by Teknita Team | Dec 2, 2022 | Uncategorized
Nowadays lot of valuable data is locked inside Portable Document Format (PDF) documents instead of being available in ready-to-use format. Fortunately there are a number of PDF to Excel converters to choose from.
EXCEL
First of all, many people don’t know that Excel can import PDFs directly — but only if you’ve got a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription on Windows. It was a good choice for the simple file but got more cumbersome to use as PDF complexity rose. It’s also likely to be confusing to people who aren’t familiar with Excel’s Power Query / Get & Transform interface.
How to import a PDF directly into Excel:
In the Ribbon toolbar, go to Data > Get Data > From File > From PDF and select your file. For a single table, you’ll likely have one choice to import. Select it and you should see a preview of the table and an option to either load it or transform the data before loading. Click Load and the table will pop into your Excel sheet.
For a single table on one page, this is a quick and reasonably simple choice. If you have multiple tables in a multi-page PDF, this also works well — as long as each table is confined to one page. Things get a bit more complex if you’ve got one table over multiple PDF pages, though, and you’ll need knowledge of Power Query commands.
Adobe Acrobat Export PDF
As the creator of the Portable Document Format standard, Adobe is doing great job in parsing PDFs. A full-featured conversion subscription is somewhat pricey, but there’s also an inexpensive $1.99/month plan (annual subscription required) that includes an unlimited number of PDF to Excel conversions. (You can output Microsoft Word files with this tool as well).
The Excel conversions include any text on pages that have both text and tables. This can be a benefit if you’d like to keep that context or a drawback if you just want data for additional analysis.
AWS Textract
For an AWS cloud service, Textract is surprisingly easy to use. While you certainly can go through the usual multi-step AWS setup and coding process for Textract, Amazon also offers a drag-and-drop web demo that lets you download results as zipped CSVs.
You just need to sign up for a (free) Amazon AWS account.
Cometdocs
This web-based service is notable for multiple file format conversions: In addition to generating Excel, it can download results as Word, PowerPoint, AutoCAD, HTML, OpenOffice, and others. Free accounts can convert up to five files per week (30MB each); paid users get an unlimited number of conversions (2GB/day data limit).
Cometdocs is a supporter of public service journalism; the service offers free premium accounts to Investigative Reporters & Editors members.
PDFTables
PDFTables performed well on most of the app-generated PDF tables, even understanding that a two-column header would be best as a single-column header row. It did have some difficulty with data in columns that were mostly empty but also had some data in cells spread over two lines.
A key advantage to this service is automation. Its API is well documented and supports everything from Windows PowerShell and VBA (Office Visual Basic for Applications) to programming languages like Java, C++, PHP, Python, and R.
PDFtoExcel.com
This is a freemium platform with paid options. It proved to be the lone free choice that was able to handle our scanned nightmare PDF. Nice balance of cost and features. This was most compelling for complex scanned PDFs, but others did better when cell data ran across multiple lines.
Tabula
Unlike some free options from the Python world, Tabula is easy both to install and to use. And it has both a command-line and a browser interface, making it equally useful for batch conversions and point-and-click use.
Tabula did very well on PDFs of low or moderate complexity, although it did have an issue with the complex one (as did many of the paid platforms). Tabula requires a separate Java installation on Windows and Linux.
You can read more about PDF to Excel conversion here.
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by Teknita Team | Dec 1, 2022 | Uncategorized
Teams is group chat software with videoconferencing capabilities and some interesting features around working with documents and spreadsheets, especially those stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. It’s included with Microsoft 365/Office 365 business and enterprise subscriptions, making it attractive to Microsoft customers who don’t want to pay for additional chat or meeting software.
Teams organizes itself around the concept of teams, which can be small groups you’re working with on specific projects, your whole department or, in some cases, even the entire company. When you launch Teams, you’ll be taken to the Teams view. The first time you launch Microsoft Teams, you’ll likely be enrolled in one or more teams.
To create a new team, which you might need to do when you start a new project, for instance, select Join or create a team at the bottom left of the Teams window. On the screen that appears, hover over the “Create a team” area and click the Create team button.
You need to then choose whether to create a team from scratch or create a team based on a Microsoft 365 Group (if you choose the latter, then you need to specify the group on the next screen), choose whether the team is private (only you and other owners of the team can decide which participants to include) or public (anyone who has access to Microsoft 365 in your organization can join), and then give your team a name and a friendly description so others can make sense of its purpose.
When you create a team, Teams automatically sets up certain elements of Microsoft 365 to support the team. Specifically, it creates a SharePoint team site and grants access to the members of the team you added, a Microsoft 365 Group comprising the team members, a shared OneNote notebook hosted in the cloud, and a shared Plan, something that’s part of the Microsoft Planner tool in Microsoft 365.
To manage your team at any time, click the three-dot icon next to its name in the navigator bar on the left. You’ll see a pop-up menu where you can add or remove members, create channels for the team, change the team name or description, and more.
Once a team is created, you’ll notice a few things in the Teams window:
- General channel
Channels are where you converse and collaborate. The General channel is meant to be a catch-all place where you go to start conversations when you first begin using the Teams product; usually more specific topic-related channels will spring from there.
You can create multiple channels for any given team. To add a channel, click the Create more channels button. On the screen that appears, type in a name and a description for the channel, pick a privacy option if you want to limit the people who can access the channel, and click the Add button. All the channels for a team appear underneath the name of the team in the left pane.
The Posts tab is a place where you can comment to your teammates in an ongoing conversation. Composing messages is straightforward: Just click the Start a new conversation text box, or click Reply below an existing conversation and start typing.
You can tag people using “@” before typing their names, or use emoticons, emojis, and GIFs as well. Other activities such as shared calls or shared files appear in a timeline fashion in the Posts tab. And anyone who is currently available on Teams will have a green circle with a white checkmark on their profile picture in the Posts area.
You can upload, open, edit, copy, move, download, and delete files, or get links to those documents to share with others.
If you click on a file name, the online version of Word, Excel, and so on will open right in the Teams window, allowing you to perform lightweight edits or create simple documents from scratch without leaving the Teams client.
- Adding more tabs (and apps)
The tab area is basically where all of the exciting integration action happens with Teams. Functionality from other Microsoft 365 services as well as third parties surfaces as new tabs.
For example, you can add Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, OneNote notebooks, Power BI dashboards, Planner plans, and more directly as tabs in the Teams client. Just click the plus button (+) at the far right of the tabs layout to add a new tab. There are also available integrations with third-party cloud services.
Video and audio calls
In Teams’ early days, it was first and foremost a chat platform. Nowadays, one of the most common tasks you’ll carry out with Teams is hosting and participating in calls.
To start an impromptu audio or video call with multiple people, click the Calendar icon on the left navigation bar, then click the Meet now icon at the top of the calendar screen. From the menu that appears, you can either start the meeting immediately and then invite participants once you’re in the meeting, or get a meeting link to share via email, chat, or other means.
To start an impromptu audio or video call with all members of a Teams channel, head over to that channel by clicking Teams on the left navigation bar and selecting the channel in the left selection bar. Then click the camera icon at the top right and choose Meet now from the menu that appears.
To have a one-to-one conversation with a certain contact, go to Chat in the left navigation bar, click the person you want to talk with in the selection bar, and then click either the camera icon (for a video call) or phone icon (for an audio-only call).
To schedule a meeting in advance, click the Calendar icon on the left navigation bar and click the New meeting icon at upper right. (If you’re already in a Teams channel or a chat area, then click the Meet button or camera icon toward the top right of the Teams app window and then select Schedule meeting from the dropdown menu.) A form appears that lets you give the meeting a name, invite people or groups within your organization, select a date and time, and provide some information about the meeting.
Joining a call
If you’ve been invited to a meeting or call, you’ll typically receive an email or other notification message with a meeting link or Join button. Click the button or link to join the call. For scheduled meetings, you can also click Calendar in the left navigation bar, click on the meeting, and click Join. If you have been sent a meeting invitation with an ID number, you can use the Join with an ID button at the top of the Calendar screen.
Meeting controls
Once you’re in a call, either with a lot of participants or in a one-to-one conversation, you can alter the settings of the call as needed.
- If you want to add more people to the call, click People and then search for the person you want to add in the search box.
- To chat with meeting participants, click Chat and then type your messages in.
- To go off camera on a video call, click the Camera To go back on camera, click it again.
- To mute yourself, click the Mic button; click it again to unmute yourself so others can hear you.
- To share other content with participants, click the Share You can then elect to share your screen, collaborate on a shared digital whiteboard, present a PowerPoint slide deck, or share individual files to your meeting participants without broadcasting them on the screen.
The navigator bar
On the far left side of the Teams window, you will find a navigation bar with a menu that contains several potential places for things to surface in Teams:
Activity: @ mentions, replies, and other notifications sent specifically to you will be highlighted here. Click the funnel icon to see filtering options.
Chat: To start a private conversation, click a team member’s name and start chatting in the main area of the screen to the right.
Teams: This area lets you see all of the teams of which you are a member, and will let you add more people, create more channels, or start conversations in channels within each of those teams.
Calendar: This part of the client essentially surfaces your calendar from your Microsoft 365 mailbox. As covered above, you can also schedule, start, or join a meeting through this tab.
Calls: In addition to initiating audio and video calls as detailed above, you can add contacts to speed dial, check your voicemail, and look at your call history through this tab.
Files: This tab grabs files from SharePoint, OneDrive, and OneNote, and helpfully surfaces what you’ve used most recently in the Recent view. You can also go right over to your personal OneDrive from within the client to find other files and monitor the progress of larger file downloads to your local computer.
The ‘…’ icon: Here you can add additional applications to the Teams client, including Planner data, OneNote, live streaming, and more. You can also use the search box or click the More apps link within the three-dot icon pop-up — or click the Apps button at the bottom of the nav bar — to add third-party apps like Zoom or RingCentral into all areas of Teams (for instance, in right-click context menus) and not just within added tabs. When you add an app this way, its icon will appear in the navigator bar.
Teams is one of those apps that gets updated frequently — for the latest on new features that might be available to you, check out Microsoft’s “What’s new in Microsoft Teams” page.
You can read more about Microsoft Teams here.
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by Teknita Team | Nov 30, 2022 | Security
Sharing files is as simple as sending a link, and personal email accounts that shouldn’t have access to confidential documents can be added without IT teams knowing. In fact, over half of employees admit that they or a coworker have accidentally added their personal email accounts to company documents.
These personal email accounts usually have fewer protections than corporate accounts, leading to outsized security risks and headaches for admins. For example, a personal account could have access to a company file for months or years after the employee who owned it has left the organization.
IT and Security teams have zero to little visibility into this access, and fixes take up valuable time and resources.
Understand the scope of the problem
Identify risks through full visibility of personal account access.
To resolve issues with personal account access, companies must first understand the scope of their risks. With the right process and tooling, this should take almost no time and zero manual effort.
Create clear policies
Get stakeholder approval and ensure all employees understand security policies
Once a company has visibility into its personal account risk, it can begin creating policies. In our experience, policy creation is a process that requires conversations with key stakeholders, and, depending on a company’s size, a formal approval process.
Once policies have been aligned and approved, it’s important to make sure employees fully understand the policies they’ll be expected to abide by.
Educate and empower employees
Train employees and delegate processes to end-users to create a culture of security
Another key step to keeping company information secure is to train employees on risks and issues related to personal accounts. It’s vital to help employees first understand the problems so that they can take part in solutions.
Remediate problems and automate processes
Quickly fix issues through simple investigations and bulk remediation actions
A key step in the journey is cleaning up personal account access. However, without the right tooling and processes, this often takes lots of time and bandwidth for IT and Security teams.
Unauthorized or accidental access by personal accounts is one of the biggest risks companies deal with when keeping their sensitive data safe. And creating a culture of security and protecting company documents from this risk is not a simple task.
You can read more about Protecting Company Data From Personal Account Access here.
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by Teknita Team | Nov 29, 2022 | Uncategorized
A legacy system is a broad term used to describe an information system that uses (Older, perhaps) outdated technology.
Some factors used to determine legacy systems are:
• Age. If the software is over 10 years old, it can be considered legacy software.
• System support. The system can no longer support multiple software that the organization relies on, or the skills required to support the system have become obsolete.
• Maintenance. The software cannot be upgraded or extended, and maintenance is more expensive and takes more time and effort.
• User Experience. The software is unable to handle a large number of users. (Or, it requires users to have to go to multiple systems to compile the required info).
While legacy systems may still work despite these factors, the window of opportunity for growth is firmly sealed shut. Missing out on new software capabilities like cloud computing , improved data integration and the effective use of Metadata tools, can hold your business back.
Fortunately, there are many legacy system modernization strategies. Which legacy system modernization strategy works best for your business depends on the skills shortages you have and what enhanced capabilities you would like to add on. Conducting a thorough assessment of your legacy system can help you determine which legacy system modernization strategy will work best for you.
Some legacy system modernization approaches that you can take:
Replacement
Legacy replacement modernization is a strategy that involves eliminating the former application component and replacing it with a new system.
Legacy replacement modernization may be the right modernization strategy for you if:
• You are looking to add on new functions and features
• Your system cannot keep up with your business needs
• Modernization of your existing legacy system is not possible or cost-effective
• Your legacy system is very outdated and not extensible
As you can tell, this modernization strategy is multi-faceted and can be applied to many business types to help meet their needs.
Rebuild
The rebuilding method essentially takes your legacy system and throws it out the window. This strategy rewrites the application component completely from scratch while still preserving specifications and key factors.
While a complete overhaul like this takes a lot of work, it does allow for new functions and features to be integrated into the new system.
Rearchitecting
Rearchitecting involves materially altering the application code so it can be transferred to a new application architecture with better capabilities.
Refactor
Refactoring involves optimizing and restructuring existing code without changing external behavior. This strategy is used to remove technical debt and to improve the features and structure of the component.
Replatforming
This strategy is used to migrate an application to a new run-time platform. Replatforming makes very few changes to the code for adaptation but does not change the code structure nor the functions and features that it provides.
Rehost
Rehosting re-deploys an application to a cloud infrastructure, virtual, or physical structure. This is done without recompiling, altering the code, or making any changes to functions and features.
Encapsulate
This strategy is used to extend an application’s features and value. Data and functions are encapsulated into the application and made available as services through an application programming interface (API).
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by Teknita Team | Nov 23, 2022 | Security
You can secure your organization from risks of ransomware and recovery with a robust, fool-proof and tested plan. However, designing a ransomware incident response plan can be a daunting task, especially if you’re not sure where to start. These are 5 steps with key pointers and best practices for creating an effective ransomware response plan that is tailored to your organization’s specific needs.
1. Assess Risks | Validate Attack
Before you can begin building your ransomware response plan, you first need to assess your organization’s risks and vulnerabilities. Conduct a thorough risk assessment and threat analysis. This includes understanding the types of ransomware attacks that are most likely to occur, as well as identifying which systems and data are most at risk.
Validate that an attack is actually happening. There are a variety of malware – phishing, adware, or other malware infections that exhibit ransomware-like symptoms, such as strange file extensions, unusual emails or files, or system slowdowns. Proceed to the next steps if the two telling signs of ransomware are verified – your files are encrypted or locked.
2. Mitigate Risks | Contain Attack
Once you have assessed your organization’s risks and vulnerabilities, it’s time to start mitigating them. This may include implementing additional security measures, such as firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS), and anti-virus software. It’s also important to make sure that your employees are properly trained in how to identify and respond to ransomware attacks.
If you determine that an attack is in progress, it’s important to take steps to contain it. This may involve isolating infected systems, disabling network access from affected systems, quarantining infected files, and contacting law enforcement for assistance.
3. Respond to Attack | Recover Data
Once you have contained the ransomware attack, it’s time to start responding to it. This may include restoring systems and data from backup, removing ransomware infections, or contacting law enforcement. It’s important to have a well-defined Incident Response Plan (IRP) or a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan (BCDR) in place so that you can respond quickly and effectively to a ransomware attack. CIOs, CSOs, and IT managers outline processes that help their organization prepare for and recover from disruptive events.
Once you have contained and responded to the ransomware attack, your next priority will be to restore systems and data as quickly as possible. Depending on the scope of the attack, this may involve restoring data from backup and/or reinstalling affected systems from scratch. If you have followed the 3-2-1 best practice of backups, then your backup should be unaffected – on the cloud or offsite – such that you can restore the “last known good version”. It’s important to work closely with IT staff during this process to make sure that any necessary security patches or updates are applied before bringing affected systems back online.
4. Train Employees | Communicate and Coordinate
Turn your weakest link to your strongest with comprehensive, contextual, and regular cybersecurity training. Also, remember to keen it contextual by building governance into your systems such that alerts and red flag checks appear at pertinent times. For instance, on sharing files or folders advise employees to provide minimal access on a strict need-to-know basis.
As part of your ransomware response plan, it is important to outline clear communication and coordination with all relevant stakeholders throughout the incident response process. This includes working closely with IT teams, security personnel, legal teams, and other key stakeholders both within and outside your organization.
5. Retrospect and Improvise
Effective ransomware incident response requires coordination between multiple teams and individuals, both inside and outside your organization. Make sure that everyone involved in the response understands their roles and responsibilities, and that there is a clear chain of command so that decisions can be made quickly and effectively.
Once the ransomware attack has been contained and dealt with, it is important to take a step back and retrospectively analyze what happened. Performing a post-mortem analysis of a ransomware attack can help your organization learn from its mistakes and improve its defenses against future attacks.
Finally, it is important to continually monitor for new threats and risks related.
You can read more about Ransomware Incident Response Plan here.
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