Since every business is different, there is no way of telling which tools will make your business more productive. Here are three tools that may help you if you run an office, or if you run a company that is hindered by its frequent use of computing technology. How you use the technology listed in this article will determine how productive it makes your employee(s) and their work processes.
https://www.libreoffice.org/
You may think that LibreOffice software is useless for your company, and you may even skip to the next tool in this article without reading the rest of this section…but you would be making a mistake. If you run or work in an office, then you probably already have an Office program, and it is probably Microsoft Office. Keep that software, and use LibreOffice too; that is what many admin companies and writing companies do. Not only is LibreOffice free, it is very powerful.
Let us ignore the brilliant qualities that LibreOffice has, such as its ability to create and open mostly any type of Office software file (including all of Microsoft Office’s file types), and let’s forget that LibreOffice has features and tools that Microsoft Office doesn’t, and let’s jump right into why LibreOffice is so powerful. It is powerful because it is open source and you can change whatever you like about it.
Let’s say that you are annoyed because your staff keep writing “wont” when they actually mean “won’t.” You can change the LibreOffice program yourself and make it so that your staff are simply unable to write the “wont” version of “won’t”, or you can hire a coder to make the changes for you. Maybe you are not interested in such trivialities, in which case, maybe you should open your mind a little and consider what else LibreOffice can do for you.
For example, what if you are concerned about staff attaching files to emails that contain confidential information? Your email tracking software can track what is said in emails, but it cannot read what is written in attached documents. In that case, you change your LibreOffice program so that it sends a message to you whenever somebody types something confidential into a LibreOffice document, such as if they write a password into one. Again, you can make this change to the LibreOffice software yourself, or you can hire a coder to do it.
There are very few limits to the changes you can make to the LibreOffice software, and the fact that it is such a high-quality piece of Office software is just more icing on the cake.
MoleSkine Smart Writing Set
https://us.moleskine.com/smart-writing-set/p0202
Some employees would still prefer to use pen and paper, and it is not because they are old fashioned, it is because there are things they have ideas and thoughts that are difficult to write as text, and/or are difficult to quickly communicate via text alone. MoleSkine has many functions, but the best is its ability to allow people to freehand draw on planners, published files, and even on PDF documents. It also allows people to draw on paper and have it converted into its digital equivalent. Some offices and some companies could dramatically improve their productivity with this type of technology.
Take the example of an electrical engineer. His or her boss may ask for a quick jimmy-rig solution to a problem on new generator prototype. The creative engineer may have a great idea for a small addition to the iron core, but writing about it would take a long time and explaining how to implement it would take longer. With Moleskine, the engineer could pull up a few product-design documents that have images and schematics on them, and he or she could draw what is needed and how to install it onto the product-design documents themselves. The engineer could use a red font to make his or her drawings clearer. The implementing engineers could use a dark blue font and annotate the same product-design documents to show what they did and where they did it. The product-design document that is now a mess of blue and red annotations is sent to the tech-writer, who turns the annotated product-design documents into a brand new and updated version of the original that shows what has been added and how. All of this would be near impossible with just text documents, and it would be far more expensive and time consuming if each step needed CAD/technical drawings.
As you can see from the example above, MoleSkine smart writing set software, along with stylus pens and MoleSkine paper devices will help to save that company a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of staff hours by simply allowing the staff to write (freehand) on PDF documents, and there are plenty of other documents that MoleSkine allows people to draw on.
The software syncs with Google Calendar, which is handy because Google Calander is a great free service that many office and company workers use. The same is true of iCal, and Moleskine software syncs with iCal too.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/notability/id360593530?mt=8
What if you simply wish to annotate a few files and you do not want to lay out money for sophisticated technical paper, software and stylus pens. What if you simply wish to annotate a PDF on your tablet with a cheap stylus pen you bought at Walmart. If you want a less advanced version of MoleSkine, then try the Notability app. It simply allows you to mark up PDFs, lecture slides and forms on your phone or tablet device.
With MoleSkine, you draw on a technical piece of paper and you can see what you have drawn. You then see that drawing digitized via the MoleSkine software. It is advanced and sophisticated, but it is also expensive if you have to buy the product for all your staff and then train them up on it. A cheaper alternative is to buy this app for your staff and have them write/draw directly on to their touch-operated mobile divides.
There are pros and cons to using this app over something such as MoleSkine. The obvious downside is that your workers cannot work with great detail if they are drawing directly onto their tablet/phone device. The biggest upside is that this system is far cheaper and may still serve the same purpose or need in your company as the MoleSkine system would.
This app allows your staff to mark up documents with ideas on changes or additions that they would like to install. It allows your staff to learn in their own way by you giving them outline notes and having your staff add their own details into each document. Similarly, it may be used for research in the field where staff are unable to whip out a keyboard and start typing, and it may be used as a simple note-taking app like Evernote.
Bio:
Amelia White has years of experience in the field of content marketing and project management. White also loves researching new inbound advertising techniques.