What are some easy ways you can begin putting
this integration to use? Two examples immediately come to mind: mail
merge and financial statement tables. Do you need to create
automatically, some customized mailing labels, envelopes or form
letters, but often end up settling for some low-tech, tedious,
scissors-and-glue approach?
The Mail Merge Helper wizard in Microsoft Word
makes it very easy to pull in address lists, or similar data,
from such programs as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook and
Microsoft Access. Don’t even think about having your clerical
staff retype the information!
Preparing Tables:
Just Say No to Spaces and Tabs and Take Advantage of
Microsoft Office Integration
Another small business redundancy has to do
with preparing financial statements within documents. In most
companies, a CFO, accounting manger or controller prepares various
financial statements in Microsoft Excel, then passes the information
over to an executive assistant to incorporate into regulatory
documents, lender and investor updates, and annual reports.
Make sure your company isn’t falling into
this huge productivity trap. Be sure your executive
assistant, or whomever is charged with pulling together these
documents in Microsoft Word, is aware of simple, enormous timesaving
shortcuts such as the Paste Special command on the Edit menu (Figure
3-1) and the Object command on the Insert menu (Figure 3-2). All too
often, we see the executive assistant retyping these
financial statements from scratch in Microsoft Word, either by using
the Insert Table feature or, even worse, by aligning text by using
tabs and spaces. Ouch!
Use the Edit, Paste Special command in
Microsoft Word to copy and paste a formatted Microsoft Excel
worksheet range into your document.
Be Diplomatic and Tread Gently at First
Not all companies will suffer from these same
redundancies. But someone needs to take the time to go on a
fact-finding mission in your organization to spot and remedy at
least some of these inefficiencies.
Because of the sensitive nature of this, you
may be better off leaning on your accountants or auditors for this
task. In other cases, there’s no reason a PC savvy office manager,
controller or CFO can’t preclude or successfully manage this
exploratory work.
Alternatively, use the
Insert, Object command in Microsoft Word to easily insert a complete
Microsoft Excel worksheet into your document.
Microsoft Office Integration Action Items
Do you have a hunch that employees are
retyping the same information over and over again?
Do your administrative staff members know
how to fully exploit the mail merge features in the Microsoft Office
suite?
Does your financial and publications staff
understand how to easily take data prepared in Microsoft Excel and
seamlessly place it into Microsoft Word documents?
Is there anyone in your company who's in a natural position to spend
some time with each department or job function and look for
opportunities to streamline workloads through more efficient use of
Microsoft Office applications?
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