Office 2000 Premium Part III: Access, PowerPoint and the Small Business Tools Small Business Tools Douglas Smith
What's New? Included in every one of the Office 2000 suites, except the Standard version, is Small Business Tools, specifically designed to help small businesses make more timely and informed decisions: Small Business Customer Manager, Business Planner, Direct Mail Manager and Small Business Financial Manager. These tools are integrated into Microsoft Office Premium, allowing Small Business owners and managers the ability to simplify daily tasks, and giving them the tools to help find business resources quickly.
The Small Business Customer Manager can create a customer and sales database for your entire office based on accounting data files and contact information from Microsoft Outlook, Expands Outlook 2000 contact management, Tracks customer activity, Generates customer, sales, product, and salesperson reports, and Creates Office communications documents for your customers, such as letters, postcards, or flyers.
The Business Planner provides instructions, examples and resources to help write a professional-looking business plan. It makes life easier by helping find practical business information, provides a well-organized list of useful small business resources and offers a variety of Office templates designed specifically for small businesses.
Direct Mail Manager allows business professionals the ability to create direct mailings, import addresses from many different file formats, verifies and sorts the address list. The program works with the mail merge feature of Microsoft Word word processor and Publisher, and links you to mailing services that can print and post a mailing.
Small Business Financial Manager creates standard financial reports and charts in Excel spreadsheet format. It can do customized growth projections and reports, create what-if scenarios to test the effects of different business decisions, and compare financing options for your assets, including loans, leases, and cash.
The Good and the Bad Most of the tools work and integrate quite well with Microsoft Office 2000 Premium and can be accessed virtually anywhere within the Office suite. We did notice that these tools create a lot of overhead as far as memory went and if you don't have a hefty processor with lots of memory forget it--the tools need lots of memory to work with any degree of usefulness.
How Does It All Stack Up? There are tons of management tools out there that do the same job and in most cases as well, and in some cases better, but where the Microsoft Office 2000 suite's Business Tools stand out is once again in the integration with the rest of the package.
