Office 365 or Office 2013?” “Are Office 365 and Office 2013 different?” “Can I get both Office 365 and Office 2013?” These are great questions to consider and I’d like to clear up a few things, including terminology.

What is a PivotTable, a PivotChart and a Slicer in Excel? These are features that work very well together to create an interactive separate report. Take raw data and build that report and change the way it looks and analyzes your data. A PivotChart is an interactive chart where you can change the view, suppress things and instantly see your changes. A Slicer is push button interface that allows people to drill down and see specific results from your report. So, how can you create a report with a PivotTable, a PivotChart and a Slicer on one sheet? Check it out!

Sorting, Filtering and using AutoSum are great ways to work with your data to present report-style spreadsheets but there’s a better way! How can you present raw data in a way to show subtotals and then suppress and expand to make a great looking Excel spreadsheet? This is an amazing feature that will add a row displaying a subtotal without having to write formulas. Here’s how.

You can add attachments to include one or more files with any email message you send, however, you have more choices with Office 365. When you add an attachment you can choose a file from your computer hard drive, but how do you send an attachment as a link using OneDrive? Well, this awesome feature is very easy to do. Is it possible to collaborate on email attachments? Yes, it is! If you choose a file that you have in OneDrive for Business, you can send it as a link. When you send a link, not only will you prevent clogging up other people’s inbox, but the recipients can automatically given permission to edit the file which is perfect for collaboration. When we collaborate in the cloud, there is only one file to keep track of which is perfect for version control.
Check out how easy it is:

As many of us already know, migrating to Microsoft SharePoint presents the risk of low user adoption. In our experience, we’ve seen resistance and a big mind shift with the concept of using metadata in SharePoint instead of the traditional folder structure. Most end users are comfortable with folders. After all, “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”  This cultural shift doesn’t come easy and requires continuous education and training.

How do you protect cells on a spreadsheet so that people can only select certain cells? How do you protect cells within a spreadsheet so other people can’t delete your formulas? Gain control of your spreadsheets! The best way is to protect your cells by unlocking them. Check out how to first unlock cells and then protect the sheet with a password. Then, users only have the ability so select the cells that you decide.

Take this Employee Mileage Reimbursement Form, for example. We only want staff members to be able to enter their name, month, commute miles, and other specifics about the expense submission. We don’t want them to be able to select cells that include formulas…only constant values that pertain to them. Once protected, the best practice is to save this document as a template. 

Occasionally, dates or names won’t merge correctly into a spreadsheet. There are extra spaces, for example, and you may want to get rid of them. How do you clean up your spreadsheets quickly? Use the TRIM and SUBSTITUTE functions. Trim blank spaces and substitute text or blanks with something different and clean up hidden characters!