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Preferred Blog

Preferred has been serving the Tinley Park area since 1991, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

Even Basic Business Software Can Be Used to Make Art

Even Basic Business Software Can Be Used to Make Art

What is art? It’s not an easy question to answer, especially with new techniques and mediums being developed all the time. By definition, art can be basically summed up as the creative expression of an individual through some medium.

For Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi, that medium is one that is familiar to those in and out of the art world.

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Tip of the Week: How to Use Excel to Quickly Generate Folders

Tip of the Week: How to Use Excel to Quickly Generate Folders

As a manager, some of the administrative work can be, if not the worst part of the job, easily the least engaging. For instance, having to create all the different folders for the employees under your purview, projects, and other organizational needs. Fortunately, Microsoft Excel offers a relatively quick and easy way of doing just this.

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Tip of the Week: Using People Graph in Microsoft Excel

Tip of the Week: Using People Graph in Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a great way for data to be visualized, particularly as it offers various features to highlight the context of the data you’re trying to communicate with. Today, we wanted to walk you through how you can use one such feature—People Graphs—to do so particularly impactfully.

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Tip of the Week: Saving Time in Microsoft Office

Tip of the Week: Saving Time in Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a super useful collection of software that serves the purposes of just about any business, at least to some degree. Since it is so popular—taking up almost half of the office productivity software market in February 2022—we figured it would be helpful to share a few tips to help speed up some of the things you may be spending time on now.

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Tip of the Week: Taking You Through Embedding a Video with PowerPoint

Tip of the Week: Taking You Through Embedding a Video with PowerPoint

When looking to present an idea, the first two options people think of are often to use a video, or to use a slideshow (typically, citing Microsoft PowerPoint). Our question is, why pick? Let’s go over how simple it is to embed a YouTube video right into your next PowerPoint presentation whether you’re using PowerPoint 365 or PowerPoint 2016.

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Your Eyes Will Thank You if You Try This Microsoft Word Dark Mode Trick

Your Eyes Will Thank You if You Try This Microsoft Word Dark Mode Trick

If you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, eye strain can be a big problem. Staring at a screen for too long can be irritating, and some even experience headaches and exhaustion from it.

Fortunately, a lot of common applications have been deploying dark or night modes. Microsoft Word’s take on this has been, well, less than desirable. We’ll show you a way around it to help save your eyeballs a lot of strain.

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What’s New in Office 2019

What’s New in Office 2019

Microsoft Office is the most utilized productivity suite in the world; and, there are several reasons why. One of the most cited is that they routinely update the applications with new and innovative features. Office 2019 has been out for just under a year and today, we’ll talk about the biggest improvements Microsoft has made within their signature productivity suite. 

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Tip of the Week: Making a Functional Database in Excel

Tip of the Week: Making a Functional Database in Excel

A database is an incredibly useful tool for organizing a lot of information in a relatively concise and accessible way. Did you know that you can use a relatively common program, Microsoft Excel, to generate a database for your business to use? For this week’s tip, we’ll walk you through this process to help you keep your data organized.

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Tip of the Week: Password Protecting a Word Document

Tip of the Week: Password Protecting a Word Document

The funny thing about some documents is how the data written on them can strongly influence how important they are. If, for instance, there were two pieces of paper on a table, there is objectively no difference between the two, and so they are objectively equivalent in value.

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Tip of the Week: Four Microsoft Word Tricks You Didn’t Know You Missed

Tip of the Week: Four Microsoft Word Tricks You Didn’t Know You Missed

Microsoft Word is more or less synonymous with word processing, but with the right tricks, you can do so much more. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over four neat and useful capabilities that Microsoft Word has.

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4 Compelling Reasons to Upgrade to Office 365 Business Premium

4 Compelling Reasons to Upgrade to Office 365 Business Premium

Microsoft Office 365 offers many different solutions that allow your employees to be able to do their jobs, keep everything organized, and communicate efficiently. Although, it can be tricky to select a good Office 365 plan for your business. To help streamline operations, the Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium edition offers a versatile selection that can meet any needs your business may encounter.

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Tip of the Week: How to Set Up Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365

b2ap3_thumbnail_office_365_multi_factor_400.jpgHackers are growing bolder by the day, taking on huge organizations like the IRS and Sony Entertainment, and forcing businesses to stay on the defensive at all times. In spite of this, what can the average small business do to keep themselves safe? For starters, you can integrate multi-factor authentication, a solution designed to make it extra difficult for hackers to access online accounts.

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Tip of the Week: View Multiple Pages at Once in Microsoft Word

b2ap3_thumbnail_microsoft_word_400.jpgLet’s face it; sometimes you need a bird’s eye view of your Microsoft Word document that a single page can’t provide you with. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could view multiple pages and take everything into perspective? Well, as it turns out, you can. In fact, you can view up to eight pages at once by following this simple procedure.

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Look Out: Critical Microsoft Office Flaw Finally Patched

Does your office practice proper maintenance and security against the latest threats, like Sandworm and CryptoWall 2.0? You should, or else your business might get a nasty holiday gift in the form of the Schannel vulnerability in Microsoft Office. This particular threat allows a hacker to take over the entire system, making it an exceptionally dangerous vulnerability that you can’t ignore. Thankfully, a patch is available to the general public, so you want to apply it as soon as possible.

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Tip of the Week: How to Go Back in Microsoft Word

When working on a project, it can be helpful to retrace your steps. This is especially true when using Microsoft Word. To help you find where you were last at in Word, Microsoft has a Go Back command that’s not very well known. For this week’s tip, we’ll show you how to use it.

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Tip of the Week: Organize Your Microsoft Outlook Contact List

What's your Microsoft Outlook contact list looking like these days? For many busy business owners, their email contacts list is jumbled and unorganized, making it difficult to do something simple like locate needed information. Here are a few tips to help you better organize your Outlook contacts so that you can quickly find what you're looking for.

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Make Dynamic Infographics with Microsoft PowerPoint

Not only can Microsoft PowerPoint make great slideshows, it can also make engaging infographics. The latest trend in marketing is fairly simple: Visual content sells. Images and videos are the most popular way to take advantage of this. Infographics can offer your marketing campaign a combination of text and image, allowing your marketing content to be both engaging and informative.

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Understanding Basic Formulas in Microsoft Excel 2013

It can be difficult to keep track of your budget and expenses, especially when prices and needs are always changing. But perhaps the biggest annoyance is the intense paper trail that you leave behind when building your budget. By taking advantage of Microsoft Excel's formulas, you can easily keep track of your budget and alter it as prices change and demand increases.

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How to Avoid a Major Spelling Debacle in Microsoft Publisher

Spell check makes spelling super easy. All you have to do is regurgitate a string of letters that halfway sound like the word you're thinking of and the red squiggly line will take care of the rest. Admittedly, spellcheck has turned most of us into lazy spellers, which is why it's crucial that your spell check settings are adjusted properly when using Microsoft Publisher.

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How to Properly Cite Sources in Microsoft Word 2013

Most people think of Microsoft Word as a normal word processor, and to an extent, that's exactly what it is. But did you know that Word 2013 has a built-in citation mechanism for your research needs? Say you are writing a white paper for marketing use, and you took specific statistics from a website. You want to make sure you cite these facts. Why? Because if you cite them, it makes your business look professional, and it looks good when you know how to credit someone else's work.

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      Preferred is once again, honored for being a Best Place to Work for the fifth straight year!  Our team is what makes Preferred a Best Place to Work.  

      Daily Herald Suburban Business 2024 Best Places to Work Honorees The Daily Herald Suburban Business has announced the names of 51 companies, in 5 categories of competition, that are honored as the 2024 Best Places to Work in Illinois. This statewide survey and awards program was designed to identify, recognize and honor the best places of employment in Illinois, benefiting the state's economy, its workforce and businesses.