Spotlight on Office Integration

When we are shown any of the Office packages it is often in isolation, in a specific course or for a specific task.

We are shown that Word is for letters, Excel is for math and calculations, Access is only for massive amounts of data, Outlook is email only and PowerPoint produces onscreen presentations.

The full power of all these packages is only realised when you combine all of their features and use what is known as the "Office Suite". Once you are familiar with a couple or all of the various packages that Microsoft has to offer you will use at least two to perform the majority of your tasks. You should also never be afraid of using a different package for a task that someone else has already started in another.

A great example of this combination of the packages is when a couple of weeks ago I needed to set up a seminar for some clients showing off the great new features of Microsoft Office 2007. I needed to decide the outputs that I wanted to produce before I could open any of the packages. I knew that I wanted to both find the correct clients and invite them, I needed to monitor which clients were interested and confirm them, I had to produce the seminar presentation myself along with handouts, and most importantly I had to order the right amount of coffee and cakes!

Finding & Identifying the Clients

All of our clients are in an Access database so I added an extra Yes/No (checkbox) field to our main Client table and liased with my colleagues as to whom we should invite. We ticked the relevant clients and I created a query in Access to pull out all the relevant records.

While Access is great for holding massive amounts of data and creating complex queries and reports I find that Excel is much easier to use if you want to spell and grammar check, and make sure that people have the relevant titles, etc. So I copied and pasted the records from my Access query into a new Excel spreadsheet. I used the Sorting & Filtering features of Excel to produce a client list that had all the relevant details.

Inviting the Clients

I wanted to send the invitation via email to our clients and so I needed an email mail merge from Word via Outlook. I created my invitation letter in Word along with our company logos and using a company template that I have set up with our specific company colours and styles. I then created the mail merge using the Excel spreadsheet I had created earlier and published the merge.

 

Monitoring Interest

After the mail merge had been published I moved over to my Sent Items folder in Outlook. I created a seperate folder within the Sent Items to hold all the receipts from my merge. I created another folder in my Inbox to hold all incoming email regarding the seminar. As the days progress myself and my colleagues received some emails expressing definite interest and some that were interested but could not make it on that specific day.

Out came Excel again! I created a table with the client name, telephone number & email. I added a column for attendance and a column for alternate dates. We added to this as the weeks progressed. Finally we had our list of attending clients.

Confirming Interest

Rather than confirm via email I wanted to confirm the clients in writing so I needed another mail merge. I used Word to create a confirmation letter again using our company template. I used the mail merge facility to publish a letter per attending client, and another mail merge for the others to confirm that we would be holding another seminar which they would be notified of in due course.

Creating the Presentation

PowerPoint is the perfect package to create my on-screen presentation but its handout feature is somewhat limited. Therefore, I used a pre-existing company template to create my presentation for screen in PowerPoint adding relevant notes as I moved along and then used the Send to Word feature to create my handouts. This allowed me to format the document to have one slide per page with my notes in two columns, my own headers and footers complete with logo and a front cover specific to my presentation.

 

 

 

Coffee & Cakes

Last but by no means least I had to make sure that my clients were well fed and watered during their visit. I sent an email through Outlook, again using our company colours and logos, to our catering company making sure I requested a Read Receipt.

A Job Made Easier

I used other features of all these packages in order to complete the task in hand. However,  even looking at the sections I've talked about you can see that a good overall knowledge of the Microsoft Office Suite can be extremely beneficial in all aspects of your working life.

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