nefficiency: Don't Pay The Price

Thu 24th May 2012

Keeping an eye on costs is imperative to any successful business. But having a finger on the pulse can be difficult if you find that you are constantly fine-tuning outdated management systems. Here, we take a look at how Microsoft Office 2010 can help you stop wasting time and money and improve your business performance.

Companies are reviewing new ways to cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint, from ensuring PCs are powered down when not in use, to considering remote systems to undertake power-ups. With many organisations under intense pressure to save where they can, reorganisations, takeovers, mergers, downsizings, joint ventures, and other major changes are extremely common. And with these changes, come new challenges and demands as everyone learns to cope with different ways of working - while trying to save money.

Keeping an eye on costs in any area of a business is especially crucial today. This could include the marketing manager having to review their marketing spend on internet, print and other media; or it might be the finance director reviewing latest office leases and deciding to negotiate a better deal with the landlord; or even the sales director spotting increasing costs of sales against generated revenue and cutting the authorised spend during lunch-hour meetings.

A successful company understands how to manage during good and bad times; and any business that does not focus on efficiency will inevitably be hit by unnecessary costs. Whether it's waiting for cost estimates from the finance department or for a budget proposal from marketing, inefficient management systems can mean losing both time and money. If your organisation suffers from a corporate bottleneck, then it's time to look at Microsoft Office.

Well-maintained and well-managed Excel 2010 spreadsheets can help at department and organisation level. Excel is especially useful when working with budgets and a major business application of Excel is in corporate budgeting.

Many companies, from big corporations to small companies use Excel for their budgeting. Indeed, 70% to 80% of all successful organisations use Excel as their primary budgeting tool. This is because Excel provides many functions and formulas that not only help you manage your data records efficiently, but will also allow you to analyse data based on constantly changing business environment. Through the use of formulas, you can create comprehensive drop down boxes to facilitate data inputs and reduce entries. And through the use of pivot tables, you can obtain a detailed analysis of your stock movement or inventory level.

More and more organisations are also finding Excel invaluable for automating extraction of data from Microsoft Access into Excel - this allows more precise analysis and management reporting, again saving organisations time and money. You can link Access and Excel through the Access Import feature.

Microsoft Access and Excel are both parts of the Microsoft Office suite. With Access, you can create simple applications; because Excel is a relational database management tool, you can use the program to manipulate and convey data findings. It takes only a few clicks to link Access data into an Excel workbook. This has saved many organisations time and money with bridging the gap between the two systems so that financial data, for example, can be easily combined into a spreadsheet and then treated to any of the complex commands Excel offers - seamlessly.

Well-designed Excel spreadsheets can help deliver key financial points accurately. Excel 2010 has powerful features and tools to help pinpoint patterns or trends that can lead to more informed decisions. Analysing large data sets, for example, is now much easier and less daunting for anyone to create and review. Excel allows a visual summary of data with Sparklines; large amounts of information can be filtered using new Slicer functionality; and there's the flexibility to enhance PivotTables and PivotChart visual analysis. These analysis and visualisation tools allow savvy financial mangers to keep track and highlight important data trends which, in turn, can lead to more informed and cost-effective decisions.

Access information can also be extracted and combined into Word 2010 files. This is a must when you need to create a company report, for example containing data such as sales figures. This function exploits Word's key strength for creating documents and for Access's strength in managing data. To publish data in documents, simply export the data to Word from Access using the export wizard. Once your data has been combined into a Word file you can use the professional tools to add themes and styles. Company logos, headers and footers can all be combined in a Word document and the end result is worthy of a mass roll out - especially to internal stakeholders and shareholders

To save time and money when booking meetings, Outlook 2010 has an array of scheduling tools that means it's easy to request, arrange and confirm a meeting with anyone from your desktop. This means that there's no need to have a telephone permanently glued to your ear as you try to arrange and rearrange meetings for groups of people dispersed over different departments or even different offices. With Outlook 2010, meetings and resources can be booked while any calendar clashes are flagged up immediately. Calendars shared by email arrive in the recipient's Inbox as email message attachments, with a Calendar Snapshot in the message body. Users can edit the Calendar Snapshot before sending.

And when it comes to presenting financial data in an easy to understand snapshot, use PowerPoint 2010. There is a huge variety of SmartArt and colour schemes enabling you to produce impactful presentations. Key budget indicators can also be combined form Excel to highlight anything that needs to be addressed urgently and to show improvements that have been successful.

Microsoft Office 2010 can help a business to identify cost and time savings, and get more out of its resources in order to maximise performance. From Excel to Access, Outlook to PowerPoint, all areas of business can benefit from the time saving functions and the professional presentation and analysis of key data.

Author is a freelance copywriter. For more information on microsoft training london, please visit https://www.stl-training.co.uk

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