If you take only one thing from this post, it should be that, as is the case with anything in your business, you need an IT roadmap going forward. You need to plan for the future.

But let’s cut to the chase: the Microsoft Windows XP operating system was released in 2001. Vista came out in early 2007. Windows 7 is the current client version (arrived in mid-2009). Windows 8 is set to drop later this year. Still think your OS is up to snuff?

Let’s try looking at it in even starker perspective: your operating system is one year older than the No Child Left Behind Act and three years older than Facebook. Pluto was demoted to a “dwarf planet” five years after Windows XP was released. Is this making sense? If Windows XP were a wine, it would almost be vinegar by now.

XP has had a long full life, and now it is time to say goodbye. Here are five quick reasons why:

1.  It’s outdated / developers keeps moving forward

You knew this was coming. XP is going on 11. Microsoft has released two separate client operating systems since XP and is poised to deliver a third. Even if you’ve stayed up-to-date with all the relevant patches and service packs, XP simply doesn’t offer high quality performance it used to.

And speaking of service packs, you also need to consider…

2.  Security

Even with Service Pack 3 in place, Windows XP is still not nearly as secure as Windows 7 (or Mac OS X Lion for that matter). And as I’ve said before, security absolutely needs to be a priority.

Security provisions in XP pale in comparison to the newer operating systems. For one thing there’s very little demand for continued patches (see #5 below), and for another there’s not going to be a supply for much longer since extended support for the product ends in 2014.

3.  Compatibility mode in Win7

One major objection that we hear about upgrading operating systems is that business applications don’t always work with the latest operating systems. This argument is rendered moot by Windows 7’s compatibility mode, which allows you to run some apps in Windows 7 and others in XP. So yes, you will be able to run your legacy apps.

4.  Risk of lock-in with Win8.

If you are considering jumping directly to Windows 8, my advice to you is to wait. CIOs and VPs of IT have yet to be impressed by Microsoft’s sneak peeks, and it hasn’t even been released yet.

Plus, with the right licensing agreement, you may be able to upgrade for free if Windows 8 turns out to be a winner. Software Assurance might be right up your alley.

5.  Competition is doing it/has already done it

This isn’t about keeping up with the Joneses; it’s about making your business successful. Your IT should be an asset that helps you drive your business forward, but if you let it become stagnant it will drag you further and further behind in your industry. Don’t let that happen!

One of Responza’s primary missions is to assist small and medium businesses in their IT planning and IT budgeting. To start discussing your IT roadmap, call (206) 762-5100 or send a message to solutions@responza.com today!

Let’s get started!

Part 1: How to archive messages in Gmail

Gmail has a “built-in archival system that you can take advantage of when you are ready.” Whether that happens to be archiving as you go or archiving en masse when your inbox reaches critical mass…

As is the case with any inbox, your Gmail is going to inevitably start filling up with old messages.

How about we archive anything located in my inbox that is older than three months?

In the search box at the top of my page I type:

After clicking the search icon, I now have in front of me a list of all the results matching my criteria.

“1-20 of many”? Uh oh…

I click the empty box at the top left of my inbox and select All.

You’ll notice that the Refresh icon

has now become the Archive icon:

But before you click Archive, check out the small type between the inbox options and the actual inbox

You’ll probably want to click that, unless you want to do the same thing an innumerable “many” times.

If for whatever reason you immediately realize that you actual preferred the clutter, you can easily Undo, or you can find your archived messages under All Mail on the left side of your inbox when you click More.

Then you can easily move them back into your inbox by using the appropriately named Move to Inbox button, located at the top of your inbox:

Part 2: How to use customized styles in Google Docs

(What are custom styles?)

For the uninitiated, a “style” is a text format. It encompasses font, size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, color, and more. There are a variety of ready-made styles that you can employ as you write titles, subtitles, headings, and body paragraphs.

Sometimes you want to modify these styles (as I’ve previously mentioned [link to http://www.responza.com/blog/2011/general/word-2010-how-to-change-the-default-font/], I’m quite partial to Times New Roman), so in the past one of my major grievances with the Google Apps for Business suite has been the inability to use custom styles in my documents. Fortunately, Google addressed this shortcoming and implemented the ability to adjust and modify default styles.

Let’s say I want to change the font in my body paragraphs to my beloved Times New Roman. Here’s how:

• Highlight the text
• Change the font type (and size if so desired)

• Click the Styles dropdown (currently labeled “Normal text”)
• Hover over the arrow in the style you would like to customize
• Select Update ______ to match selection (in this case it reads, “Update Normal text to match selection”)

You can also accomplish this by right-clicking the highlighted text and selecting Update _____ to match selection.

You can do the same thing to other styles, including Titles, Subtitles, and Headings.

To make these default settings apply to future documents, go to the Styles dropdown, select Options, and click “Save as my default styles.” (This can also be accomplished under Format, Paragraph styles, Options. And if you go there, you’ll notice that there are three more Heading styles in Format>Paragraph styles (4, 5, and 6) for you to adjust and bend to your will.)

So while Google Docs may not have the wealth of styles and options that, say, Microsoft Word 2010 has, for most purposes it’ll do just fine.

The formatting tools you may have relied upon in the past, whether you used Microsoft Office, Open Office, etc., only seem curiously absent; I assure you that they do exist. You just need to familiarize yourself with the nuances of Google Docs.

Let’s say for example that you need to convey to a colleague the chemical compound of ethanol, or drinking alcohol:

You can highlight the text and use the handy Format tab, or you can use a keyboard short cut, [Ctrl] + [+] + [,].

And there you have it: the chemical formula for the alcohol in beer. It’s certainly easier than brewing your own!

So now, instead of switching back and forth from an Excel spreadsheet and a Word document, you can take advantage of the excellent Table functions built into Word 2010.

There are three easy ways to make a table in your Word document, and they all start at the “Insert” tab on your ribbon.

1)      Preformatted table templates

From this tab, you can pick any ready-made table that suits you.

• All sorts of calendar templates- no more typing out each and every day into each cell
• Matrices ranging from simple to complex
• The double table template is especially helpful if you’re trying to keep your whole table on a single page

But maybe you’re looking for something slightly different than what Microsoft has developed. Instead of going through the trouble of adding rows and columns and adjusting height and width in the preformatted templates, you can create your own table:

2)      Table menu

Here, I’m about to create a three-by-three table.

The user interface on this function is pretty great. Put hover your mouse over the cell corresponding to the number of rows and columns you want and it’s there—even before you click, so you can see what your table is going to look like. You can add in your own flourishes—color shading, border weight, font size—as you fill the table in.

3)      Insert Table dialog box

The good old fashioned “Insert Table…” function lets you do pretty much the same thing, but it gives you more options up front. Don’t want to adjust the size of the cells? Use the AutoFit options.

It’s easy to confuse this function with “Draw Table,” which can be useful, but it can also be a huge waste of time because it’s much less intuitive than Microsoft would like us to think. If you are familiar with it, though, it can be a lot of fun:

Tic-Table-Toe

Game!

Now you know three ways to quickly create a table in your Word doc! And since you’ve created your table so quickly, you can spend more time actually inputting the information you needed to organize in the first place…

A table within a table within a table…

…or not!

Need some more help with what you can do from Word 2010? Let us know at solutions@responza.com.

(If you’re a Google Apps user, you’ll want to check out this page [link to Google Apps How-To blog post] on archiving messages in Gmail and using customized styles in Google Docs.)

Let’s get started!

Part 1: How to ignore conversations in Outlook 2010

Section A – how and why to use Conversations

First of all, there’s a pretty convenient setting in Outlook 2010 that allows you to organize your inbox by date, by sender, by recipient, etc., and by Conversation. When this last option is enabled, a group of messages appear as a single line item with an arrow icon when not selected:

and as a cascade of back and forth messages when selected, with the newest messages at the top:

Obviously, the conversation capability can drastically reduce clutter, and it helps make items in your inbox that much easier to find and act upon. You can turn Conversations on by going to the View tab in your ribbon and clicking the radio button beside Show as Conversations.

(Section B – how to ignore certain conversations)

Inevitably, there are going to be some conversations that you don’t want to pay attention. Maybe you’re on a broad distribution list or there’s someone in your office who is really into sharing videos of cats playing the piano.

If you don’t use Ignore, the same inane nonsense and anti-content will continue to jump to the top of your inbox as new replies come in. It doesn’t matter how many times you press the delete button, the conversation will reappear at the top of your inbox with the arrival of each new reply.

Ignore not only moves the conversation to your Deleted Items folder, it reroutes any new messages in the conversation to the Deleted Items folder as well.

Here’s how to keep these particular discussions from interrupting you:

• Select the conversation
• Under the Delete group in the Home tab, click Ignore

(FYI, there are also a couple other ways of accomplishing this. You could select the conversation and press [Ctrl] + [Delete], or you can right-click the conversation and select Ignore from the options that appear.)

If for whatever reason you would like to bring an ignored conversation back to your inbox, you can do so by navigating to your Deleted Items folder, selecting the conversation, clicking Ignore (it should appear as a depressed button before you click it)

and finally selecting Stop Ignoring Conversation in the resulting pop-up window.

And now the conversation is back in your inbox. Pretty easy, huh?

Part 2: How to change default line spacing in Word 2010

If you’ve recently upgraded from 2003 to 2010, you may have noticed that the spacing between lines isn’t the same. (If you haven’t yet upgraded, here’s a tip on the house [link to http://www.responza.com/blog/2012/general/word-how-to-turn-off-overtype-in-word-2003/], but you really do need to start budgeting for that upgrade.)

You could change the line spacing for each and every document you create—there’s a Line and Paragraph Spacing button in the Paragraph group under the Home tab that you can manually adjust:

But the three seconds you spend doing that on a document add up when you’re working on several different documents every day. So it may be wise to revert your document settings back to the Word 2003 settings you are comfortable with.

• In the Home tab of the ribbon, under the Styles group, click Change Styles

• Hover over Style Set and then click Word 2003

• To make Word 2003 settings your default settings for this and all future documents, click Change Styles again and select Set as Default

Alternatively, you can change the default line space settings to single space and take advantage of the new features in this edition of Microsoft Word. And I promise, there are some features that are actually pretty cool and worth exploring.

So how do you change just the default line spacing? It’s not as difficult as you might think.

• Click the pop-out button at the bottom right corner of the Paragraph group

This will open a new window.

• In the drop-down box below Line spacing: select Single.

• Click Set As Default.

Note that you can also change to a double spaced format between lines if you so desire. In fact, you can set the default line spacing to pretty much anything you want. In honor of Pi Day tomorrow, here’s 3.14 line spacing:

What I’ve seen is the use of individual employee email addresses, like “mailto:sue@yourdomain.com,” with frightening frequency.

There’s a fine line between making yourself available to customers and prospects and throwing your contact information onto the web for everyone to see. Giving the entirety of the Internet your email address definitely crosses that line. If you are receiving tons of spam, this would be one of the first places I would start.

Spammers, scammers, bots, and more are trawling your website regularly, and when they snatch up your email address, you start receiving more spam than you thought was possible. These automated pieces of software are always on, searching the web for easy targets. And mailto: gives them precisely that.

You could simply direct messages to an alias at your organization, for instance “mailto:info@yourdomain.com,” but you’re going to have to deal with the same problem there. Just moving where the messages are sent isn’t going to fix the issue. Instead, I would recommend a different means of receiving communication from outsiders.

One option is to build a contact form into your website instead of using that mailto: link. Not only does this method cut down on spam and virus-laden messages, it can also be formatted so that you receive pertinent information. For instance, you could require that message senders include their name and organization, and the resulting contacts can even automatically be entered and categorized in your CRM database for future contact based on the information they provide.

So instead of wading through thousands of spam messages for those few real contacts, you receive interested and qualified individuals with whom you can then confidently communicate via email and phone.

Not to brag, but www.responza.com/contact.html is a pretty good example.

Want to implement something similar but don’t know how? Check out http://www.responza.com/webdev.html or request your free web services quote [link to http://www.responza.com/free_web_quote.html] today!

If you use Microsoft Word 2003, you may have noticed the letters OVR that appear at the bottom of your document in the status bar. Ever wonder what that is?

This feature is called Overtype (it also features in Outlook 2003 and Excel 2003, but it is most noticeable in Word 2003). As you edit your text in Overtype mode, you are typing new characters over existing characters. If you’re simply adding content at the end of your document, this is no problem since you’re just writing over empty space. But if you’re trying to add and subtract text somewhere in the middle, it’s a nightmare. In order to insert characters into existing text without overtyping that text, you must first turn off Overtype mode.

There are three quick fixes you can use to disable Overtype mode:

1)      double-click OVR in the status bar

2)      press the Insert key

3)      in the Tools menu, click Options, click the Edit tab, and then clear the check box beside Overtype mode

Any one of those will solve your problem for now. But if you’re like most users, you don’t want to do this every time you create a new document. There are two ways to get rid of overtype for good: the easy way and the tech-speak/glazed-eyes way that requires you to use macro language. I’m guessing you’re not interested in the latter, so here’s the easy way to turn off overwrite in Word 2003:

• right-click any empty part of the Word toolbar and then click the Customize menu item. This will cause a new window to appear
• select the Commands tab at the top of the window, and then click the Keyboard button at the bottom left

• in the Categories list box, select All Commands;
• in the Commands list box, select Overtype.
• in the Current Keys box, select Insert and then click the Remove button

Done!

Lucky for the rest of us, Microsoft seems to have figured out in their latest editions of Office that this feature is at best unhelpful, so this tip is only applicable if you’re still working with Office 2003.

So I guess the best solution is an upgrade to the latest edition of Microsoft Office!

Click. Drag. Highlight. Go to the Page Layout tab in the ribbon at the top and manually adjust the indentation. What a drag. You may think you’re saving time because you know that you can access this in the Paragraph region of the Home tab in the ribbon, but you should know that there’s a way to do this sort of thing even faster: keyboard shortcuts.

Suppose you’re working on a proposal. You’re done with the content, and all that’s left before you send it to the prospect is formatting.

Let’s say you have a coworker who has a habit of stealing and hiding your mouse while you’re away. Instead of using Chinese Water Torture to find out where your mouse is and finish that proposal, you can take advantage of the built-in formatting styles of Word 2010 with these simple keyboard shortcuts, and devise a better way of getting back at that coworker later.

1)      Apply styles- through these keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly and efficiently take advantage of built-in styles of Word 2010 to create headings, bullets, and normal text in your proposal:

• Ctrl + Shift + N = apply Normal style
• Ctrl + Shift + L = apply List Bullet style
• Ctrl + Alt + 1 = apply Heading 1 style
• Ctrl + Alt + 2 = apply Heading 2 style
• Ctrl + Alt + 4 = apply Heading 3 style
• Ctrl + Shift + S = open the Apply Styles dialogue box, where you can choose any style available to the document

2)      Adjust font size- maybe your proposal needs some fine print, which is easy to create:

• Ctrl + ] (right bracket) = increase size of selected text by 1 point
• Ctrl + [ (left bracket) = decrease size of selected text by 1 point
• Ctrl + Shift + > = increase selected text to the next largest installed point size
• Ctrl + Shift + < = decrease selected text to the next smallest installed point size

3)      Modify line or paragraph spacing- add some white space and improve the readability of your proposal:

• Ctrl + 0 = apply or remove 12 points of space above the current paragraph
• Ctrl + 5 = apply 1.5 line spacing to the current paragraph
• Ctrl + 2 = double-space the lines in the current paragraph

4)      Transfer formatting- you can quickly transfer existing formats from one block of text to another, and you just add one key to the copy-paste keyboard shortcut that you already know

• Ctrl + Shift + C = copy the formatting of selected text
• Ctrl + Shift + V = apply the copied formatting to a new selection

5)      Remove manually applied formatting- this is especially useful when working with documents created by others who use extraneous formatting; get rid of all that manual formatting and get back to the document’s underlying styles:

• Ctrl + Spacebar = remove character formatting, leaving just the formatting of the default character style
• Did you know you can change the default character style? Click here [link to blog post “Word 2010: how to change the default font”) to learn how.
• Ctrl + Q = remove paragraph formatting, leaving just the formatting of the paragraph style applied to the selected paragraphs

Using these keyboard shortcuts should drastically reduce the amount of time it takes you to format your documents.

Got a request for a Microsoft Office tip or trick? Let us know in the comments below or shoot an e-mail to solutions@responza.com.

Word 2010 also uses Calibri 11 as the default font, but it’s pretty easy to change this setting. Here’s how:

1)      Over in the “Styles” section of your “Home” tab, click the icon in the bottom right-hand corner.

2)      This will open up the “Styles” box. At the bottom of this box are three icons. Click the “Manage Styles” icon, located third from the left.

3)      A “Manage Styles” window should have popped up. Select the “Set Defaults” tab at the top.

4)      You can pick which font you would like to use as your default under the “Font:” pull-down—I’ve picked the lovely Times New Roman—and you can adjust the font size under the “Size:” pull-down—I’ve picked 12 because I want my Times New Roman to easily read without glasses.

Note that I’ve selected “Only in this document” at the bottom of this window. This allows me to only apply my new default font to this particular document, but I could just as easily make this my default font for all future documents.

5)      Click “OK,” close the “Styles” box, and start typing in your new default font!

But before we dive into actual malware on Macs, let’s cover some basic security measures first. The default settings on a Mac are not at all optimal for security. You should definitely change these.

Open “System Preferences”

Select the “Accounts” icon under “System”; in Lion, this will be “Users & Groups”

Click on “Login Options,” located in the white space on the left side of the window.

Change “Automatic login:” to Off, change “Display login window as:” to Name and password, and uncheck the box for “Show password hints.” Don’t forget to click the lock icon at the bottom left of the window.

Now go back to “System Preferences” and select the “Security” icon under “Personal”; this will be “Security & Privacy” on Lion

Under the “General” tab of the “Security” window

Turn the “Require password” on and select immediately from the drop-down. Under “For all accounts on this computer:” check the box for “Disable automatic login.” (Mine is grayed out because I have FileVault enabled, which disables any user from automatically logging in, but more on FileVault in a moment.) If this is a shared Mac and you would like to prevent other users (who are not admins) from undoing any of this, check the box for “Require an administrator password to unlock each System Preferences pane.”

Now before you go and turn your FileVault (or FileVault 2 on Lion) on, know this. It can cause a Mac to become unresponsive, it can prevent users from logging into their accounts, and it can even permanently damage or destroy user data. So before you switch this setting on, know that if mobile workers use this machine or if the data on the machine is so sensitive that it needs to be protected at any or all costs, then you probably shouldn’t mess around with this setting.

The Firewall tab is a bit more easily understood. Just like a physical firewall, the Mac’s internal firewall helps prevent undesired traffic from entering or existing the system. If enabled, it can cause some issues, such as file-sharing or iChat errors or not being able to find other machines on the network, so if the machine is already within your workplace network then I would advise against turning this setting on. However, if you are a mobile user who must frequently use remote networks, then this firewall software is great at reducing your level of risk. Still, it is worth looking into getting good anti-virus on your machine to be doubly sure, but let’s return to the basic settings and we’ll get back to Mac A-V momentarily.

Go back to “System Preferences” and select the “Desktop & Screen Saver” icon under “Personal”

The particular screen saver you select is not important, but you do need to set the slider beneath “Start screen saver:” to an appropriate amount of time. I set mine at around 20 minutes so that I don’t get interrupted when I’m doing e-learning, but so that my machine still gets locked down in a reasonably short amount of time.

Now let’s get into the title subject of this post: malware on Macs.

It’s not for me to say whether Macs are truly prone to malware. That’s a tough case to make with Apple purists—you can take it up with our security experts at (206) 762-5100—but everyone should be able to accept that a Mac can act as a carrier of malware. So how can you stop your machine from passing on viruses?

Macs come with XProtect, a piece of rudimentary anti-virus software, built in. XProtect is limited; it can’t do more than stop the most basic of intruders. Luckily, Sophos has developed a free anti-virus for Mac home users. However, the home edition can’t handle the onslaught that businesses face every day. Responza partners with Sophos to provide best-in-breed security to our business customers, and we feel that it is an important safeguard for our customers to consider.

But back to the recent trend of Mac-directed malware. A series of trojans have been making the rounds since earlier this fall.

Flashback.A, the first in the series, was discovered in late September. The aim of its creators is to connect the infected machine to a remote server and transmit stolen data, such as the infected machine’s unique MAC address. Flashback.B, discovered earlier this month, keeps the trojan from installing on virtualized Mac OS X environments. Flashback.C, the latest version in the series, looks like an update to Adobe Flash and requires users to enter their admin password to install. Once installed, the trojan disables the automatic updater component of XProtect. Ultimately, this creates a path for the trojan’s creators to maximize their financial gain.

Now that you know what you’re up against, you’ll need to start prepping your defense.

Want to learn more about Sophos or give it a test run? Let us know at solutions@responza.com.

For example, we are advised time and time again not to use peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent, and yet we continue to do so. Even when we’re not using this file-sharing protocol illegally (i.e., downloading the latest movies), there’s still cause for alarm. If you’re not worried about the consequences of peer-to-peer file-sharing, you should be. And here’s why.

Do you use Skype? This may seem like it has nothing to do with P2P, but stick with me.

Skype is a powerful tool that businesses can and should use to communicate both internally and externally. But it does require that users divulge a modicum of information. When a user signs up for Skype, they must provide an e-mail address and create a Skype ID. They can also provide personal information, such as birth name, location, gender, age, and website. This information is recorded in the Skype directory.  Naturally, you shouldn’t be giving any of this sort of information out, but you still have to create that Skype ID. It turns out that this simple piece of information can be observed by anyone, and that poses a terrifying possibility: who is watching you?

A research team with members from Germany, France, and the United States created a scheme that was able to find a targeted person’s Skype ID and inconspicuously call that person to find their IP address. This scheme was used periodically to observe the mobility of that Skype user, tracking where they operated from.

Furthermore, they found that Skype does not attempt to hinder this sort of scheme with any sort of countermeasures. In fact, even though the researchers informed Skype of major privacy vulnerabilities back in May (the same month that the company was acquired by Microsoft), these vulnerabilities have not been addressed.

The researchers then used their scheme to link Skype and BitTorrent to show how it is possible to determine the file-sharing usage of identified users.  Here’s a sample of what they found:

This is only with a handful of users, but the researchers drew from a set of 100,000. Plus, the researchers limited their scheme to link only Skype and BitTorrent. There are any number of other communication services and P2P networks that bad guys can target to get to your personal information.

This isn’t an indictment of Skype. You should just know that even with modest financial resources, it can be pretty easy to gain access to your personal information. Simply put, the researchers hypothesize that any Internet user can find out who you are, where you are, and what you are downloading and uploading on peer-to-peer networks, all simply by finding your Skype ID. Now that’s scary!

You can read the whole study at http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/skypeIMC2011.pdf.

BitTorrent, and other P2P networks like Vuze and The Pirate Bay, suck up bandwidth, waste employee time, provide viruses with an easy entry point into your network, and often straddle the line of legality. Granted, P2P makes it easy to share information with others, but the risks involved clearly outweigh the rewards. Luckily, there is an alternative: Microsoft SharePoint. Stay tuned for more on SharePoint later this year…

So how do you control P2P on your network? You can monitor your network’s bandwidth usage to spot applications like these, and even block them at the firewall. You should also create and circulate a company Internet policy, if you haven’t already. Responza has a pretty simple policy when it comes to BitTorrent: don’t!

For a sample policy or to learn more about how you can keep your personal information secure, call (206) 762-5100 or send an e-mail to solutions@responza.com.