This guide from Howard Fosdick explains many of the threats to your security and privacy you may encounter when you use Microsoft Windows. It describes these concerns in simple, non-technical terms. The goal is to provide information anyone can understand. Fosdick also offers solutions, safe practices you can follow, and free programs you can install. While no one can guarantee the security and privacy of your Windows computer, following the steps outlined will go along toward that ultimate goal3

Editor's Note: written in 2008, but still quite useful.

If your Excel skills are perennially rusty, this cheat sheet will help you knock out basic tasks without forcing you to scramble back up the learning curve.

At last, we have some scientifically rigorous evidence to show that slides full of bullet-points don’t work.

The research is the work of Chris Atherton, a cognitive psychologist. Chris recently delivered a presentation at the Technical Communication UK Conference and has put up her slides on slideshare. There’s been a tremendous amount of interest in them, but as they were designed to complement Chris’s talk – they only tell half the story.

In this post I’ll explain the findings of Chris’s research. I’ve written the post based on Chris’s slides and asked Chris to comment on various aspects. Chris has also reviewed this post to make sure I’ve got all the science right.

Are things you need to get done falling between the cracks? Does taking an entire day off seem impossible?

Maybe you need a time-management system.

Sue Shellenbarger asked a half-dozen executive coaches to help pick the most widely used time-management systems—not just software tools or high-tech to-do lists, but behavioral-change techniques that help people get organized, clarify thinking and increase output. Then, she tried out for a week each of the three methods they mentioned most often—including one that involved a ticking plastic tomato.

To make a stronger business case, put away the spreadsheets and get out your pencil.

Making quality decisions is an intricate tapestry of experience, inquiry, and judgment that converge to form solutions. According to Michael Sacks and Steve Walton, professors at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, there are strategies that can be adopted to make the process more effective.

Plenty of motivational coaches pledge to boost your efficiency. These are the few who really deliver.

Here's how finance executives abuse the most-useful of computer programs — and how to do better.

Some of the top colleges and universities in the world provide free business administration courses online. Here is a list of the best sources.

Enterprise software selection is a risky undertaking. Even after you've determined your requirements, the crucial software assessment and negotiation phases are potential minefields. Find out how you can reduce the risk involved in choosing a solution that meets your needs.

Enterprise software selection is a risky undertaking for any organization. Find out how you can reduce the risk with a best-practice approach to assessment, evaluation, and selection—and learn how to reduce the time and cost involved in choosing the right solution.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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This article discusses and demonstrates the use of De Bono's Six Hats Method as a powerful and creative approach for communication. Design your communication efforts (speeches, meetings, dialogs, posters, ads, etc.) according to this model and get your message through in an original yet clear and effective way.

Spreadsheet analysis is a very visual technique to help improve business operations and profitability. In this Editor's Note Professor Rick Hesse discusses how far we've come in the 25 years since spreadsheets were introduced.

Pam Slim provides a great list of things to do prior to making a presentation. If you make speeches, presentations, or pitches, read this.

Spreadsheet optimization is a great way to improve your decision making on a practical basis without having to use difficult or expensive software. Here we use the example of selecting a capital project to show how an optimization model built in Excel can arrive at the best decision using the Solver tool. This tutorial spreadsheet includes an annotated working model, as well as a customizable template to get you started building your own. After reviewing this instructional spreadsheet, you'll have a good sense of the Solver tool, and you'll have all the information you need to start building a model with real-world complexity.

There's nothing new about requests for proposals (RFPs). Companies have been using them for years to source products and services. But sourcing information products is another matter. While RFPs are customary in government organizations and academia, in other sectors, information products are more often purchased through a process of discussion and negotiation.

Today, however, more companies are becoming smarter about consolidating their spending on information products. As a result, more companies in all sectors are adopting a formal RFP process.

In this article, the authors outline an end-to-end RFP process for use in purchasing information products.

Sleeping on the job used to be grounds for dismissal. But now, years after Cornell University psychologist James Maas coined the term "power nap," companies are beginning to embrace the practice.

The only thing worse than sitting through a boring PowerPoint presentation is delivering one. Yet death by PowerPoint may be one of the biggest risks of doing business. On any given day, some 30 million PowerPoint presentations are delivered, according to Microsoft. Of course, when it was released for Windows in 1990, the software was an exciting new way of presenting information. But that's not always the case today. Technology got us into this mess; now, technology is working hard to get us out. There are scores of new products designed to enhance, or even replace, PowerPoint. Some cost thousands, others are free. Here are six offerings that can help make your next presentation less of a snooze and more of a blockbuster.

A strategic off-site's success is largely determined by what happens before it convenes. To make sure the meeting generates tangible results, its designer must do three things. First, answer the most basic questions: Who should be there? Talking about what, when, and why? Second, compile and distribute relevant data. Third, create a structure for the meeting that will compel progress.

Would you like to be able to scan your company's financial operations spreadsheet and instantly see which departments are over budget or behind schedule or which accounts receivable are past due? There's an easy way to do that in Excel, which can automatically flag cells that meet most any condition you establish. You can set the cells to display different formatting flags-colors, font styles, shading, patterns, underlining-with each custom format identifying a specific financial condition. Here's how.

You're about to leave on a business trip. You've packed your laptop, PDA, e-mail pager and cell phone. Yet despite all of this high-tech equipment, you feel disconnected from your office. After all, you realize that being on the road significantly increases the possibility you won't be able to adequately monitor your business even if you can remotely connect to the Internet.

What if you had a function that could robotically perform some of the monitoring for you-automatically, 24 hours a day, seven days a week-and alert you when it's appropriate?

Well, you probably already have that power--Excel--in your briefcase. Here's how to use it.

Business metrics lie at the heart of every important decision you make. Your decisions are only as good as the numbers that inform them and the communication that presents those numbers to you. Are you communicating these numbers well?

A good password isn't a password at all. Instead, it's a system for creating codes that are easy to remember but hard to crack. And by codes we do mean codes, plural, so that someone who finds out one of your passwords won't know them all. Here's one methodology to help you generate unguessable-but memorable-gibberish.

Two tools frequently used by teams to make decisions are Multivoting and Nominal Group Technique. While idea-generating tools such as Brainstorming produce a list of possible alternatives, Multivoting and Nominal Group Technique help to identify the important or popular items or prioritize the items on a list.

Instead of sifting through data-filled spreadsheets, turn on a filter and let the spreadsheet program search for the information you require.