Let your customers schedule and manage appointments online with Microsoft Bookings.

If your business involves scheduling appointments with customers, you need to give the Microsoft Bookings service a serious look. This online service, which is part of Office 365, simplifies the process of setting and managing appointments with customers. It’s ideal for businesses such as medical offices, law firms, consultants, advisors, auto shops, hair salons, or anyone who provides services on an appointment basis. Customers can set appointments themselves or you can do it for them.

Bookings has 3 primary components:

• An online bookings page where your customers can schedule appointments with specific staff members. This page can be used as a stand-alone page or embedded in your website and works on desktop and mobile devices.
• An online backend where you can view and manage appointments, set a staff list and schedules, specify your services and pricing, record customer preferences, and customize how the service works.
• A mobile app you can use to view and manage bookings and access customer information from anywhere you can get an internet connection.

With Bookings, you can efficiently:

• Bring in Business 24/7 – You get a customizable public web page your customers can use to book appointments around the clock.
• Put an End to Phone Tag – Customers can view available times online and book the slot that’s most convenient for them. Customers who prefer to call can do so, and you can enter their information manually. Either way, confirmations are sent immediately and automatically.
• Reduce No-Shows – Send automated appointment reminders to customers, on the schedule you define, with date, time, and directions. You can set the system up to remind staff members automatically too.
• Offer Self-service Rescheduling and Cancellations – It’s easy for customers to change or cancel an appointment. All they have to do is click the link contained in the appointment confirmation email. You can control how much advance notice is required for cancellations.
• Manage Bookings on the Go – With the mobile app, you can add or view appointments and access or change staff and scheduling info when you’re away from the office. You can also view customer information and call or text customers directly from your mobile device.

How it Works

Bookings appointments can be made two different ways: customers can schedule an appointment themselves using the online booking page or staff can manually enter appointments. To make an appointment, the customer first selects the service they want. Then, based on the availability schedule you created, they can choose a day and time and enter their contact information to book the appointment.

As soon as the appointment is submitted, the customer is sent an email confirmation notice. The notice contains details of the appointment and a link for directions. It also includes a link the customer can use to change or cancel the appointment.

At the same time, the date is automatically added to your calendar or your staff’s calendar. Bookings work with Outlook calendar and Google calendar. Your customers won’t see your linked business calendars; they’ll only see the Bookings calendar you publish online.

The configuration is highly customizable and easy to configure. To set it up, you simply:

1. Enter your business information.
2. Set your scheduling policies, such as length of appointments, acceptable cancellation times, and automatic notifications.
3. Define your service offerings, including service name, description, location, and pricing. You can also add internal notes about the service.
4. Create your staff list.
5. Set employee working hours.
6. Schedule business closures for vacations or other reasons.
7. Publish your booking page.

Bookings is available to Microsoft customers who have an Office 365 Business Premium subscription. The Microsoft Bookings mobile app is available in the Itunes and Google Play app stores.

For more information on Microsoft Bookings or help getting started, contact Computer Network Systems today at 1.866.205.8123 or support.staff@compnetsys.com

Additional Reading:  So You Want Highly Informative Excel Spreadsheets?

If you are giving a presentation and part of it involves a shared display or handouts of a spreadsheet what can you do to keep the group awake? Let’s face it, Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool for organizing and manipulating statistical data, but when sharing your spreadsheet with others, your spreadsheet has to be interesting and informative.

How Do I Get More Information into an Excel Spreadsheet?

Before you get more information into your spreadsheet, make sure that a spreadsheet is a right tool for the job. More often than you might think, we use spreadsheets inappropriately. Would an Access database work better? Should you use PowerPoint for your presentation.

If you have decided that Excel is the right vehicle for your presentation, include a text document that is a “welcome” or “about” for the Excel document. This keeps you on track and reminds others what the purpose and mechanics of the spreadsheet are.

While it’s true that most of the spreadsheets we use in our careers are for our own consumption, it is a good practice to talk about your spreadsheet with others. Find out what features they like and which they don’t favor. If you work collaboratively with others in your organization be generous with credit and be sure to mention their names in the about or welcome document.

PivotTables Help (A lot)

PivotTables are important as they take tables of data, often with hundreds if not thousands of rows and help you and others understand the data by summarizing them by the column fields.

For a PivotTable to operate correctly it has to be set up in a certain way; each column needs to contain the same kind of data that is in a “raw” state – that is the data has not been processed yet. The following are some advantages associated with using PivotTables in Excel:

• Simplicity
• Speedily produced
• Multiple dimensions – you can sort data by row or by column
• Allows for interactive analysis

Appearances Do Matter

Your Excel Presentation can be exciting and visually stimulating. Following are some tips that help you accomplish this.

• Consistency: Your spreadsheets will be easier for others to understand if you use only one font, bold headings for data groupings and formulae, distinct shade categories of data (for example shade raw data gray and results in green) and analytical comments should be in italics.
• Create a Logical and Natural Flow: This is done by using the order of Worksheets and the layout of calculations and data to read left to right and top to bottom. An excellent Excel presentation takes the reader through a story – from inputs and assumptions to calculations and finally the results.
• I Want Highly Informative Excel SpreadsheetsMake Data Relevant: To be more informative, an Excel spreadsheet presentation needs to have relevant data and analysis stand out. To do this, try to downplay the non-data elements of your tables and graphs. While you might create axes and gridlines the same color, make them paler than the data points.

Additional reading that may interest you :The Truth and Lies Behind Common IT Security Myths

The latest version of Microsoft Outlook is designed to be a personal information manager, not just email. Learn the shortcut tricks and a user can become a power communicator very quickly.  

While many wish there might be another choice, it is unlikely that Microsoft Outlook as a user interface is going to go away anytime soon in the workplace. In this regard, those who see the long perspective focus far more on how to use Microsoft Outlook effectively versus trying to replace it. And that’s where power users are really pushing the boundaries of the tool for maximum performance and the least amount of time communicating.

Here are 12 shortcuts that really stretch Outlook for what it can do for a user:

1. Keyboard Shortcuts – Yes, there are menu commands. However, it’s those who know the keyboard shortcuts who really get things done amazingly fast. Shortcuts go direct to the function needed, and it doesn’t take long to get used to them. Beginners often just print out a cheat sheet.
2. Quick Steps – In addition to the keyboard shortcuts, Outlook has a number of Quick Steps. Started with the 2010 version, this is the macro version of shortcuts. They are customizable, so you can make personal multi-step tasks that happen with one code versus three or four menus.
3. The Clipboard Email Creator – A neat feature, one puts the text in the clipboard and then with Ctrl-V Outlook will automatically convert it into a message, calendar post, or contact entry.
4. Email Shortcuts – Outlook comes with a number of built-in sorting features for fast locating of a given email message. Learning them allows a user to control the mass of messages that come in daily.
5. Limiting Notices – A default notice in Outlook will notice every new email, but these can be limited to just high priority parties, cutting down time and focusing attention better. It’s a simple rule creation in Outlook.
6. Flagging – Ever had an important email that you needed to find later but couldn’t? Red flagging makes it easy to find a pin in a haystack of messages.
7. Template Powering – Saved email templates for commonly sent emails cuts down a great deal of time, and it protects messaging when protocols have to be followed.
8. Folders – Simple but effective, active sorting of emails into labeled folders makes them extremely easy to find, segmenting out other emails not needed at the time.
9. Quick Message Saving – Many people use cut and paste or printing to an Adobe PDF file to save a message. Instead, one can just drag it to the desktop which changes the email to a .MSG format file, easy to open in Outlook.
10. Utilize All the Features – Outlook isn’t just email, it’s also a task-minder, calendar and journal. Don’t ignore them.
11. Use Priority Tagging – Outlook has a number of priority fields and color coding for tagging. Using these make it easy to sort and filter items for what’s critical versus fluff.
12. Natural Language – The software includes a feature where natural language can be typed in to the date field. For example, type in “Christmas” or “four days from today” and Outlook will recognize it on the calendar and implement the item.