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Archive for November, 2010

Office 2010 Adds New Features

November 5th, 2010 by Sean Wilcoxson

If you have not already made the jump to Office 2010, then you are still sitting on the lily pad, with all the other frogs deciding when to jump into something better.

The new edition of Office came out last June, changing the way people use the computer and how they conduct their business through it, and now is standard in new PC’s. Microsoft Office is really just an easier way to handle multiple operations at once when the operating system normally could not perform these tasks. For businessmen and professionals, Office has become the standard for email, meetings, and productivity.

Office provides Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, InfoPath, Groove, and Publisher. That is a ton of operation for one program to handle, and Office fits them all together for you to use them with ease. So if you have the old version of Office, why not turn your ‘ease’ into ‘easier’?

New Features

One new add on to Microsoft Office is PowerPoint LiveWeb, which is perfect for anyone who uses PowerPoint. Who does not love this program? Students especially have benefited from using this program greatly because it offers such a detailed and neat presentation. No more posters or weird looking projects that you have to spend hours on making. With this new feature, you can add web pages right to the slide making your presentation perfect. The OLD PowerPoint is so hard to configure because you have to add the code to the page.

To top it all off, a new feature called Producer takes the cake on ease. It lives up to its name, it produces results allowing the user to import video, photographs, and audio right into your presentation. If you are involved in e-Learning, a conference, office communications, and public speaking, Producer lets you do what you want to do: the best!

Office 2010 gets into the social network scene with Outlook Social Connector. With this feature you can see what your friends and business associates are doing instantly through Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Window’s Live Messenger. Using this feature allows people to follow each others progress and status when at work, school, or home.

Offisync is more than a combination between Office and synchronization, it is a revolutionary change in the way people share, edit, and communicate documents. If you use Google Docs, another multi-usage platform that combines a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation along with storage, then Offisync is the right stuff. With this feature you now have access to your Google Docs within Office. This makes it easier because you are free from being confined to the Google Apps. It is the key you have been looking for to unlock the door to accessibility.

For all of you that travel across the world seeking business and/or pleasure, Office has combined with Bing to create: Bing Travel Planner for Outlook. Especially if you have trouble to begin with trying to plan a trip or multiple trips over the year, Bing Travel Planner helps you schedule flights and also remember them.

Perhaps one of the most useful tools that Microsoft has added to its new edition of Office, is Microsoft Mathematics Add-In for Word. You can download this free of charge at the Microsoft website. What this allows you math illiterate people like myself to do, or math geniuses like you to accomplish, is graphing 2D or 3D, solving equations in arithmetic and algebra, and even completing statistical functions. How awesome is that? This is something that has been missing in computers, an application that is easy to use and effective in helping the student or businessman who has to deal with numbers daily, finish the work they started.

So for all you Microsoft Office Addicts out there who are off the wagon and need a fix? Office 2010 gives you all that need to satisfy that craving for more.

Fighting Computer Problems: When Should You Flight?

November 4th, 2010 by Sean Wilcoxson

At Geek Choice our main priority is to heal your ailing PC back to full health with our caring service and our dedicated mission. But what do you do before you call us? How do you know that your computer has a problem? Obviously it has stopped working properly and you are frustrated, but stop for a second and ask what the real problem is. Knowing when to go to us can make the difference between a dead PC and a small problem that Geek Choice can fix, problem solved.

If you hear your hardware inside of your computer making a clicking sound then it may already be too late, the PC is near death at this point. How did it get to that point?

The power supply units are the main cause of this problem. What most people do not know is that when it comes to making a PC, a company will most likely skimp on this very important component of the computer in order to cut costs of making it. This big metal box that sits in your computer is overlooked when it should be the first thing you check out.

When you look with the perspective of electricity, the power supply runs through every little electronic component in the computer. Kind of important, right?

When you want more hard drives, CD/DVD-ROM players, and floppy drives added on to your computer, you are really asking for an overload of power. By overloading the power supply, the system might not shut down right away leaving you to suspect other problems for the reason why your PC is going slow. The results of putting too much pressure on the power is the slow failure of the supply or the fluctuating power that creates an unstable system.

Another way in which your computer might be failing is the Power On/Off switch you keep hitting. When you power on the computer the electricity heats up the components, expanding them. When you power off the system, they contract. The thermal shock to the computer is too much for it to take after a while, leaving you with a broken piece of machinery. This is a problem that might be happening in your computer right now, for example, when you had to push the power button 0n your computer two or three times on and off in order to finally get it running.

This is when the question of whether to fight or flight comes in. What should you do? Unless you have a degree in Computer Science, I would call places like Geek Choice who can get to you fast and fix the problem. Next time you are about to throw the computer out of the window for acting up again, check how the basics. It might be over heated, or it might be getting too much power. Simple right?

Computers do not have to be a big mystery on how to shoot the trouble in the face and go along your business without interruption. But most of the time it is through ignorance that leaves the person stumped on why their computer needs repair. You did not know what you did not know, that is okay, just make sure you make the right decision.

The Real Story of Google

November 3rd, 2010 by Sean Wilcoxson

How many times have you heard people say, when they are trying to find out some information on a question they themselves cannot answer, “I’ll just ‘Google’ it!”? They type the words in the search box, and like magic 100,000,000 results come up for asking the ‘meaning of life’. Google is actually in the dictionary as verb!

Behind Google Lines

Who is behind this giant? When did it become the number one provider for information globally? What is a search engine and what does Google do to stay on top of the market?Just how did this giant of an engine that grabs so many results, 99% of the results being random non-related content, come to be? These are questions I will answer for you.

At the head of Google, Inc. are two men named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 1996 these two graduate students who attended Stanford University were working on finding out how many “backlinks”, the number of web pages that link to a certain site, were out there in the world wide web and how to pull them all together.

Originally, the name 0f the project was called “Backrub”, a clever one talking about how it rubbed the backlinks of the internet. This web-crawler traveled across the internet picking up all the sites that had a connection to a certain web-page, instead of the conventional method of search engines at the time, which only counted how many times the search term appeared on a page. The super-information-highway was on it’s way to being paved.

The name ‘Google’ comes from the misspelled ‘googol’, a name for the number one followed by one hundred zero’s. This was a powerful name to choose for a search engine that boasts it can find that many search results. What is interesting today is that the googol signifies more than just search results.

The “Google Guys” have come a long way from the days when they had to put together 10 four Gigabyte hard drives in a case built out of Lego’s, hence the colors of Google, they are advancing rapidly into every territory you can think of.

After maneuvering through financial difficulties, Google was able to get into a unique online auction and sell their shares at a high price, instantly making many Google employees millionaires. They did not stop there, Google grew into an enormous beast of a company buying out YouTube and creating service such as Google Earth and Google Voice. At the rate that this company is going, there will soon be a Google Life!

Google is top-secret too, they are not kissing and telling. That is perhaps why they stay on top and always ahead of the market in terms of fresh, innovative ideas. They are even turning green: recently this year Google Energy was created, after an investment was made in a North Dakota wind farm to harvest mega-watts. What else will Google do?

In basic terms, Google connects the world to the internet, and allows people to get the most of what they are searching for. The real story of Google is still a mystery, since they won’t even tell how many servers they have, so you will just have to guess that this company will probably take over the world!

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