How to Give your Small Business a Professional Makeover

While the vast majority of businesses in the UK are small businesses, it is the larger businesses that attract most of the customers and make most of the strategic partnerships. The reason that many small businesses don't attract the customers and partners they hope for is because their presentation lacks the confidence and professionalism of a more serious competitor. The good news is that just about everything you need to give your business a professional makeover can be found in the software you already own; it only takes Microsoft Office training to unlock the potential.

Microsoft Office training explains much more than just the basics of Word, Excel, and Outlook. The Office suite of products is an extremely robust set of tools that gives even the smallest businesses the ability to create web sites, proposals, project plans, sales presentations -and much more- that have a professional look, like big business material. The full range of programs covered in Microsoft Office training includes Visio, Front Page, Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, Project, and PowerPoint. If you're not utilizing all of these programs to the fullest extent, a few weeks of Microsoft Office training can start you on the path of completely rebuilding your professional image.

Building a Professional Website

There's no need for you to spend thousands of dollars on a professional looking website or make do with a bland template site when you can build your own with Microsoft Front Page. An important piece of Microsoft Office training, Front Page training provides you with everything you need to know to build and update a website.

Just having a website isn't enough to stay competitive on the web today. In order to achieve a site that ranks high in search engine results, the content on the site must be updated regularly and in order to gain customer interest, that content must be fresh and relevant. With this piece of Microsoft Office training, growing your website can be a simple part of your daily or weekly tasks.

Winning Big Contracts

In order to win the important contracts or receive serious funding, it's essential that your business documents be detailed, thorough, and ultra-professional. Many business owners feel hindered by these documents and believe that if they could just pitch the proposal in person they could convey the message more clearly. Through Microsoft Office training, you'll find plenty of ways to step out from behind the two dimensional words of a basic Word document and learn to incorporate visual imagery created with Visio or Excel into your proposals and business plans.

Powerpoint presentations are another way you can present big ideas as a stand alone presentation or as an enhancement to an in-person presentation. Through Microsoft Office training, you'll quickly learn what many of your competitors don't know: that Powerpoint is capable of much more than just basic slideshows laden with gimmicky clipart. With Powerpoint you can embed video and audio files, import high quality imagery, incorporate advanced special effects, and more for a highly professional business presentation.

Success in business greatly hinges on your ability to exude confidence and professionalism. While most of your small business competitors are making due with the knowledge they have to create their business image, through Microsoft Office training your team can create an image that rivals that of even your biggest competitor.