Heart of Texas Network Consultants Blog

A compressed file (also known as a zip file) is a handy way to accomplish various tasks, although many people may not know what they are or do. We want to fix that, so we’re going over what a compressed file is and how to make one.

Productivity is extremely important for your business' ability to generate revenue and maintain consistent performance. Interestingly, many businesses face similar productivity challenges over time. What can small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) do to improve productivity when it starts to decline? Let's take a look at some strategies to keep productivity high. 

Obviously, we won’t tell you to cut down on your cybersecurity. That said, it can be easy to overinvest and overreach if you aren’t careful about what you’re implementing. This phenomenon is known as cybersecurity sprawl, and if not prevented, it can easily have serious consequences for your business. Let’s go into how to avoid this sprawl.

The conference room for any business is bound to be pretty interesting, and it can tell you all there is to know about a business. This is why it’s especially important to ensure your conference room gives the right impression, especially if you have clients who frequent your office. Let’s go over how you can make your conference room the best it can be!

The laptop is an excellent piece of office equipment due to its portability and its power to meet the needs of most of today’s workforce. When in the office, however, many prefer the much larger screens that are more typical of the traditional desktop. Let’s talk about how you can get the best of both worlds by plugging your laptop into a set of peripherals and using it while it's closed—effectively turning it into a PC’s tower.

Last week, we shared a blog referencing “smart chips” that could help augment a Google Doc. We wanted to dive a little deeper into the topic of smart chips so you could apply them to your own Google Docs and Sheets.

Templates are a handy feature that popular word processing platforms, like Google Docs, offer to help users create specific types of documents. While there are plenty of prebuilt templates available, there’s always the possibility that you have a need that isn’t filled by one of them.

In these cases, you always have the option to build your own. Let’s go over how, and discuss some of the elements and options that your custom Google Docs templates can support.

You know that a software has made its mark when its name becomes synonymous with the type of software it is. For instance: PowerPoint.

This element of Microsoft 365 is well-known enough to often be used as a catch-all phrase for any presentation software. Less well-known, however, are some of the cool features and functions that PowerPoint has to offer. Today, we’re sharing a few of these features with you.

Chances are, your and your employees’ lives are fully permeated with technology, from the very start of the day to the moment you close your eyes to sleep in the evening. That’s just how the world works nowadays, but there is evidence that this permeation of tech can have some adverse effects on us all. That’s why, as odd as it may sound coming from an IT provider, you may want to occasionally take a moment to step away from technology.

Scams are everywhere in our highly digitized world, which makes it especially important that everyone is prepared to deal with them—both personally and professionally. The publication Consumer Reports’ cover feature for its August 2023 edition is dedicated to exactly this goal: helping its readers avoid the various scams and threats out there. Let’s look at some of the advice shared in the article, and compare it to the best practices we recommend.

It’s important that you are able to communicate with the people you work for, with, and over; and a big part of this is ensuring that your points are heard. Let’s go over a few strategies and techniques that can help you ensure that those around you are apt to listen to what you have to say.

Productivity is always a primary focus for a business today, which makes any effort to improve it a welcome one. We wanted to take a moment and introduce you to a simple concept to make it easier to develop productive habits: something called habit stacking.

We tend to focus most of our attention on how to maintain your business’ technology over time. This only makes sense—we are a managed service provider, after all—but that being said, your IT is not the only element that needs to be properly taken care of. It is just as important that you and your team members are physically able to focus on work…something a desk job doesn’t always help.

If you have ever invested time and effort into an Excel spreadsheet, then you know how irritating it is to move all of that data to a different sheet. Thankfully, you can easily and accurately copy this data using a simple technique. Here’s how you can do it.

The past few years have made many people understandably antsy about their health and spending extended amounts of time around other people—which can make coming into the office a very, very stressful experience for some. How can you make your office a healthier place so your team can feel a little more secure as they work?

We’re all familiar with the old, cliched joke where someone needs to give their technology a good smack in order for it to work right—and by some miracle, it works. The thing is, it isn’t a miracle, and can sometimes be effective. Having said that, this is not a strategy that we would recommend.

Remote work has become a major part of modern business operations for a great many companies, but there is also a difficulty that frequently comes into play with remote work: the phenomenon of overwork. Let’s review some tips to help minimize the risk of overwork as people continue remote work.

Workplace burnout is a serious issue that can have far-reaching impacts in your business. Therefore, it is critical that you can identify when one of your team members is starting to feel it, and know what you can do to help reduce it. Let’s go over what can lead to burnout, as well as a few ways to remediate it.

Most modern businesses rely on wireless internet connectivity in their day-to-day processes. Of course, this means that their potential productivity is tied to the quality of their internet and its capability to serve the entire workforce. As a business grows it becomes more important that its Wi-Fi setup can support it. Let’s go over the process of properly scaling your network to your needs.

While it isn’t officially a business solution, per se, the collaboration platform known as Discord has seen some popularity as a means of facilitating a business’ internal communications. Let’s go over some handy tips to improve your use of the platform, in case you are part of an organization that does so. Who knows… this might inspire you to give it a chance for yourself.