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The right age to buy a smartphone is a tough decision for parents. Most experts suggest middle school age children are more likely to handle the responsibility of owning a mobile device.  

There’s little doubt over the appeal tech has for children. Each holiday, most kids are likely to fill their wish lists with the latest video games, tablets, and mobile devices. As more of their peers start showing off their own smartphones, your child may become insistent on having his or her own device. Experts warn though of buying smartphones for children who are not yet responsible enough.

Average Smartphone Ownership Stats

According to data compiled by Influence Central, the average age of children getting their first smartphone is on the decline. Back in 2012, the average age was 12. In 2016, the age is 10 with some children getting their own devices as young as 7. One reason cited for the decrease? More and more parents are tired of loaning their own devices to children eager to play the latest and greatest app.

Age Versus Maturity

Experts can’t seem to agree whether age or maturity level should be the biggest factor when deciding on the appropriate age of ownership. According to a recent 2017 interview featuring Microsoft founder Bill Gates, he banned his own children from carrying smartphones until the age of 14. His children weren’t permitted unrestricted use after this point either. Gates went on to say he doesn’t allow cell phones at mealtimes and he sets limits on screen time.

Although many experts claim between the ages of 12 and 14 are fine for children to own a smartphone, many watchdog organizations like Common Sense Media stress the importance of judging a child’s emotional readiness too. A few considerations:

• Would you describe your child as having a strong sense of personal responsibility?
• Does your child have a tendency to misplace important things often?
• Will the phone be required for safety concerns such as picking up from practice and going over a friend’s house for a sleepover?
• Would your child be able to follow the rules regarding the smartphone like not texting during school?
• Is your child the type to retreat into games and apps and not engage with others?

The answers to these questions will help you make a calculated decision over whether your child is ready for a phone or not. Remind your child that the smartphone is a privilege and can be revoked due to misuse. Since you may only need a smartphone temporarily for your child, don’t get locked into a long-term mobile contract. Purchase a prepaid or month to month phone plan.

When Not to Buy a Smartphone

Caving to peer pressure isn’t a valid reason to buy your kid a smartphone. Just because all of his or her friends seem to own one, doesn’t mean you have to purchase a device to help him or her “fit in.” Don’t buy a smartphone as a toy for your child either. If your child wishes to play mobile applications, there are kid-friendly tablets available with more restrictions in place.

The bottom line is later you can wait to buy your child a smartphone the better. Videos, apps and messaging can all become addictive. If you buy a smartphone too early, you will have a harder time controlling screen time limits.

If you are giving a presentation and part of it involves a shared display or handouts of a spreadsheet what can you do to keep the group awake? Let’s face it, Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool for organizing and manipulating statistical data, but when sharing your spreadsheet with others, your spreadsheet has to be interesting and informative.

How Do I Get More Information into an Excel Spreadsheet?

Before you get more information into your spreadsheet, make sure that a spreadsheet is a right tool for the job. More often than you might think, we use spreadsheets inappropriately. Would an Access database work better? Should you use PowerPoint for your presentation.

If you have decided that Excel is the right vehicle for your presentation, include a text document that is a “welcome” or “about” for the Excel document. This keeps you on track and reminds others what the purpose and mechanics of the spreadsheet are.

While it’s true that most of the spreadsheets we use in our careers are for our own consumption, it is a good practice to talk about your spreadsheet with others. Find out what features they like and which they don’t favor. If you work collaboratively with others in your organization be generous with credit and be sure to mention their names in the about or welcome document.

PivotTables Help (A lot)

PivotTables are important as they take tables of data, often with hundreds if not thousands of rows and help you and others understand the data by summarizing them by the column fields.

For a PivotTable to operate correctly it has to be set up in a certain way; each column needs to contain the same kind of data that is in a “raw” state – that is the data has not been processed yet. The following are some advantages associated with using PivotTables in Excel:

• Simplicity
• Speedily produced
• Multiple dimensions – you can sort data by row or by column
• Allows for interactive analysis

Appearances Do Matter

Your Excel Presentation can be exciting and visually stimulating. Following are some tips that help you accomplish this.

• Consistency: Your spreadsheets will be easier for others to understand if you use only one font, bold headings for data groupings and formulae, distinct shade categories of data (for example shade raw data gray and results in green) and analytical comments should be in italics.
• Create a Logical and Natural Flow: This is done by using the order of Worksheets and the layout of calculations and data to read left to right and top to bottom. An excellent Excel presentation takes the reader through a story – from inputs and assumptions to calculations and finally the results.
• I Want Highly Informative Excel SpreadsheetsMake Data Relevant: To be more informative, an Excel spreadsheet presentation needs to have relevant data and analysis stand out. To do this, try to downplay the non-data elements of your tables and graphs. While you might create axes and gridlines the same color, make them paler than the data points.

{company} in {city} is your best source for tips, tricks, and hacks as well as news relating to the latest advances in technology. [Phone} or {email} us today.

Outlook’s new feature allows you to hold onto deleted emails longer than ever. By setting a later purge date, you can hold onto important communications without cluttering your email folders.  

Most people have likely suffered the heartache of deleting an important email. You search and search again through your inbox and the communication is nowhere to be found. Although some providers archive emails automatically instead of deleting them forever, the emails are eventually purged from the server. With Outlook’s new feature you can hold onto emails longer and not worry about those emails disappearing for good a short month later.

Why Save Deleted Emails?

For each opened email, you have to make a clutch decision: archive or delete the communication? In some cases, like if you receive any spam, deleting the offending email is a no brainer. However, emails from contacts are often different. For instance, if a colleague sends a link to a website you need, you may decide to delete the email after finding the URL. However, a couple months down the road you may wish to bring up the email. If the email has yet to be purged, this saves you the headache of having to get in touch with your coworker to ask for him or her to resend the information. Another case for not prematurely deleting emails is to retrieve contact information. If you accidentally delete an email without copying contact details, you may have a hard time tracking down the sender to get back in touch.

Office 365 Presets

In most cases, deleted Outlook emails are automatically set to purge from the system after 30 days. For onsite Outlook inboxes run on an Exchange server, an administrator is responsible for setting the length of time for emails to stay in the Deleted folder. This timeframe is managed through the system’s Messaging Records Management feature. The default setting is for emails older than 30 days to get moved to a recoverable subfolder. The subfolder holds onto the emails for 15 days before completely removing them from the system. Onsite Exchange users were able to change this default setting in the past, but Office 365 administrators were stuck with losing emails permanently after 30 days. Luckily, the retention policy is now changed for Office 365 and administrators have the option for allowing the purge to take place a maximum of 24,855 days in the future. The date used by the system is the timestamp of the email or the last time the message was edited.

Don’t worry about any of these settings getting rid of your archived items. Once you save an email to a particular folder, the email can only be manually deleted from the server. Keep in mind there is a setting to delete expired items in Outlook within your Office settings. For instance, emails in your inbox have a default aging period of six months while outbox emails age after three months.

If you don’t have any system recovery options in place, prematurely purging Outlook emails can be disastrous. Make adjustments to your purge settings to have a holding place for emails you’re unsure if you should permanently delete or not.

WannaCry Ransomware has hit thousands of businesses, government institutions, and private citizens worldwide.

It’s been all over the news.

And as you have probably heard, it’s only getting worse.

WannaCry version #1 was destructive for those affected by the ransomware causing downtime, disruption, lost revenue, and in the case of the National Health Service hospitals in the UK – putting lives at risk.

But WannaCry version #1 had a fault.

A 22-year-old, anonymous security analyst known as MalwareTech discovered that there was a “kill switch”  buried in the code of this vicious ransomware. This “kill switch” consisted of an unregistered web address. When the virus first contacted a victim’s computer, it would reach out to this web address buried in the code. If it received a reply from the address, the WannaCry ransomware would shut down entirely.

But here’s the problem…

Version #2 of WannaCry  – WannaCry 2.0 –  is coming out and promises to be worse than the first.

The analyst who discovered the original “kill switch” has stated, “Version 1 of WannaCrypt (also known as WannaCry) was stoppable, but version 2.0 will likely remove the flaw. You’re only safe if you patch ASAP.”

Can’t patch your computers?

If it is impossible to patch your computers, following  Microsoft’s instructions on disabling Server Message Block version 1 (SMBv1), will do the trick.

Not sure if your business computers are patched with the latest Microsoft updates?

Don’t know if you’re following the Server Message Block version 1 disable instructions right?

Call in the experts. Call {company}.

Preventative action is the only thing that will save you from pain due to WannaCry.

International cyber-security experts tell us that it is only a matter of time before the criminals disperse WannaCry Version 2.0 that will not have the “kill switch.”

That’s when the real pain begins…

Make the call now.

It’s vital that you take action!

The {company} IT professionals will make sure that your patches and backups are up to date so you can weather this tidal wave of cyber-criminal activity.

The safest thing for your business in this dangerous cyber-climate is to bring in the professional cyber-security team from {company}.

We’ll make sure that you are ready to face an attack from WannaCry 2.0 head on.

Don’t wait!

Once your computers are infected with WannaCry 2.0, there is nothing that can be done to retrieve your files without paying criminals hundreds and thousands of dollars.

Let us help you NOW to save you financial losses!

Contact us at {phone} or {email}

It’s called the Wanna Decryptor, and it’s one of the most feared ransomware strains today.

Why?

Because once your systems are infected with this ransomware variant, there is nothing that can be done for you. There is no known software that can decrypt a computer or network once it has been infected and encrypted by this particular weapon of global cyber-criminal syndicates.

Wanna Decryptor has hit the National Health Service of England and Scotland hard.

UK’s National Health Service announced on Friday, May 12, 2017, that Wanna Decryptor had been used by criminals to take 16 hospitals and administration facilities hostage in the UK.

The ransomware has brought the computer and telecom systems in those institutions to a standstill.

What do the criminals want?

They are demanding 415,000 pounds by May 19th.

If that amount is not delivered to them, they have threatened to delete all of the encrypted files – leaving those NHS hospitals and administrative centers crippled.

The BBC has reported that the pain caused by this ransomware attack is already being felt and that patient treatment – and lives – are being put in jeopardy. Why? Doctors cannot readily access health records, patient histories, or even records of medications. The situation at the hospitals under attack is so critical that ambulances are being redirected away from these hospitals to other facilities that are not affected.

At this point, the official line from NHS is, “We do not have any evidence that patient data has been accessed.” But the fact that NHS cannot say definitively that the criminals have looked at the private patient records they have encrypted is little comfort to the doctors, nurses, and patients who are valiantly trying to make do without access to those same records.

At this time, the UK’s National Cyber Security center is working together with NHS to try to mitigate the situation, but that does not mean that a quick resolution to the situation is on the immediate horizon.

It has also been reported that the US, China, Russia, Spain, Italy, Vietnam, Taiwan and others are also experiencing difficulties with this strain of ransomware.

The hospitals under attack are not expected to be open to full-service again until next week. At the moment, they are limping along trying to care for their patients as best they can and transferring patients with higher needs to facilities not affected.

So what happened?

The NHS spends millions on computer security each year.

And they’ve been hit with ransomware.

If the NHS isn’t safe – no one is.

What’s worse…there is NO DEFENSE against ransomware.

You either PAY UP, recover your systems from a previously backed up copy, or LOSE IT ALL.

It’s time for your business to prepare.

They’ll hit anyone they can make a buck off of.

No business is immune from a ransomware attack.

{company} of {city} has a solution which can have you back up and running cleanly in less than 1 hour after a reported ransomware attack.

But our solution has to be in place before the attack occurs.

Are we trying to scare you into purchasing our services?

No. The criminals are the ones doing the scaring.

We’re offering hope and a solution – but you have to act BEFORE your systems are compromised by ransomware.

Let’s get your business fortified against the menace of ransomware NOW.