Articles about Productivity App

Binary Fortress Software has released DisplayFusion 5.1, a major update of its multi-monitor management tool for Windows. Available in both free and Pro versions, the latest version adds a number of notable new features, plus improves compatibility with the forthcoming Windows 8.1 release and promises better quality generated wallpaper images.

The headline new feature is support for monitor splitting, which allows folks to set up multiple "virtual" monitors. Binary Fortress claims this feature will particularly suit high-end users with AMD Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround setups.

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I am a very heavy Excel user. I organize my life and finances in spreadsheets for easy calculations and sorting. Quite frankly I enjoy the software very much for such nerdy reasons -- it is my favorite. However, not all people are excited by pivot-tables like me.

Yesterday, on Microsoft's official Excel blog, the software giant highlighted some creative ways that the software can be used. "One of the things that is incredibly satisfying about working on the Excel team is seeing how people use Excel in unbelievably cool and unexpected ways for work and for fun. There have been a few great examples of this floating around the internet and the news recently, and I thought I’d share a few of my favorites", says Excel Program Manager Carlos Otero.

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The holy grail for businesses is to understand what their customers are going to do. Marketing departments spend a lot of time and effort trying to predict consumer behavior. Enacomm's 4Cast customer relationship management product looks to help in the quest by using past and present data in order to predict future customer behavior.

By creating what it calls a 'Dynamic Decisioning Solution' Enacomm aims to help companies know who their customers are, what they want and what they're going to do. The result is better customer service, enhanced brand loyalty, increased efficiency and improved profitability thanks to the ability to cross sell.

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Web automation service IFTTT just gained itself a new channel, adding support for no lesser an establishment than the New York Times. This means that if you don’t want to have to keep checking the NYT website to see when there is a new article in the Science section, you no longer need to. In a couple of steps it's possible to create a recipe that will send you an SMS, email or some other form of alert.

As with many of IFTTT's other channels, the New York Times has various possible triggers. In addition to the addition of an article to a particular section, recipes can also check for popular' articles, Critic's Pick movie reviews, new additions to the Best Sellers list and the addition of new events.

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Tableau Software has launched a SaaS version of its Tableau Server business analytics product. The software allows users to explore and share corporate data in a reliable and secure way without the need for specialist support.

"Tableau Online will allow people to get their analytics up and running in minutes and add users in a few clicks," says Chris Stolte, Chief Development Officer and co-founder of Tableau Software. "It's completely scalable and secure and requires no infrastructure. It's the fastest way to get everyone in your company using powerful analytics to make better decisions today".

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In an effort to boost the adoption and sales of its two Windows slates, on Monday, Microsoft introduced a new channel program (simply called Microsoft Devices Program), which allows authorized resellers to commercialize Surface Pro and RT devices.

"Today, we’re announcing the first phase of our expansion into the business channel that allows customers to purchase Surface and commercial services through authorized resellers", says Microsoft. "In addition to offering Microsoft's extended warranty and accidental damage, resellers bring a variety of additional value-added services to the Surface family, such as asset tagging, custom imaging, kitting, onsite service and support, device recycling and data protection".

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It is no secret that the Windows clipboard is, well, extremely basic. It does not even try to remember anything more than your last operation, so if you copy some text, for instance, anything that was already there will be lost forever.

You do not have to live with this, though. Install Shapeshifter and it will remember everything you add to the clipboard, then allow you to choose exactly what you want to paste later.

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Seven months ago, when rumors burned hot, I explained why "Microsoft Office for Android and iOS is a Trojan Horse" -- that any mobile suite would be all about the cloud service. Sure enough, today Microsoft released the strangely named "Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers" to the App Store.

Office 365 is the productivity suite's future. Microsoft now claims to be a "devices and services" company. Smartphones are devices, Office 365 is a service and required for the iOS app. What more reasoning is needed? The Redmond, Wash.-based company provides more functionality than I predicted, but does so strictly in mobile context that doesn't diminish the PC product. That said, what Microsoft gives to iOS should be withheld from Android.

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Email is often cited as the killer application that turned the Internet from a novelty for geeks into a serious business tool. Why then is it so hard to get right? The recent changes to Gmail and Yahoo Mail  sparked a bit of debate amongst the BetaNews team as to what makes a good email service. What are the features we really want and what can we happily live without?

Until around 12 years ago you were most likely to access your email via a client program, downloading messages from the server and dealing with them on your PC. This was mostly down to slow dial-up connections which meant that you weren’t online all the time. Since then -- for personal mail at least -- there’s been a shift towards webmail services. Mainly this is thanks to broadband connections and ever increasing storage allowances which mean that you never have to throw anything away. But despite this shift a whole generation of mail users still think of Outlook Express, with its classic three-pane view, as the way email should be.

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Merely a half year ago, my thoughts on Office 365 were salty at best. Outages continuously plagued the service. Its treatment of browser-based users who wished to forego desktop versions of Outlook and Office disappointed. And spam filtering was bottom tier, proving to do little in stemming waves of junk mail. In the February 2013 release, Microsoft turned a new page and proved why it's a reliable comeback kid in the cloud.

If you don't believe Microsoft is transorming itself into a company solidly rooted in the cloud, you're clearly missing the writing on the wall. The company's past three years have been nothing short of a cloud-cluster of budding services while simultaneously sun-setting legacy on-premise products. Windows Small Business Server bid its farewell, while runaway hits like Azure sweep the Redmond, Wash. horizon. Yet even as Office 365 for consumers came out to relatively loud fanfare, the main attraction of the Office 365 product line is the business-oriented offerings.

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It’s common knowledge that Google is closing its Google Reader service, and that July 1 deadline is creeping ever closer. Now is the perfect time to switch to an alternative service and become acclimatized to a slightly different way of working, and the good news is that you can make the switch in minutes without having to perform any convoluted tricks, thanks to Feedly.com.

There are two ways to access Feedly -- if you’re on a desktop or laptop, you’ll need to install the Feedly for Firefox, Chrome and Safari plug-in, and if you’ve an Android or iOS mobile, you’ll want to install Feedly 15.0.1 instead (or in addition to) in order to access the service.

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Not content with free versions of its cut-down photo editing software for iOS and Android, Adobe has released Photoshop Express for Windows 8 and RT. As this is available free of charge, it should come as little surprise that the app does not afford users access to an unfettered range of professional level image editing tools, but for quick and dirty tweaks and fixes, there are plenty of options.

Taken a wonky photo? Getting things straightened up takes just a couple of taps and swipes. There are also tools for removing red eye, adjusting color levels and tweaking shadows and highlights. If you don’t feel like doing the hard work yourself, you can always turn to the auto-fix option to help take care of common issues in an instant.

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Despite the almost laughable nature of the Scroogled campaign, Microsoft continues to push it. The company slams Gmail, but that is not enough. Jake Zborowski, senior product manager for Microsoft Office, releases not one, but two blog posts that attack Google Docs. Both are accompanied by ads -- low resolution videos that view like someone pulled them from the cutting-room floor.

"Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble" Zborowski claims in one post. "Why take the gamble on converting your Office files to Google Docs when you can use Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Web Apps to create, share and edit your Office files with your content intact", he explains. A new casino-themed ad accompanies the post and features B-list celebrities Rob Schneider and Pete Rose.

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When you need to distribute a particular set of images – or perhaps reconstruct some scanned pages into a digital version of the original document – then being able to combine those JPGs into a single PDF can be very useful. There are commercial tools which will handle this for you, but if your needs are simple then there’s no need to spend big money; the free (for personal use) JPGasPDF could provide everything you need.

The program is compact (a single 572KB executable), with a basic straightforward interface. If you’re in a hurry you could just click the Add button to select your images, the Create button to save the finished PDF, and, well, that’s it -- your document will be saved right away.

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It’s not difficult to create PDFs these days. If your application doesn’t already have a “Save as PDF option”, then a virtual printer like Bullzip will generally get the job done.

These converted documents won’t always be formatted properly, though, and large or oddly-sized margins can be a real problem -- but that’s where the open-source Briss comes in. If you need to crop PDFs, perhaps to remove page numbers, maybe just to make the document easier to read on a small screen, then this small free program could an excellent solution.

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