5 Tips for Office Automation at Home

Data entry, marketing and other common office tasks are often mundane and time consuming. Businesses may save time and revenue by automating some of these tasks. The time available will be for other tasks such as, sales and product development. Crowd sourcing and scripts may help companies automate some of these mundane tasks. A few of these time saving resources to really boost your productivity are explored in detail below.
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Scripts Make Life Easier

Tools such as DaVinci Scripts automate task on the personal computer despite the complexity. The freeware is a Windows Automation Tool that can help an individual instantly publish images on a website. Many companies may snap an image from their mobile phone and send it to the Windows server, which can then be automatically added to the web page. Image processing and web page building are processed server side, but the instructions may be sent from a mobile phone for additional ease of use.

Automator for Mac OS X is a free tool that comes bundled with every Mac. It's a tool that allows anyone to create relatively complex workflows with relative ease through Apple's typically slick user interface. Automator is commonly used for batching time consuming tasks such as resizing images, pulling images from websites into iPhoto, generating Keynote business presentations automatically, and much more.

Editors Simplify Office Tasks

Editors such as VEDIT can be used to automate time consuming office tasks. If your business needs to transfer data between databases and accounting programs, then this tool will help you automate this task. Often businesses need to clean up databases or extract data from databases, again, VEDIT will clean up databases and extract data from databases. This editor can also perform functions such as extracting valid email addresses from log files and sorting email addresses, as well as extract text from a web page and stripped of HTML.

Use Crowdsourcing

This process involves outsourcing tasks to a large group of people through an open call. Mass collaboration is a technique familiar with businesses, authors and journalists who use crowdsourcing to solve business problems in automated ways. When this method is used, your business will save money and produce better solutions to the problem.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the best known crowdsourcing marketplaces that allows individuals to automate business tasks quickly, easily and to a high standard. Mechanical Turk is often used by businesses to complete tasks dependent on human intelligence that computers are unable to perform. Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) are often used to select photographs for websites, identify performers on CDs or writing product descriptions.

99Designs is a website used to create a crowdsourcing site where individuals can go and submit a request for a design where contractors submit their designs – all you have to do is choose the design that best meets your ideas. The designer will be paid according to the budget set for the project. This website significantly improves work productivity within the office environment.

Macros

Macros are often used to automate office tasks. This is a more rudimentary way to automate tasks; however, it is effective, nonetheless. Businesses that repetitively perform the same tasks may write a macro for automation. While writing the macro does invariably involve an upfront investment in your time, they have the potentially to massively boost your productivity in the longer term. Many macros may be written by placing the software in record mode, performing the task and then simply the macro. With this method, no extensive programming or coding is required – just simply record and play back the macro.

Automatic Data Backups

One of the biggest problems any business faces is data loss. Now with a new generation of online backup solutions, such as those offered by Dropbox, Mozy, and Box.net, it's possible to continuously back your important data up to the cloud so that it's always available, anywhere!

Image Source: smowblog

22 thoughts on “5 Tips for Office Automation at Home”

  1. Pingback: BizSugar.com

  2. 5 nice tips to save huge time. thanks James. thanks for introducing davinci scripts, dropbox.

  3. Dennis Edell

    I don’t see how crowd-sourcing works so well. it’;s hard enough to find ONE trustworthy person to outsource too.

    What am I missing here?

  4. This is a LOT of information here! 🙂

    Thanks for the piece, James, and nice meeting you at Basic Blog Tips.

  5. Hi James,

    Never tried nor heard dropbox,

    I am using the free wordpress plugin for backup so far.

    Thanks for the link,

    cheers.

    1. Hi there Kimi,

      Everyone has their own method that works well for them 😀 Dropbox is fairly useful though, so I’m glad I introduced you to it! It’s always good to know the options out there.

      Thanks for the comment! 🙂

  6. Hey James, that crowdsourcing seems like an amazing thing, this is the first time I am hearing about it. What are the macros that you have in use currently. I get the concept but not too sure what a real world application would be.

    1. Well, crowdsourcing online is the crowdsourcing I’m familiar with. MTurk is useful as it is a community, so you don’t have to “find the crowd”. It’s basically a board where you submit work, and other people do it for you. It’s fairly simple to use and allows you to get people to perform tasks for you.

      Hope that helps!

  7. This site 99designs.com looks very good. I almost thought I will use it, but the I saw some prices :D. The MINIMUM for a logo design is $200. In my country people make whole websites form few times less! I have seen people do pretty good logos for few dollars :).

  8. Crowdsourcing is a very interesting topic, but I think it depends on the size of the business to determine if it is an effective cost saving tool.

  9. Pretty cool article. There are some new things in here that I hadn’t heard of and could be useful for me such as Vedit. I’ll have to check that out.

  10. I use Automator on my mac- great stuff- do you know where I can get the twitter plugin that is featured on this page- Kind regards Grant

    1. Hi Grantly, I just changed my theme to Thesis earlier this week and I got rid of a whole bunch of plugins. I think the Twitter plugin you are talking about is called Digg-Digg. However I was slowing down my blog’s load time so I removed it. The Blog Skin that I got from ThesisAwesome adds all of the social sharing icons that you see above the post now. If you are using Thesis on any of your blogs you should give it a try. Have a great weekend Grantly I look forward to seeing more of your photos and portfolio.

      1. Hi Ileane I use Sexy Bookmarks and ShareThis on my blog- but I will checkout your suggestion Blog Skin as they sound really good. Thanks for the tips. Kind regards Grant

  11. Great post. I love automating anything and everything. I mean for myself and my business. Because automation can be bad as well, a lot of people lose their jobs to automated processes.
    I try to automate or outsource as much as possible, that gives me more time to be creative and set up new projects or just enjoy some free time.

    There are some great ideas in this post. Will definitely check this post again when I want to automate something.

  12. More and more people are beginning to back up their data up to the cloud. This appears to be the most secure way to backup data. Whatever happens to your system, all the files are secured.

  13. These are some very helpful tools. I like the idea of Crowdsourcing. Its more likely my preference. I am hoping it works for me too. Making your home an office is not hwta this is about; its just about doing your work at home – your comfort zone.

  14. Macros are definitely very helpful when you’re trying to complete basic repetitive tasks. I believe that OpenOffice suite provides native support for it so for those users who use this free package for their office, it might be a good idea looking into that.

  15. Hi Ileane I have used photoshop to batch process and rename images. I know its not a basic automator but it is a very good tool if you work with images. You can create an action that allows you to save and reuse it.

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