The feet are shoulder-width apart, the front foot turned just a bit toward the flag. Left arm straight, right arm slightly angled. The thumb of his left hand rests against the heel of his right, as the fingers curl firmly around the grip of the club. He looks out over the beautiful green expanse, sighs contentedly to himself, looks down at the ball, and lets his arms swing back, left arm still straight. Down come the arms, the club swings through the ball, and a sweet “ping” echoes from a clean hit. No slices this afternoon, and no hours wasted hunched over a desk troubleshooting someone else’s problems so the boss can get a clean report of this month’s data. As the programmer strolls down the fairway towards his ball, he asks himself whether the popularity of high-quality reporting software is in some way connected to the rising cost of green fees these days, as so many programmers and report designers seem to be getting out of the office early each day. No matter, he concludes – it’s awfully nice to be outside on a day like this.
Most of us work to live; we don’t live to work. Each hour in the office is an hour not spent on the golf course or in the home or relaxing with friends. Just as our companies all need to become more efficient to gain competitive advantage, so each of us wants to become more efficient in the office to gain more time doing the things we love to do. All too often, translating the data we have into the knowledge we need can eat up hundreds of hours which we would all rather spend anywhere but the office. Modern reporting software – which is designed to quickly and seamlessly bridge the gap between complicated data and simple reports – can drastically cut busy time for programmers, report designers, and managers, and can give workers of all stripes more time to work on their short game.
Work would be a lot more simple if management could digest raw data, if the brains of customers, clients, and co-workers could sift through numbers and information and pull out the relevant and important bits. But few of us can do that efficiently. As a result, we need something to take the data from our spreadsheets, documents, and presentations, and turn it into readable and visually impressive reports. In many firms, in-house software solutions require employees to re-input data into special formats, then plug that data into a rough template, then clean up the result to make a passable report, then fight to convert the final product from one format into the one preferred by the end user. And of course there are many bugs and hitches along the way, which we learn to avoid or jury-rig or just ignore, and so we spend our precious time re-entering data, re-formatting reports, and re-working work that surely could and should be handled more easily. Reporting software takes away all the wasted effort and gives back all your wasted time. It works with the most popular office software programs to create customizable reports which can be saved in a variety of user-ready formats.
No longer do workers need to learn to operate new software to generate quality reports, nor do programmers and report designers need to develop their own proprietary systems for creating informative and visually impressive materials for management and clients. Gone is the wasted time. Reporting software can bridge the gap between the most popular word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software and the kind of standardized reports, letters, graphs, and documents which translate data into knowledge. In today’s information-centered economy, plenty of us can accomplish much of the same work done by reporting software – but good reporting software can do it many times more quickly, and with far fewer mistakes along the way.
Manufacturers of reporting software include many familiar names and many other corporations which focus most or all of their efforts on creating the best and most user-friendly reporting software (a list of popular reporting software is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reporting_software). Each of these companies is in the business of giving you back your free time. Reporting software makes your business more efficient and more productive, and that means it saves you time. And, at the end of the day, a bit more free time is something we could all use.
More information on the advantages of reporting software is available here: http://ezinearticles.com/?Using-Business-Reporting-Software&id=4120675. More information on what to do with the free time you gain from reporting software is available in the many books and articles of golf fans such as Dan Jenkins and Rick Reilly. Then when you tee off in the early afternoon on a pitch-perfect weekday with the sun blazing overhead, think of your colleagues still sweating away in the office, and tip your hat to your new reporting software.
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