With the holidays approaching, your office will be abuzz with lots of activities, many of which may fall under your supervision. You may be planning activities ranging from your office holiday party to overseeing the mailing of holiday cards to the coordination of gift giving. For busy people such as yourself, this can be a particularly stressful time of the year but you can overcome many of the organizational headaches that come with these tasks by turning your Microsoft Office Suite into your Virtual Holiday Elf!

For instance, you can use Microsoft Word or Publisher to help you create the perfect newsletter, holiday card, party invitation or firm announcement. If you are in the mood for something fancier, Microsoft PowerPoint can be used to create a unique and innovative electronic holiday card or announcement that can be easily emailed to recipients for a more dramatic effect. Try using PowerPoint’s rich graphics, sounds and animation schemes for something that’s sure to make a great impression.

Microsoft Word and Excel can be extremely practical for tracking all the back-end details such as spending, budgets, checklists, and gifts received as well as those given. Microsoft Outlook can be useful in keeping track of important dates, times and deadlines as well as leveraging tasks to other employees and keeping track of milestones with your party planning etc. For example, meeting requests in Outlook distributed to all users within your firm can easily add items to everyone’s calendars to remind them of holiday milestones such as the Firm holiday party, holiday card deadlines, etc.

And then there are the holiday cards, you can combine the power of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word to efficiently address labels or envelopes for your card announcements or newsletters. See detailed instructions on one specific scenario for doing this.

In this case, a Public Contacts folder has been created in Microsoft Exchange to serve as your Firm’s holiday card mailing list. (For large organizations or firms each department or practice group may have its own public contacts folder.) Any employee within the firm can copy existing contacts into this list for inclusion in your mailing. This reduces the need for manual data entry and allows for a faster and more efficient collection of data. Microsoft Word will then be merged with this list in order to turn your contacts into data that can be printed directly onto envelopes or labels. The resulting merge document can also be saved for future uses. And as a reminder, the steps outlined may vary slightly depending on your version of Microsoft office, integrations, etc.