Meeting Today’s Work Challenges

Whether you feel successful in your work probably depends on many factors. If you are a business owner or manager, success likely has a lot to do with your ability to lead—to make good decisions, to focus on the important things, to gather and act on accurate data, and to delegate and follow up in a way that continues to move your company or your department toward the overall goal. If you are an information worker who focuses mainly on projects and timeframes, you might feel successful when you can complete the tasks and projects you’re working on, collaborate with those who have information or input you need, and produce the output you (and your supervisors) are hoping for.

No matter what our roles at work, to be successful today we need to somehow balance the following critical needs:

• To gather and process information accurately and efficiently to make sound business decisions (and weed out the irrelevant data we receive)

• To connect with others (customers, vendors, employees, peers, managers, and stakeholders) in a timely and effective way

• To learn and use tools that help us schedule and complete tasks, manage relationships, track business processes, and demonstrate professional results

• To produce quality materials that help move our company or department toward established goals (increased market awareness, improved customer satisfaction, enhanced business partnerships, and so on)

The following sections go into a little more detail about each of these items and introduce a few possibilities for the way the Microsoft Office system can help you address them.

Finding What You Need to Make Educated Business Decisions

Because of the fast-moving nature of business today, it is crucial that owners and managers be able to track the results of their business decisions. Having the capacity to evaluate actions—did that last marketing campaign result in new leads for your company?—in a timely way helps ensure that you are doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Microsoft^® Office Outlook^® with Business Contact Manager 2007 includes a Marketing Campaign feature that enables you to create a campaign, distribute it by using Office Word 2007 or the Microsoft^® Office Publisher Mail Merge functionality, and then track the results of the campaign by gathering customer account data. Microsoft^® Office Excel^® 2007 also includes tools designed to help you gather Business Intelligence (BI) that will give you the information you need to make decisions that will affect your business or department.

Prioritizing Your Work Efforts—Weeding Out the Irrelevant

The fact that we have the option of being connected 24/7 brings with it additional challenges. We want access to information—but we need it simple. We have to be able to prioritize what we need to work on—and then find quickly what we need to do the work, and then move on to other things. Otherwise, we are buried in a mountain of extraneous data that never gets us where we need to go.

As Microsoft Office evolved over the years, it grew dramatically in the number of features and tools it made available for users. But until now, one thing the software could not do was to help us prioritize—what’s most important to do first? Which tools do I need in order to do that? With the new look and feeling of the Microsoft Office system, you will be able to find and use the tools you need for the task at hand, which helps you focus on accomplishing the next step—while still keeping the big picture in mind.

The command tabs in the core applications follow the life-cycle stages of a document or project, so the programs are organized to provide the support you need in each step of document creation. For example, in Office Word 2007, the command tabs are (from left to right) Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View (see Figure 1-1). (If you have installed Office Outlook with Business Contact Manager 2007, you also see a Business Tools tab.)

Chances are that as you create a document, you will want to write first (Home tab); add charts, clip art, or diagrams (Insert tab); then finalize the page layout (Page Layout tab). For some projects, you might need to add more specialized items, such as footnotes or citations (Reference tab), add mail merge components for a mass mailing (Mailings tab), or work collaboratively with others as you go through a review cycle with the document (Review tab). Of course, along the way you’ll want to be able to see your evolving document from different perspectives (View). This life-cycle progression is similar in Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office^® PowerPoint^® 2007, and Microsoft^® Office Access 2007 as well. With this approach, you always know where to find things—and you always remember which step comes next!

Connecting to the Right People and Getting the Job Done

Today’s business is connected. When is the last time you felt completely out of touch with the outside world? That means no cell phone, no television, no Internet. We have grown accustomed to staying in touch with the flow of information throughout our workdays and into our evenings at home. Everywhere we go, it seems, we have the option of connecting to the information we need—via our cell phones, our PDAs, and laptops. You can schedule meetings on your Pocket PC while your daughter finishes at soccer practice; you can download the files you need for a presentation while you sit in a drive-through waiting for your mocha latte. The coffee shop isn’t just a quiet place to “get away from it all” anymore—now it’s a place to surf the Web, answer e-mail, or finish your review of the team’s report for this Friday’s stakeholder’s meeting. Office Outlook 2007 includes a great new To-Do Bar that helps you see at a glance all the appointments you have and tasks that are due for the next few days. Office Outlook 2007 functions more than ever before as your command center, enabling you to identify and prioritize tasks so you can get more done in less time.

Learning and Using Flexible Tools for Varying Experience Levels

The workplace today represents a dramatic range of ages and experience levels. Companies include people who began working before the IBM PC arrived on the scene and they may still work to get comfortable with new technology; while at the other end of the spectrum, workers coming out of college today have grown up with access to computers, video games, and more. The difference in their comfort level can be dramatic—and it means that there might be a great mix of attitudes in your own workplace. How can you meet the needs of both groups of users—and all those in-between—so each person can be more productive while working, no matter the experience or comfort level? Design a simple, elegantly powerful suite of programs that works the way they do.