Once Office for iPad was announced, I couldn't wait to stage a bare-knuckled battle with iWork, the productivity suite that's held down the fort on iPad for four years. I pitted Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote against Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps, respectively, to determine which better provided all the tools one would need in at typical work environment.
You have no excuse for being buried under paper these days. The tools to digitize most or all of your pile are readily at hand and very affordable. We're not exactly a paperless society yet, but this guide will help you get to less paper, and that's a step in several right directions: increased efficiency, better security, and a reduced environmental footprint. We've also added a few ways to eliminate paper from your workflow, the better to declutter your office--and your mind.
Social media has been a boon for businesses small and large, but it's also becoming a minefield for those unable to manage the increasing complexities of the run-and-gun nature of the beast. On a seemingly daily basis, we suffer through one "Twitter disaster" or another. It's becoming so commonplace that "Twitter disaster" really doesn't deserve to be in quotes.
Pop quiz for small business owners: When is the last time you updated your company's Google+ page?
It's over between me and my file cabinet. Six drawers full of dead trees. Total weight: a gargantuan 194.7 pounds of paper. I can't think of any less useful way to utilize home office space, especially when most of the contents, once filed, will never be touched again. I'm also gearing up to move, and the thought of packing, unpacking, and refiling all that stuff made me even more eager to end the relationship, pronto.
Companies make bad decisions all the time. Some of those decisions do irreparable harm, but others--like forcing users to boot to the new Modern interface in Windows 8, and taking away the Start button--can be reversed. Microsoft needs to ask whether it makes sense to backpedal.
Google shook things up last week when it dusted off its old Notebook service and relaunched it as Keep. Google's new software muscles in on the space currently dominated by Microsoft OneNote and Evernote, two note-taking apps that save your text, Web links, photos, audio recordings, and more, helping to keep your life organized.
The war between Google and Microsoft is heating up. Each tech giant offers a productivity suite serving the essentials for serious work online: word processing, spreadsheets, email, and calendars. Should you ally with Google Apps for Business, or root for Microsoft's Office 365 for Small Business?
Microsoft Word remains the world's beefiest and most popular word processing program. It's no easy task to simplify an application that has accumulated 30 years' worth of features, but Microsoft has improved the 2013 edition in several key ways, starting with a polished Read Mode and embedded PDF edits.
Rumors have been floating around for some time that Microsoft is hard at work developing Microsoft Office apps for iOS--or more specifically for the Apple iPad. Speculation about Office for iOS has grown following the launch of Office 2013 and the new Office 365, but Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appears to have squashed that dream for the time being.
Open source software projects may not typically have the marketing budgets necessary to match launch events like the one Microsoft just held for Office 2013, but that doesn't mean their products are any less valuable.
Even in the best of times, businesses don't like upgrading their PC operating systems. The process is expensive and time-consuming, and usually demands retraining a technically challenged workforce. And now Windows 8 threatens to make workplace system swaps even less attractive than before.
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the first Web browser in 1990, it was just an application made to read HTML pages passively. Fast-forward to today, and the modern Web browser has become a powerful platform in itself—almost a miniature operating system, capable of running complex JavaScript code and interacting with Flash plug-ins.
