Office Automation

In today’s business atmosphere, it is imperative that an organization should operate at its optimum level of efficiency. The best way to achieve this goal is through a custom-designed, local and wide area network, with appropriately sized workstations. Businesses across the globe are increasing exploit teams to accomplish significant work or projects. Much of this work is also accomplished using technology tools to support their communication and collaborative efforts.

Office Automation

Office Automation is the use of a scripting language or other tool to automate repetitive tasks in an existing program. Some of the more common uses for Office Automation are to enter predetermined text or values in a spreadsheet or database depending on what values were entered in another dependent field. Basically, it makes work less tedious, reduces workload and repetitive keyboard strokes or mouse-clicks. When computers were first introduced, people were trained on how to operate them and use software programs within the organization. There are some people who are very knowledgeable and familiar with the new software applications. Of course, there are some people who are not very clever when it comes to a click of a mouse. Since Microsoft office is the most frequently used, the military offers Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access training to all military and civilian personnel; and free of cost. This training helps employees to enhance their work productivity and accomplish the military’s day to day missions. Knowing a program’s features, capabilities, helpful tips and shortcuts most definitely helps determine the decisions on what software to use based on their job. There are times when more than one person is sharing software or websites to complete a project or tasking. This method of sharing is called “Group Collaboration”.

Group Collaboration

Effective collaboration is the key to organization productivity, whether working together in the same office or spread across the world. The Internet presented several new collaboration approaches and is modifying the traditional ones. The main advantage of the Internet is its ability to reach users just about anywhere; however, users may have connections that only allow transfer of small amounts of data. Companies can use the Internet to extend the capabilities of traditional collaboration tools. Many times large projects extend between many companies. The Internet makes it easier for workers from different companies to use and share collaboration software so they can work on the same project. I remember my first assignment to Germany in 1990. I had no clue how to work computers or even knew what a login password was. Financial customer service was the first job I was trained in. There was one computer in the office that everyone shared for inquiries and processing transactions. Basically, I took a number and waited. We had few customers who were financial challenged and needed advance payments. All payments were tracked manually on a log and hard copies of supporting documents kept in the organization. Fifteen years later, increased amounts of advanced technology have steadily led us towards a paperless society. Electronic documents and files are stored on the hard or shared drives on a centralized server. Payments transactions are now tracked on Excel rather than a manual log. Excel is a spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft used within the Microsoft Windows operating system. I used Excel majority of the times, especially when dealing with high numbers and multiple expenses. The military finally figured out that limiting different organization with workstations was hindering the productivity and negatively affecting the mission. In addition, we expanded our service to a multitude of contractors and foreign internationals. We drastically needed to change how we did business; and the first step was to get more computers, printers, faxes and Ethernet capability. Now everyone has his or her own computer and access to various software programs which enables