In January 2017, UK businesses saw a price increase on Office 365, with Microsoft citing Brexit and the fall in the value of sterling as the major contributory factors. However, this cloud-based solution remains the obvious choice for SMEs.

There’s a good reason why businesses rely on email providers such as MailChimp to send high volume broadcasts and this became obvious to one worker last month who inadvertently crashed the entire NHS mail system.

Fifteen million UK internet users have undertaken a ‘digital detox’ in a bid to strike a healthier balance between technology and life beyond the screen, according to major new Ofcom research. The majority of internet users say they’re ‘hooked’, spending a day a week online and the Ofcom study revealed some of the effects of excessive internet use on sleep, school, family and relationships.

Excel Sparklines were introduced in Excel 2010 version. It is small line chart that could be easily embedded with the text and gives a great presentable output for easier depiction when aligned next to the tabular data. They are supported in Excel 2010 and above version only. Although sparkline’s design is not limited to lines they can also be represented as columns or win loss. The below example depicts how sparklines look: When to Use: Excel Sparklines can be useful if you have your data in a tabular format. You can place the sparklines next to each row to give a clear graphical presentation of the data selected in that particular row. How to Use: Below listed steps give a clear understanding on how to use excel sparklines: Click on the cell where you want to insert the “Sparkline(s)”. Go the “Insert” tab on the top ribbon. Select the Type of “Sparkline” (Line, Column, Win/ Loss), in this case we will take “Line Sparkline” as example. Line Type of Sparklines So, this was all about how to use excel sparklines. You can also do formatting, add markers, axis, etc to enhance the sparklines. Below section suggests on type of sparklines and their formatting. Type of Excel Sparklines: Line – These sparklines are displayed in the format of simple lines. You could change the style of line, sparkline color and marker color. Column – These sparklines are displayed in the format of bars. If the data is of positive value then the column would be lying on the upper axis. For negative data value the column would be below the axis. Likewise for zero value the column would not be displayed and an empty space would be left at that data point. In these sparklines too, you can change the style of column, sparkline color and marker color. Win / Loss – These sparklines are displayed in the format of bars like “Column” sparklines although these only represent profit or loss. If the data is showing profit (positive data points) then bars would be above the axis and if the data is showing loss (negative data points) then the bars would be inverted and will be below the axis. If the data is of zero value then the column would not be displayed and an empty space would be left at that data point, as shown in above figure as well. In these sparklines as well, you can change the style of column, sparkline color and marker color. You can change the type of sparklines for the whole group or for single row by un-grouping the sparklines first. Thus each row can have a different type of sparkline.

When it comes to cyber security, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond MP has recommended fighting fire with fire (or maybe firewalls with firewalls).

Microsoft has announced that a new chat application, called Teams, has been created for Office 365.

Widespread distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were recently responsible for bringing down a large proportion of the internet, including Twitter, Spotify and the PlayStation network, but how was it carried out? Let’s take a look at what DDoS attacks are and the risk they pose.

In the past IT service was a matter of infrastructure: networks, devices, servers and so on. The internet was slow, the applications were often clumsy and sometimes unusable, and these systems were not interconnected. That was the first wave of IT. The good news is the free market has driven solutions to those challenges - and we’re all glad it did.

Just Because You’re Not a Big Target, Doesn’t Mean You’re Safe Not too long ago, the New York Times’ website experienced a well-publicized attack, which raises the question – how can this happen to such a world-renowned corporation? If this can happen to the New York Times, what does this bode for the security of a small company’s website? What’s to stop someone from sending visitors of your site to an adult site or something equally offensive?