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Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Ferrum Technology Services has been serving the Elgin area since 2007, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

How to Make Your Conference Room the Place to Be

How to Make Your Conference Room the Place to Be

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!

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A Digital Detox Might Be Just What You Need

A Digital Detox Might Be Just What You Need

You and your employees are likely exhausted from dealing with technology day in and day out. Even if it is what allows businesses to flourish, you still might want some time away from it from time to time. When it feels like too much, know that a digital detox can be a valid way of temporarily moving away from technology—even in the workplace.

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Here Are Some Desk Exercises to Keep You Healthy at Work

Here Are Some Desk Exercises to Keep You Healthy at Work

While sitting all day might sound appealing at first glance (after all, who doesn’t like sitting?), it’s not something that our bodies are designed to do. Sitting, as a result, can have considerable negative consequences on our overall health when done in excess. It doesn’t have to be hard to fit a workout into your day, though; you can do these simple desk-ercises right from your office to combat the creep of becoming too sedentary. 

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Tip of the Week: How to Turn Your Excel Sheets into Heat Maps

Tip of the Week: How to Turn Your Excel Sheets into Heat Maps

My team and I are big fans of a good spreadsheet, just as a simple way of organizing and contextualizing your data. Therefore, we’re all for sharing some neat ways that you can make these visualizations even easier to communicate your findings through.

Let’s talk about how you can make your Excel spreadsheets into a heat map, giving you this kind of increased visibility.

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Tip of the Week: How to Copy Excel Data

Tip of the Week: How to Copy Excel Data

So, you’ve spent a ton of time and energy transcribing data into Microsoft Excel, only to find out that you need this same data elsewhere in your spreadsheets, too. Bit of a bummer, unless you know how to accurately and easily copy all of this data. Let’s go over how you can do so.

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Tip of the Week: Optimizing Your Business’ Technology in Three Ways

Tip of the Week: Optimizing Your Business’ Technology in Three Ways

Businesses cannot run without technology. This relationship has only grown more complicated and complex over time, and with so many businesses depending on their technology in ways never before seen, you’ll have to understand just how great of an impact your technology has on the way your organization runs. Here are three ways you can implement the right tools to see increased success.

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Tip of the Week: Five Simple Steps Towards a More Productive Business

Tip of the Week: Five Simple Steps Towards a More Productive Business

If asked, most business owners would likely rank “improving productivity” as one of their overall business goals—and for obvious reasons. Often less obvious, however, is how to go about accomplishing this particular goal. Here, we’ve put together five different but equally effective ways to do so.

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How to Troubleshoot an Iffy Wi-Fi Connection

How to Troubleshoot an Iffy Wi-Fi Connection

Your business depends on its wireless connectivity, but you might notice that there are various factors that can influence how well your devices can connect to your wireless networks. We’ve put together a shortlist of things that can get in the way of your Wi-Fi connection and what you can do to avoid them.

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Why You Shouldn’t Use Your Work Email for Personal Accounts

Why You Shouldn’t Use Your Work Email for Personal Accounts

Efficiency is great, but it should never come at the cost of boundaries. A perfect example of this is your work email address. It might be easy to use it to subscribe to an online service, like Netflix, but this is far from the best idea. Let’s take a look at why it might be a bad idea to breach these boundaries between your personal life and your work life, and why it might have lasting consequences.

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Why Shadow IT is Such a Big Deal

Why Shadow IT is Such a Big Deal

Shadow IT is a considerable problem for businesses that rely on IT in their operations. Let’s take a  quick look at what shadow IT really is and how it can impact your business. We’ll also discuss ways you can avoid it.

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Tip of the Week: Easily Alter Individual App Volumes in Windows 10

Tip of the Week: Easily Alter Individual App Volumes in Windows 10

When you’re in the thick of the workday, you’re likely to miss a notification, especially with so much media playing all at the same time. To make sure that your notification sounds don’t get drowned out by your other applications, we’ve put together a tip on how you can adjust the volume levels of your individual applications in Windows 10.

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Have Circumstances Changed Parents’ Views on Remote Work?

Have Circumstances Changed Parents’ Views on Remote Work?

Remote work has thrown a wrench into the operations of countless businesses around the world, some more than others. While some employees have been able to adapt and make the most of the circumstances, workers with children at home might find themselves questioning their line of work or considering a change in careers.

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Tip of the Week: Handy Productivity Features in Microsoft Word

Tip of the Week: Handy Productivity Features in Microsoft Word

Many businesses rely to some degree on Microsoft Word as their word processor of choice. Considering this, it seemed fitting to go over some of the productivity-supporting features that Word has to offer.

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Tip of the Week: Microsoft Word Features You May Not Have Known About

Tip of the Week: Microsoft Word Features You May Not Have Known About

If your business utilizes Microsoft Word in any way, shape, or form, there’s a good chance that you aren’t using it to its full capabilities. Let’s go over just a few of the features that the software offers that can assist you in excelling (whoops… wrong Office application) in your day-to-day responsibilities, and how to put them to use.

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How to Optimize Your Technology Budget in 2021

How to Optimize Your Technology Budget in 2021

After 2020, it is understandable that many businesses would be seeking out a way to recoup a lot of the expenses and losses that the year’s events likely incurred upon them. This has led many to turn to their IT investments as the sacrificial lamb. While we are undeniably biased, we would argue that there are better ways to streamline your business’ expenses in terms of its IT than to simply cut them outright.

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Is Your IT Infrastructure Fully Documented and Tracked?

Is Your IT Infrastructure Fully Documented and Tracked?

When reviewing their inventory, many businesses forget to consider one of their most used, most important resources: their technology. Let’s go over a few reasons that your business’ technology inventory needs to be tracked—and what goes into properly doing so.

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3 Employee-Related Threats and What To Do to Stop Them

3 Employee-Related Threats and What To Do to Stop Them

I think most business owners would be kind of surprised to find out that the biggest threat to their business wasn’t hackers or natural disasters, it was coming from the same people they depend on the most: their employees. 

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Tip of the Week: Embedding a Video into a PowerPoint Presentation

Tip of the Week: Embedding a Video into a PowerPoint Presentation

Microsoft PowerPoint is an extremely effective visual tool for helping to get a message across. Oftentimes, however, a video clip can be even more effective at driving home a point or summarizing a topic than a presentation. Of course, you don’t necessarily have to choose between one or the other. Let’s go over how you can embed a YouTube video directly into a presentation built in Microsoft PowerPoint.

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It Is Still People that Makes Your Business Work

It Is Still People that Makes Your Business Work

2020 is finally coming to a close. It has been an extraordinarily long year for most small businesses. Even if yours hasn’t seen a lot of the financial problems that thousands of businesses are seeing, you've definitely had to make some major adjustments that often come with additional cost. Through it all, one part of your business has been a rock, your people. 

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You’ll Need to Do Better Than Just a Firewall

You’ll Need to Do Better Than Just a Firewall

When dealing with IT, there are often misconceptions as to what some parts of an IT infrastructure does. Firewalls are a prime example, as many believe that a firewall is the catch-all for all bad things coming in from outside the network. This month we will discuss why this isn’t the case, and tell you what you really need to secure your business.

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