Take Advantage of the Tools Already on Your PC to Improve Productivity

AI is all the rage these days and rightfully so, it’s amazing how food companies can use it to come up with new recipe ideas, formulations and out of the box thinking to help them improve their business.

What you may not realize is that your PC already comes with some amazing tools and features you can leverage to improve productivity and accomplish more with the same number of employees. Here are four technologies you can leverage now:

Microsoft Power Automate Desktop

This free tool comes with your PC, (or is a free download from the Microsoft website), with it you can automate repetitive tasks such as filling out the same fields on a webpage or transferring the same data from one system to another. Think of it as the macro recorder for Windows. I’ve helped companies enter EDI transactions on the web or scrape web pages of data into a local database, allowing employees to avoid data entry mistakes.

Microsoft Teams - (Included with Office)

Think of this tool as much more than just a chat program to communicate with colleagues, it can also do surveys, vacation approvals, project management and so much more. We use it to keep track of tasks and even chat with clients in real time, avoiding long email chains.

Microsoft Power Apps - (Included with Teams)

Use Power Apps to create simple web apps that can do data collection, information repository or routing solutions. If all you need is a simple web app consider this technology before creating an expensive web solution.

Clipboard History Manager

Hands down this is my favorite tool to increase productivity, to enable it just copy any text and then use Windows Logo Key - V to paste it. It will keep the last 25 items you copied in memory, and you can even pin the ones you use the most, so they are always there when you need them. Some examples: Corporate Address, Phone Numbers, Link to your appointment calendar, etc.

About Juan Soto: Juan is the President of IT Impact, Inc. a Microsoft Gold Partner in Chicago specializing in helping food companies and manufacturers for more than 25 years. You you can find the IT Impact ad on page 23 of this issue.