Microsoft Office packages are designed for different groups of people/businesses, with each suite featuring a range of applications to suit your needs. For example, the Home and Student package allows you to create documents via Word and PowerPoint, while buyers of the Home and Business suite get use of Outlook. These programmes are well known for their larger functions - like word processing in Word - but there are additional features that make up the applications that could have just as much impact on your office.

Improve your Outlook

Outlook allows you to write emails and much more! It forms part of the Home and Business, and Professional suites, but you can buy it separately if you wish. This application has a lot of features that allow you to give your office an efficiency overhaul. Stuffed inboxes can severely affect your working day, especially if they lead to missed messages as you attempt to wade through hundreds of emails a day.

Conversation View in Outlook gives you the chance to keep your inbox more streamlined. It does this by taking messages with the same subject line and placing them together in one location - rather than have them scattered throughout the application. If you have no need for correspondence of this type, say your queries have already been answered but you're still getting lots of messages then you can use Outlook's ignore function. This hides the message so you don't even have to delete it yourself.

Manage a blog

Blogs are a great way to reach your target audience and this informal way of promoting websites is proving increasingly popular. But how can you make sure that your blog rises above others and gets people landing on your web portal? To make them more appealing you could consider adding PowerPoint slides to add visuals. PowerPoint isn't just for presentations, in fact uploading diverse multi-media could help to make your site more interesting. Information can also be uploaded via Excel for example, especially if you want to add data that could entertain your target audience.

Put power into PowerPoint

As mentioned previously, PowerPoint has a place outside of presentations, and some features allow you to create slides that are viewable from any location - provided there is internet access. In some offices, online meetings are beginning to replace the traditional face-to-face kinds, as employees save costs by chatting from their own locations. Broadcast Slide Show is part of PowerPoint, and as the name suggests it lets you show your slides to others connected to the internet. They simply click a link and view your presentation, so you can save money and time that you may have spent travelling to clients' locations.

Get Excel-lent templates

Excel is another well known piece of software that is synonymous with spreadsheets. These applications can take lots of information and turn them into worksheets that make sense of numbers generated by your company. Each release of Excel boasts fresh functions and the templates included can be utilised so you can give your office a makeover courtesy of Microsoft.

For example, you could download the Business Expense Sheet in order to closely examine your income and outgoings, while the invoice template can save time before payday. In addition, if you wanted to look at/update spreadsheets on the move then you can use Excel Mobile.