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Office Software Business Guide: Presentation Software, Word Processors and Spreadsheets

Although most companies work with many different pieces of software designed to meet the specific needs of their businesses, general office software used for word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets is usually at the heart of the business. A general office software suite allows your company to quickly produce professional-looking documents, including memos, letters, reports, statistical analyses, presentations, brochures, invoices, and expense reports.

You should look for a well-rounded office software suite that is easy to use, communicates with your other software programs easily, can be automated or customized as needed, and provides robust customer support.

Benefits

Once your employees learn how to use the office software systems, your company will begin to immediately reap the rewards.

Branding and Consistency

The use of customized templates ensures that documents, particularly those sent to clients or customer presentations, have a consistent look and feel, which reinforces your company’s branding. Interoffice documents, such as expense reports and sales reports, also benefit from the consistency that templates provide.

Increased Efficiency

Software used for word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation allows employees to share and recycle documents as needed, instead of creating new copies each time. The marketing department, for example, can create basic product presentations that the salespeople can simply customize for their own audience, instead of starting from scratch.

Speedy Communication

A study completed by The Radicati Group, a technology research firm in Palo Alto, California, concluded that corporate email accounts make up roughly 25 percent of all email accounts, and continued growth is expected. With the prevalence of email communication, electronic documents have become mainstream. Businesses can send and receive professional memos, letters, reports, spreadsheets, brochures, and presentations with the click of a mouse.

Improved Accuracy

A decent office software suite will improve the accuracy in company documents. Most word processing systems have a built-in dictionary, thesaurus, spell-checker, and grammar-checker that eliminate most typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors, and spreadsheet programs perform simple and advanced math calculations automatically, avoiding costly errors.

Pitfalls

Confidentiality Issues

Since it is so easy to email electronic documents or copy them onto a CD or flash drive, document theft is a real issue. To avoid this, use trusted personnel only for office documents that are sensitive in nature or that your competitors would love to get their hands on.

Installation and Support

If you do deploy office software to your entire organization, you must have a staff whose job is to maintain the software and the hardware you run it on, as well as train employees on how to use it properly. If you cannot afford to dedicate an employee to this task, purchase only the office software that has high-quality customer support in place.

Upgrades

Many software companies continue to produce software upgrades on a regular basis. Although these upgrades may introduce new functionality, they can become expensive to purchase and time-consuming to install and train the employees on. If you decide not to upgrade your software in a timely manner, you could find that the manufacturer stops providing customer support on the version you are running.

Piracy

If you purchase hard copies of the software on CD, you may find that employees use them to install the software on their home computers as well, which is in violation of piracy laws. You can install a multi-user version on your company network, however, which will eliminate this possibility, but you will be responsible for tracking how many licenses you have paid for compared to how many you are using to keep it legal.

Pricing

Office software can be pricey when purchasing just a few copies for a small office, costing $100 or more for every program purchased for each employee. These software programs are often sold as a software suite, however, and may also include email and database software in the package, making the purchase more cost-effective. Don’t try to cut corners too much, as it can harm you in the long run. There are free programs available that you can download online, such as Open Office, but you will find yourself without professional customer support.

Larger companies should purchase multi-user licenses that allow you to install the software to your server and deploy it to many employees at once, which will save you money and increase the efficiency of your office software rollout.

The benefits of office software greatly outweigh the initial costs of purchasing and implementing the software. Konecranes, a lifting equipment manufacturer, implemented a productivity suite for 8,000 employees across multiple locations. The company predicts it will reduce its travel expenditures by 2012 due to the reduced need for employees to travel between locations.

Office software for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, such as Microsoft Office, has become mainstream and is sure to benefit your company, but it can be costly to implement. Make sure that you have the proper technical support, be it in-house, through the manufacturer, or from freelance contractors, to ensure a smooth implementation, training, and rollout for your company.