Office automation reduces human involvement in handling data, eliminates the risk of human error, and puts many critical processes on autopilot. Efficient office automation streamlines processes and generates better overall results. Time savings also means cost savings as employees can devote their time to higher value and more demanding tasks.
We can implement office automation in your workplace including:
MS Office (MS 365) applications
- Excel: multiplatform spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
- Access: database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Access Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools.
- Word: most widely used word processing program on the market.
- Outlook: for sending, receiving, and managing your emails with the built-in calendar to keep track of appointments and events.
- OneNote: is designed for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It gathers users’ notes, drawings, screen clippings, and audio commentaries. Notes can be shared with other OneNote users over the Internet or a network.
- PowerPoint: used to make presentations for personal and professional purposes.
- To Do: cloud-based task management application. It allows users to manage their tasks from a smartphone, tablet and computer.
- OneDrive: file hosting service operated by Microsoft. You can upload your files directly there, or integrate it in the 3rd party applications.
- Forms: allows users to create surveys and quizzes with automatic marking. The data can be exported to Microsoft Excel and viewed live using the Present feature.
- Teams: a team collaboration application developed as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Offering workspace chat and video conferencing, file storage, and proprietary and third-party application integration.
The examples of the office automation:
- Send the emails from the Excel using the data stored in the table.
- Analyze and redistribute received emails.
- Get external data (database, API, websites) in Access or Excel, analyze it and write appropriate task in To Do.
- From the Access create Word documents on the fly to generate letters, envelopes and custom reports based on data in a database.
- Create an expense report from Excel that saves the information into a database for summary/analysis purposes.
- Retrieve information from an API endpoint (including popular ChatGPT), make content, write it in a Word document, and send it with Outlook.
We can keep this list going endlessly.
We can do office automation in various ways:
- Microsoft Power Automate: for optimizing and automating workflows and business processes.
- Office Interoperability: access MS Office objects via .NET libraries.
- VBA Macros: for augmenting the functionality of Microsoft Office applications. Virtually every operation that can be executed interactively (via the mouse, keyboard, or dialog box) can also be executed via VBA.
- Web add-ins: web add-ins are built using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS and are hosted on a web server. They can be used to add context menus, custom ribbons, and task panes to web-based Office applications.
- VSTO add-ins: Visual Studio Tools for Office has complete access to all Office object models. It can perform all operations on the Office client. All the features are easy accessible in VSTO. C# or any other CLI programming language can be used to create new Office add-ins.
Google G-suite
Google Workspace is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It consists of:
- Gmail: mail service from Google. Google’s mail servers automatically scan emails for multiple purposes, including to filter spam and malware and to add context-sensitive advertisements next to emails
- Contacts: a contact manager. It is available as an Android mobile app, a web app, or on the sidebar of Gmail as part of Google Workspace.
- Calendar: time-management and scheduling calendar service. Google Calendar allows users to create and edit events. Reminders can be enabled for events, with options available for type and time. Event locations can also be added, and other users can be invited to events.
- Meet: communication service for video calling and meetings.
- Currents: for talking and working with your co-workers, customers, and others inside and outside your organization. Currents for work, school, and other groups is different from Currents for personal accounts.
- Drive: allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google’s servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files.
- Docs: allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating with other users in real time.
- Sheets: allows users to create and edit spreadsheet files online while collaborating with other users in real-time.
- Slides: presentation app allows users to create and edit files online while collaborating with other users in real-time.
- Drawings: diagramming software, allows importing images from the computer or from the Web as well as inserting shapes, arrows, scribbles and text from predefined templates.
- Forms: allows users to create and edit surveys and quizzes online while collaborating with other users in real-time. The collected information can be automatically entered into a spreadsheet.
- Sites: structured wiki and web page creation tool.
- Keep: the app offers a variety of tools for taking notes, including texts, lists, images, and audio. Text from images can be extracted using optical character recognition and voice recordings can be transcribed.
- Workspace for Education: set of Google tools and services that are tailored for schools and homeschools to collaborate, streamline instruction, and keep learning safe. Google Classroom is part of Google Workspace for Education, which empowers your institution with simple, safer, collaborative tools.
The examples of the G-suite automation:
- Automate your reports by connecting Google Analytics and BigQuery to Sheets and Gmail.
- Automate event registrations by connecting form to Google Sheets and Calendar.
- Analyze and store customer feedback by connecting form with Google Natural Language and Sheets.
- Organize workflows using Drive, Google Keep, and Google Tasks.
G-suite automation is done using Google Apps and various add-ons.
LibreOffice
The LibreOffice suite consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams, and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 115 languages.
The suite includes the applications:
- Writer: A word processor with functionality similar to Microsoft office and file support for Microsoft Word or WordPerfect files.
- Calc: a spreadsheet program, similar to Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3.
- Impress: a presentation program resembling Microsoft PowerPoint.
- Draw: a vector graphics editor, raster graphics editor, and diagramming tool similar to Microsoft Visio, CorelDRAW, and Adobe Photoshop.
- Base: a database management program, similar to Microsoft Access.
- Math: an application designed for creating and editing mathematical formulae. The application uses a variant of XML for creating formulas, as defined in the OpenDocument specification.
Automation of LibreOffice is done using extensions and macros.