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Office Work
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Day to day office software
Most offices will run on a combination of documents, spreadsheets, emails, together with planners (of people, time, resources, etc), as well as perhaps a specialist accounts package.
What more there is will depend on the type of business.
Documents
Most documents used in offices are 'rich text' formats featuring many formatting and layout options, embedding of graphics including charts and videos. Additional functionality such as referencing may be handled by external programs as add-ons to a software package. Document editors with a greatly simplified file format are used for data files or computer code.
Word:
Microsoft's Word Processing app
The standard document software is Microsoft's Office package. This is available for monthly or annual subscription. There are also free versions of Office but they are probably not worth it overall owing to the range of functionality possible which can integrate between Word, and with the complimentary programs Powerpoint and Excel (as below) to give a seamless collection of office packages.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are a mainstay of modern office operations, holding up to huge quantities of numerical and other business data types for records keeping, interactive functions with other software or the internet, analysis pipelines, and calculations or templates for meetings or reports.
Excel:
Microsoft's spreadsheet app for Data calculations
Microsoft's Excel program is useful for all statistics, data and charting purposes. Functions range from quick and easy ways to set up tables, to almost entire applications worth of code saved as standard functions in the program, to run very complex business tasks across industries.
Example, spreadsheet intro Excel 2010.
Presentations
The presentation format consists of 'slides' viewed one after another usually with not too many lines of text on, and often pictures or other media embedded. They are mostly used for either presenting ideas or results in a business meeting, a sales presentation, a class or a lecture, or as an alternative to making a booklet format for handing out some information.
Powerpoint:
Microsoft's app for presentations
Microsoft's Powerpoint application is useful for all presentations whether in business or in lessons or lectures. People also use this app for editing figures and charts, but vector graphics based software - Inkscape (free) or Adobe Illustrator (paid) - provides more figure editing power.
Example presentations:
Top = information-style, Lower = presentation-style.
File sharing over cloud services.
Most software providers build 'cloud' options alongside downloadable copies of programs, meaning files or other data travels over networks, to go alongside the traditional desktop
office models.
The content you share could be raw files in folders shared with individuals or teams (see below), or it could be as part of a business operation to get the right data to the right people, eg, to get product data and customer lists to a mobile sales team; or to get accounts data loaded seamlessly to an accountant or accounts department as you go (see below).
Cloud services:
Sharing raw files and folders.
View
Cloudwards article or Video
View
Cloudwards article or Video
Live (social, digital, sales, websites)
If you are maintaining live social media accounts,
it can save time to work with online media content organisers,
which can be pre-loaded with content you plan to post aross many different sites and will then run in the background performing the media uploads at the times you have specified.
Social Media Management Dashboard:
Example.
View Video
For creating your website if you need one, it might be an idea to hire a specialist for that as it reflects the front end of your business. Depending on the functionality you require, I can use template based website builders to help you achieve a professional looking result.
For this website, I used IONOS (formerly 1&1) for the pages, and then embedded widgets and other code snippets, and pictures and videos, into it.
Business functions over networks.
Even a simple sole trading business will be sharing at least their business data
with an accountant. Beyond that, there might be a small team of sales reps, trades workers, marketeers or others, where it is handy to share information from an office to all the various people looped into a process. Plenty of custom built software exists to update people over networks, for everything from accounts to sales!
Cloud services: Example Custom built software for different business functions.
View
Video (For Sage 50, not Cloud)
View
Video
E.R.P.s (Enterprise Resource Planners)
'Enterprise resources' just means business resources, such as facilities, goods and also staff labour. Gathering all the data together is often the job of quite complex software packages termed E.R.P.s. The cost and needed to subscribe to and operate these packages can
grow rapidly. It would't make sense if you are a sole trader to invest in an E.R.P. but as a business grows this may enter into the review of the operations in order to find the most time & cost saving systems.
Subscription to most specialist software depends on the number of users. Medium - to - large business departments are likely to have a large number of companies competing to give you a single package to run departmental operations including for:
- Facilities
- Project Management
- Production lines (process, or discreet)
- Inventories
- Logistics
- CRM
(Customer Relations Management)
- Sales
- Accounts
- Business Intelligence (BI)
- Risk Analysis
* Business Intelligence'
is the only area touched on properly on this site, as it is a pre-made collection of statistical and analysis tools for creating business "dashboards"
(shared summary screens of 'key performance indicators') in order to understand the trends and patterns in your business data.
It can get quite complicated with even it's own programming
languages, eg DAX, so might require specialist employees just purely
to run those dashboard analytics.
Enterprise Resource Planner:
Example.
View Video
NOTE:
For many medium sized companies, these kinds of packages are being replaced since around 2010 by "cloud computing" services with software delivered to all the terminals "as a service".
The advantage is portability across far more devices such as tablets and mobile phones in addition to the traditional "office desktop" systems; in addition, the maker of the cloud software distributed this way can release updates easily to just the central cloud storage location - instead of needing to install updates separately onto every machine and device in the network.
