Microsoft

On November 10th at .NET Conf 2020, Microsoft announced the general availability of .NET 5.0. This much-anticipated release of .NET also includes C# 9 and Arm64 support.

The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting workplace environments in a big way. There are a lot more organizations thinking and planning for the future of work and collaboration. The rise in remote and hybrid work during the ongoing pandemic continues to push people and organizations to work and invest in new ways, introducing challenges as well as opportunities to find level ground.

Microsoft shared some news this week at their recent customer event, Ignite. They highlighted several important new additions to their Teams platform that we were very excited about. 

The first version of Microsoft Word was released in 1983. Each version since then has seen remarkable improvements and innovations in word processing, paving the way to be the gold standard. According to Spiceworks, eighty-three percent (83%) of organizations across the globe use Microsoft Office. Even with such a base level of familiarity, it is surprising how little people know about the hidden features and shortcuts built into MS Word. It is common to spend several hours trying to properly format headers and footers, change page layouts in the middle of a document, or set up a navigation pane through custom styles. 

Less than three months ago at the Microsoft Connect; 2018 Conference, the first public preview of the latest version of Microsoft's flagship software development environment, Visual Studio 2019 was released. Two more previews have been released into the wild since then, with the most recent one, Preview 3, just two days ago on February 13th.

We recently completed a data centralization project where we needed to retrieve information from multiple sources into an internal database and have a cohesive representation of our data for multi-level review. After forming the relationships between our sources, we leveraged Power BI to showcase the new intel. Power BI is an interactive data visualization and reporting tool that offers self-service Business Intelligence capabilities. It allows you to connect with countless, popular data sources and effortlessly display information from them in a meaningful manner. I found that not only can Power BI work wonders with data, but it can also proactively schedule notifications or alerts for specified values. As our team has explored the many benefits of this service, I am even more confident that Power BI will broaden your capacity to make more informed and intelligent decisions in the workplace. Here are my top 5 most useful features in Power BI:

As you begin to use Microsoft Teams, you are probably wondering if there are any tips and tricks out there that you don't already know about.  After using Teams for over six months and reviewing its list of features, I have compiled my top five list of helpful tools and shortcuts I learned while using the platform.  These features do not come naturally but can be powerful when used and can save you a lot of time and frustration.