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.

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, Box.net and SugarSync, it’s possible to continuously back your important data up to the cloud so that it’s always available, anywhere!

Image Source: smowblog

James is part of a team of writers at Office Kitten, one of the top specialists in business supplies in the UK.

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Tagged as: 99 Designs, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Automation, Crowdsourcing, DaVinci Scripts, DropBox, Shareware, SugarSync, VEDIT