As a partner with many MSPs, I often have a chance to speak with industry IT leaders and understand how they are seeing the world. Lately, our conversations always seem to touch on the spectrum that exists within an organization regarding the gap between user productivity needs and IT’s obligation to protect organizational data. Nowhere is this more evident than with Office 365.

Microsoft Excel 2013 has a new useful function called Days. It is pretty easy to use and only requires two arguments: an end date and a start date. The results will be displayed as the total number of days between the two dates. Follow the steps below to create the function.

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!

There are several ways to hide and unhide columns and rows in Excel. One thing you might not be aware of: you can hide and unhide more than one column or row, at the same time, even if they are non-contiguous. Better yet, if they are contiguous you can use Excel's Grouping tool. Below I have outlined a couple of time-saving ways to hide and unhide your Excel columns and rows.

For years I have been a big fan of First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. I love that they started with data from more than 1 million Gallup surveys and worked intently to find what the data would reveal.

Many of us have experienced a situation where we have created a Word document and then accidentally closed it out without saving it. Is it lost forever? Do I have to recreate the entire document over? Those are just a few of the questions that will be flying around in your head. Take a deep breath, and follow the steps below to recover your document.

One question often asked by my family, friends and sometimes co-workers is, "How do you keep up with technology, it seems to change so often." While I agree that technology seems to change faster these days, these are some tricks I use to try and stay ahead of the curve.

Hopefully your organization has a great employee training program in place for all the right reasons: you are improving business outcomes, intentionally building a culture of continuous learning, and increasing employee satisfaction. On top of all that, as an added bonus, you can use your training benefits as an advantage for recruiting and hiring top talent.

As companies embrace outsourcing more IT functions, external resources such as MSP Account Managers and vCIO's have greater influence in decisions around migration strategies. Is user adoption factored into the planning?

Ever find yourself in need of a classroom with a projector and a bunch of computers? Consider renting one of our classrooms for your next training event in the Burlington, Vermont area.

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.

Training employees. “Whose job is that? It’s not mine.” I’ve heard this often from my IT peers. They aren’t trying to skirt responsibility, they love technology and want users to embrace the latest enhancements. IT administrators and staff are often tasked with learning about the newest technologies to help their business maintain a competitive edge and meet customer demand. There are many reasons why IT may seem like the best choice for providing training. A common example being the C-suite seeing their IT staff as experts of the newest technology and they want to leverage that expertise.

With a large number of our clients making the move to Office 365, many are leveraging SharePoint Online, either migrating their existing sites or starting fresh.

KnowledgeWave has a confirmed-to-run SharePoint 2013: Site User class, the first of 3 one-day classes that help the user, site owner and site administrator get the most out of SharePoint.

This class will be taught LIVE in our South Burlington training facility. For those who prefer to be in the same room with the instructor, here's your chance! You can also attend remotely using our online classroom technology.

Everyone is affected by procrastination in some form or another. But why does it happen? It can’t be just a product of laziness, because adept procrastinators may become the hardest workers of all in the hours leading up to a deadline. What, then, can explain a process that is so irredeemably unpleasant and inconvenient for all involved?

Communication, teamwork, problem solving, attitude, leadership, professionalism. They are typically called "soft skills" and are vital to the success of any organization. The good news is that they can be learned and developed, just like hard skills.