By Annette Marquis, TRIAD Consulting

Part of your job as an administrative professional involves figuring out how to be efficient in accomplishing your tasks. More than likely, your typical workday is divided between routine tasks (such as reading and responding to e-mail messages, answering phone calls, and scheduling meetings) and more challenging tasks (such as producing a report for the board, publishing a newsletter, or creating an on-screen presentation). You are expected to be an office technology expert who knows how to complete each of these tasks as efficiently as possible.

In this article, we'll take a look at how the programs in the Microsoft Office System can come to the rescue in helping you accomplish your assignments quickly and effectively.

Expanding your horizons

If you're like many people, you jump right into a new assignment by using the same tried-and-true methods that you've used in the past, even if it might take some finagling with your favorite software programs to get the job done. Some people never even venture outside of their favorite program (although, it's a challenge to create a flyer in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 or a form in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 — it can be done). If you are willing to take a risk now and then, however, you might just find that there is a better way.

Each program in the Microsoft Office System has its own particular strengths. It pays to get to know what they are so that you know where to start with each of your assignments.

Many projects can be best completed with the use of more than one software program. When you start thinking about the Microsoft Office System as individual parts of an integrated whole, you can be more flexible in your approach to a project. Here are some simple tips to get you started:

• Define your output. For example, will the final result be a printed document, an on-screen presentation, an electronic document (such as an online manual or online form), a mail-merged document, or an e-mail message that others might print?
• As you envision the end result of your project, identify which of the following components it will contain:
• Blocks of text
• Spreadsheet-type data and calculations
• Tables
• Charts
• Graphics
• Drawings
• Meeting notes
• Form fields

The following table offers a quick overview of each Microsoft Office System program and its uses, to help you make the best choice(s) for your project.

Don't limit yourself to one program per project. Pick a base program — the one you'll use for the bulk of the project — but then pick and choose from among the best features of the entire Microsoft Office System as they apply to different components of your project.

Pulling it all together

For a practical example of how to apply this process, here is how you might go about using the Microsoft Office System to prepare a printed packet and a slide show for an upcoming board meeting:

• The bulk of the packet will be text-based, so you choose Word as your base program. Use Word to create or collate an agenda, travel information, minutes from the last meeting, and committee and staff reports.
• Your executive wants to include a year-to-date budget report, so you switch to Excel and either open the existing financial documents or create a spreadsheet that summarizes the current financial status.
• You create a column chart in Excel that shows a comparison to last year's year-to-date budget, and then you copy and paste the chart into a Word document so that your exec can write an analysis of it in her executive report.
• Using the Organization Chart template in Visio, you create an organization chart to show the organizational changes within the company during the last quarter.
• To include a meeting announcement, you use an event-flyer-design template in Publisher to create an attractive meeting announcement that will be included in the packet.
• So that all the board members have the meeting on their calendars, you create an appointment in Outlook. Because the board members do not have access to your internal Microsoft Exchange server, you forward the appointment as an iCalendar attachment (in the meeting invitation message, on the Actions menu, click Forward as iCalendar) so that they can add the appointment to their own appointment scheduling software.
You print an address card list of all the board members from the Contacts folder in Outlook, so everyone on the board has the latest contact information.
• You create a cover letter in Word, and then you merge the letter to the board member list in Outlook Contacts. To add a personal touch, ask your executive to add a few individualized comments to each letter. You also merge mailing labels to address the envelopes.
• The printed packet is ready. Now you move to PowerPoint and spend the rest of your time creating the presentation for your executive's report. You create a great summary of all the information by copying key concepts from the various printed reports — including the charts from Excel files, headlines and key information from the Word documents, the organization chart from Visio files, and a list of all the board members — and pasting them into your summary. Then, to help connect the board members to the people who work there, you add photographs from your last staff meeting and your company picnic.

Everything is ready to go. You've sent out an impressive packet of information, and you have an even more impressive presentation for the meeting. Although you could have accomplished this task by using just Word and PowerPoint or just Excel and PowerPoint, by expanding your horizons to include the other programs in the Microsoft Office System, you can use the best tools from each program and create a much more professional-looking packet with less struggle and more flexibility.

About the author   Annette Marquis is a partner of TRIAD Consulting, the premier Microsoft Office System training firm for the International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP).