Software can help your company in ways that you probably haven’t even thought of. It can help to streamline processes, make your workforce more efficient and do numerous other fantastic things. Here are a few types of software that can help your business be the best it can possibly be.
Shutterstock Licensed Photo – By Stokkete
Common Software
Common software includes all of those types of software that you have probably already heard about. Things like Microsoft Office (www.microsoft.com/Office/Suite) and incredibly popular and for good reason. You can send word documents that almost any computer can open and read with ease. There are free alternatives (which will get onto in a second), but they can’t compare the accessibility or number of features available on things like Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office itself includes things like Outlook, Word and Excel as well as other things like PowerPoint and Access. If you company could make good use of these kinds of things, then they are well worth the cost to use them. Other common software includes how you manage and build your company’s website (assuming you have one, and if you don’t then you should make one). Your website is likely the number one location your customers and potential customers will visit, so you want to make sure that it is the best it can be at all times. This might mean making changes or adding new pages, through specific software.
Specialized Software
Specialized software covers software that won’t be relevant to everyone, but specific types of business will find it immensely useful. That might be having software to quickly and easily edit photos like Adobe Photoshop or something like Drink-IT (https://www.drink-it.com/) that helps you manage your beverage company. Each of these serves a specific purpose to a specific type of company. If you think there might be a piece of software out there that will help you run your company better, then it is worth spending some time doing some research on the internet to see what is available. The chances are that there probably is some software that can help and it is only a quick Google Search away.
Free Software
Free software is literally that, software which is free. If you don’t want to pay for Microsoft Office, then there are free alternatives such as OpenOffice or even things like Google Docs (www.openoffice.org) and Google Sheets. Both types of which offer software which is similar to Microsoft Office, but doesn’t have as many features. However, the main benefit of using Google Docs is that multiple people can access a single document and work collaboratively on it at the same time. This, in addition, it is integration with Google Drive means that you can access work from anywhere with an internet connection. Other useful free software includes things like Slack and Trello which you can use to help manage your team and communicate with one another. Trello is especially good when planning and managing a project as it lets you map out what needs doing and have each person feedback separately depending on what they have been allocated.
