Helen Bradley

This year millions more people will watch videos online than ever before, and the rapid, world-wide trend doesn’t look like it’s stopping any time soon. Many online businesses harness the visual impact of video to help them find new customers, to sell more products to existing customers, and to provide after-sales support. If you want […]

How do you differentiate your small business ecommerce store when you sell products that are sold on many other Web stores? Using product descriptions provided by manufacturers or copied from other sites might seem like a quick way to list your products, but that strategy can spell disaster for your shop. Google penalizes duplicate content […]

You might think that the desktop is just another tile on the Windows 8 Start screen, but it’s where most small business users will spend their day. The desktop runs all of your legacy software; it’s where you store and manage your files, and you can browse the Web from there too. While the new […]

Not all of the tools on the Microsoft Word 2010 Ribbon are where you’d expect to find them, and some Word 2007 tools didn’t make it to the Ribbon at all. Luckily you can customize the Ribbon and create your own custom tabs with commands to make it easier to find the tools you use […]

Metro, the new Windows 8 interface, is causing an equal measure of excitement and consternation across the Web. The new tablet-style interface that uses tiles to launch your favorite applications — including the old familiar desktop — will be unfamiliar territory for many people. If you’re planning to upgrade to Windows 8, there’s no getting […]

One of the big computer news stories of the year is the upcoming release of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system. This important small business software release comes at a time when businesses must face the reality that Windows XP extended support will cease as of April 2014. Before that date, small businesses that rely on […]

If the numbers you need to crunch come from the Web, then you’ll need an efficient way to get it into Microsoft Excel. There are several ways you can do this, and one method even allows for automatic updating, which means that the Excel worksheet will reflect the data changes and keep your small business […]

Email is vital to your day-to-day work, but it can also be a sink hole into which precious time simply disappears. Anything you can do to manage your incoming and outgoing emails more quickly will free up time for other tasks. Here are five ways to improve email management in Microsoft Outlook. 5 Microsoft Outlook […]

Google Docs Spreadsheets include a special feature not available for other Google Docs apps — Gadgets. These are elements that you can add to your worksheets to do anything from create an organization chart, create a QR code or make an animated chart — all of which are tools that your small business can use. […]

Not every PowerPoint presentation needs to be displayed in a linear way. Even though the basic PowerPoint presentation style moves forward from one slide to the next, you may sometimes prefer to move your slide deck in a less structured way. Luckily a free, small business software add-in from Microsoft Labs called PptPlex lets you […]

Small businesses can save a good chunk of both time and money by using hosted software tools and harnessing the power of cloud computing. Software as a Service (SaaS) makes great sense for small businesses — you only pay for what you need and someone else does the work of data backup, security and updates. […]

The iPad is a fun and entertaining gadget but, thanks to a range of business apps, you can actually use the iPad to do real work, too. The snag in the system is transferring files to and from your iPad. Let’s face it, cranking up iTunes each time you need a file doesn’t look very […]