In the 1970’s the expenses for a small business were entered onto analysis paper. A date, description and amount were entered in the first three columns and that the figure was double-entered into an analysis column on the right. Individual expenses (e.g. postage, food, sundries and stationery) could then be analysed simply by adding the columns. An automatic check was made on the accuracy of the addition as the individual columns had to sum to the same as the amount column on the left.
Around the same time one large multinational organisation with an HQ in London might employ over 100 managers in the finance area to set, manage and control the budgets for the European area. The managers used techniques similar to the small business. They entered budget figures onto A3 analysis sheets, which were typed up as required by their secretaries. These were then used as the basis for analysing what would happen given different sales performances, different commission rates, different interest rates etc. These were well-paid, well qualified and skilled accountants who were able to work quickly and efficiently to analyse potential changes using the latest calculators and replicate them quickly with only a tiny proportion of mistakes across all columns, and down all rows.
The speed at which they worked necessitates continual retyping so the secretaries were also kept very busy. When sheets were returned they had to be proofed, but as the managers were skilled and the secretaries well trained and highly efficient for the most part there were only a few occasions when the sheets had to be retyped. A dramatic change occurred in the early half of the 1980s to this organisation when microcomputer software became widely available.
Tasks -
Name two different office applications that could be used by the small business to improve upon the paper-based systems employed in the 1970s.
Describe two advantages of each over the paper-based system and one advantage of each over the other.
How were secretaries’ and typists’ employment prospects affected by the advent of these office packages?
What new job opportunities were opened up by the advent of office applications?
Excel - This would have made it easier to keep track of the finances and would have done all the sums and other mathematical equations for you with pin-point accuracy that you could select. (e.g. You have a number: 1.25465456 and you want to round it to 3 decimal points then it would round it to: 1.255.)
Advantage over Access: You can do more money based things than Access with higher accuracy and ease.
Access - This would be used to store all the customer information, t would also allow you to put a password and username system in place to stop unorthorised people acccessing the data and causing you to break the law. It can be set up by someone who has an understanding of the software and they can make it easy for the people who will be using it to understand, this will allow for increased productivity in the staff and making it faster to go through records if you need to find them by just entering a search query.
Advantage over Excel: You can store customers data without having to create new rows, all you have to do is have someone set up the forms and then it is easy for someone who doesn't know a lot about computers to use.
Secretaries: There was less need for them, instead of having lots you could have just one who was skilled in using simple applications such as word processing to get the job done, it could also be quicker depending on the task set. This meant that there were less jobs in secretarial work and this caused people who had skills in these jobs to look for another job, usually however they were all taken and so they had to learn new skills to get a different job.
Typist: They were most commonly used to type out messages without mistakes, as programms such as "Microsoft Word" came about you could use the mail merge option to create multiple copies of one things with lots of people names on seperate messages. Also the fact that you could now delete mistakes before printing it out lowered paper costs and time consumption as the typists became accusome to the change. This also made some typists redundent because again, the same as the secretaries, you needed less people to do the job. This caused them to look for other jobs and improve in ICT in the hope of securing another job.
To name a few, the new jobs that opened up were things such as an IT Technican or a teacher as computing was only going to grow and bringing up a new generation who had a good understanding into the technical world would cause the computing world to boom and grow at an extraudinary rate.
Another job would have been to work in the main companies that were trying to become the best computer and software designers so becoming a software designer and improving your skills all the time would help you secure a job in the huge companys, if you chose wisely you could have been one of the worlds most known "computer Gurus".
