How to run Windows 10 faster? Try out these tips; your machine will be less prone to performance and system issues.
1. Change your power settings
If you’re using Windows 10’s “Power saver” plan, you’re slowing down your PC. That plan reduces your PC’s performance in order to save energy. (Even desktop PCs typically have a “Power saver” plan.) Changing your power plan from “Power saver” to “High performance” or “Balanced” will give you an instant performance boost.
2. Disable programs that run on startup
One reason your Windows 10 PC may feel sluggish is that you’ve got too many programs running in the background — programs that you rarely or never use. Stop them from running, and your PC will run more smoothly.
3. Go to a Previous Restore Point
As you use Windows 10, it automatically creates restore points that are essentially snapshots of your system at specific moments in time, including installed software, drivers and updates. Restore points are a kind of safety net so if something goes wrong, you can always restore your PC to a previous state.
They can also be used to speed up your PC if you notice — for no reason you can fathom — it’s started to slow down. Recently installed problematic drivers, software, or updates could be to blame, so going back to a previous restore point could speed things up again because the system will be returned to the state it was in before the problems started. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll only be able to restore your system to the state it was in during the last seven to 10 days. (Restore points don’t affect your files, so you won’t lose any files by going to a restore point.)
4. Use ReadyBoost to speed up disk caching
Windows 10 regularly stores cached data on your hard disk, and then when it needs the data, fetches it from there. The time it takes to fetch cached data depends on the speed of your hard disk. If you have a traditional hard disk instead of an SSD, there’s a trick that can help speed up your cache: use Windows’ ReadyBoost feature. It tells Windows to cache data to a USB flash drive, which is faster than a hard disk. Fetching data from that speedier cache should speed up Windows.
5. Shut off Windows tips and tricks
As you use your Windows 10 PC, Windows keeps an eye on what you’re doing and offers tips about things you might want to do with the operating system. You can rarely if ever found these “tips” helpful.
6. Stop OneDrive from syncing
Microsoft’s cloud-based OneDrive file storage, built into Windows 10, keeps files synced and up to date on all of your PCs. It’s also a useful backup tool so that if your PC or its hard disk dies, you still have all your files intact, waiting for you to restore them.
It does this by constantly syncing files between your PC and cloud storage — something that can also slow down your PC. That’s why one way to speed up your PC is to stop the syncing. Before you turn it off permanently, though, you’ll want to check whether it is actually slowing down your PC.
7. Use OneDrive Files on-Demand
Some users may not want to stop OneDrive from syncing; doing so defeats its purpose of making sure you have the latest files on whatever device you use. And it would also mean you won’t be able to use OneDrive as a way to safely back up files.
But there’s a way to get the best of both worlds: You can keep syncing to an absolute minimum and only do it when absolutely necessary. You’ll speed up performance, and still get the best of what OneDrive has to offer.
8. Turn off search indexing
Windows 10 indexes your hard disk in the background, allowing you — in theory — to search your PC more quickly than if no indexing were being done. But slower PCs that use indexing can see a performance hit, and you can give them a speed boost by turning off indexing. Even if you have an SSD disk, turning off indexing can improve your speed, because the constant writing to disk that indexing does can eventually slow down SSDs.
9. Clean out your hard disk
If you’ve got a bloated hard disk filled with files you don’t need, you could be slowing down your PC. Cleaning it out can give you a speed boost. Windows 10 has a surprisingly useful built-in tool for doing this called Storage Sense. Go to Settings > System > Storage and at the top of the screen, move the toggle from Off to On. When you do this, Windows constantly monitors your PC and deletes old junk files you no longer need — temporary files, files in the Downloads folder that haven’t been changed in a month, and old Recycle Bin files.
10. Clean out your Registry
Under the Windows hood, the Registry tracks and controls just about everything about the way Windows works and looks. That includes information about where your programs are stored, which DLLs they use and share, what file types should be opened by which program, and just about everything else.
But the Registry is a very messy thing. When you uninstall a program, for example, that program’s settings don’t always get cleaned up in the Registry. So over time, it can get filled with countless outdated settings of all types. And that can lead to system slowdowns.
11. Disable shadows, animations and visual effects
Windows 10 has some nice eye candy — shadows, animations and visual effects. On fast, newer PCs, these don’t usually affect system performance. But on slower and older PCs, they can exact a performance hit.
12. Disable transparency
In addition to turning off shadows, animations and visual effects, you should also disable the transparency effects that Windows 10 uses for the Start menu, the Taskbar and the Action Center. It takes a surprising amount of work for Windows to create these transparency effects, and turning them off can make a difference in system performance.
13. Turn on automated Windows maintenance
Every day, behind the scenes, Windows 10 performs maintenance on your PC. It does things like security scanning and performing system diagnostics to make sure everything is up to snuff — and automatically fixes problems if it finds them. That makes sure your PC runs at peak performance. By default, this automatic maintenance runs every day at 2:00 a.m., as long as your device is plugged into a power source and is asleep.
There’s a chance, though, that the feature has been accidentally turned off or you haven’t had your PC plugged in for a while, so the maintenance hasn’t been done. You can make sure it’s turned on and runs every day, and run it manually if you’d like.
14. Kill bloatware
Sometimes the biggest factor slowing down your PC isn’t Windows 10 itself, but bloatware or adware that takes up CPU and system resources. Adware and bloatware are particularly insidious because they may have been installed by your computer’s manufacturer. You’d be amazed at how much more quickly your Windows 10 PC can run if you get rid of it.
15. Defrag your hard disk
The more you use your hard disk, the more it can become fragmented, which can slow down your PC. When a disk gets fragmented, it stores files willy-nilly across it, and it takes a while for Windows to put them together before running them.
Windows 10, though, has a built-in defragmenter you can use to defragment your hard disk. You can even tell it to run automatically so it stays constantly defragmented.
16. Disable Game Mode
Game Mode works great when you’re just playing, but it can slow down your system when you’re not playing because it multitasks with lots of processes running in the background. So turning off Game Mode can give your PC a quick boost. (You can always turn it back on again when you want to play a game.)
17. Shut down and restart Windows
Here’s one of IT’s not-quite-secret weapons for troubleshooting and speeding up a PC: Shut it down and restart it. Doing that clears out any excess use of RAM that otherwise can’t be cleared. It also kills processes that you might have set in motion and are no longer needed, but that continue running and slow your system. If your Windows 10 PC has turned sluggish over time for no apparent reason, you may be surprised at how much more quickly it will run when you do this.
You can read more about speeding up Windows 10 here.
Teknita has the expert resources to support all your technology initiatives. We are always happy to hear from you.
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.
Teknita has the expert resources to support all your technology initiatives. We are always happy to hear from you.
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 Addbutton. All the channels for a team appear underneath the name of the team in the left pane.
Posts
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 conversationtext box, or click Replybelow 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.
Files
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.
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).
Teknita has the expert resources to support all your technology initiatives. We are always happy to hear from you.
A process of implementation involves a variety of different departments and stakeholders. The key to a successful ECM implementation lies in the combination of planning and partnership.
Here are five steps you can take to ensure a smooth ECM implementation.
1. Enlist a team of stakeholders
The success of your ECM program depends only minimally on the technology you choose. A much more important consideration is around your stakeholders – the people and leaders of teams who will use or benefit from the ECM system. You should examine how they feel about the project and whether the ECM system it produces meets their needs.
Input from your stakeholders will help you to understand how an ECM system affects different departments of the business. This understanding will improve your chances of success.
2. Define your ECM goals
You should define the goals of your ECM project with your stakeholder team. Goals will depend on your situation, but some common ECM goals are as follows:
Improve information security.
Support compliance.
Reduce friction in the business.
Implement content tagging.
Integrate automation and AI.
3. Plan for your goals
Once you know what your goals are, you should plan how to reach them. This could be through refinements of the current system or by building a new system. This may require you to consider content migration and user training and adoption.
For each goal, it’s important to balance time-to-market with its effects on the business. Determine whether there are important things you can complete faster than others. During this step is the time to optimize your implementation timeline.
4. Build, test and deploy your ECM
Use the agile/scrum methodology to drive your implementation project and CI/CD to maximize stakeholder engagement and program flexibility. Iterate in bi-weekly or monthly releases that stakeholders will evaluate.
By moving incrementally toward the goals, you will provide opportunities for learning and course correction as the program progresses.
5. Iterate
Despite completing a successful implementation, the work is not over. An ECM must adapt to new realities if it will remain viable and valuable to an organization. You should include in your plan the capability to build, integrate and refine your ECM to deliver future business value.
Power BI is a business analytics tool from Microsoft that helps build various dashboards and reports and can quickly deal with millions of rows of data. In contrast, Excel is also a tool from Microsoft with various built-in tools and functions that we can use for mathematical calculations, iterations, forecasting, and creating graphs and charts.
Key Differences
Data Size: One of the key differences is handling the capacity of data quantity. With Power BI, we can handle millions of rows together with fast speed, but with Excel, it is annoying to handle large amounts of data.
Cloud-Based Features: Once the dashboard building completes in Power BI, we can publish the report to the end-users with Microsoft’s cloud-based services. But, when it comes to Excel, we need to share the large data with the dashboard via email or any online sharing tool.
Visualizations: In Power BI, we have plenty of visualizations to design the dashboard, but with excel, we have only limited visualizations.
Custom Visualizations: Power BI allows us to import visualizations that are not there in the file by going to the marketplace, but Excel does not have that luxury.
Item
Power BI
Excel
Availability
Recent product, so you cannot see this with all Excel users.
Commonly known and available to most people.
Learning
Requires considerable knowledge of Power Query and Power Pivot DAX formulas and techniques to use it.
Universal language spoken in almost all the offices worldwide. Most users find it easy to learn.
Cost to Acquire
Free to download and use for personal use, but it takes $10 per month per user to share reports with others.
Free
Working Flexibility
Not flexible, especially if it just shifted from Excel to Power BI. You cannot do everything, everywhere.
Flexible to use and create summary reports in simple steps and formulas.
Visuals
Wide variety of visualizations.
Only a few built-in charts.
Chart Customization
Possibility work with only one chart.
Possibility to create another set of charts only using built-in charts.
Dashboard Interactivity
Power BI not only has slicers but also has a wide variety of other slicers. Cross filters, visual level filters, report level filters, and drillthrough filters.
Excel has slicers to make the dashboards interactive with the user.
Size of the Data
Can handle large amounts of data with the Power Pivot engine model.
Struggles to handle a large amount of data and often says “Not Responding” error with a large quantity of data.
Accessibility
Cannot be accessible everywhere unless you have licensed software.
Access from everywhere.
Formula Language
DAX language for its formulas and functions.
MDX language for its formulas and functions.
Data Security
Possibility to restrict the data view to individuals by setting rules.
When you share the dashboard with external stakeholders, you need to share it with data, which does not guarantee data security.
Data Source
Can get data from everywhere with Power Query.
Can get data from everywhere with Power Query.
Power BI and Excel have many similarities in terms of functionalities and how the data is presented or how we make the connection with the other data sources. Excel is much easier to use than Power BI, but Power BI has a certain upper hand, like better visualization. We should also remember that Excel is very limited to sharing reports which Power BI overcomes.
You can read more about Power BI vs Excel – Differences here.
Teknita has the expert resources to support all your technology initiatives. We are always happy to hear from you.
