It’s become a fact of modern office life that we all need to deal with a lot of information every day; a lot of “knowledge worker” jobs have evolved towards being able to acquire, process and make use of that information as quickly and efficiently as possible.

In principle that’s fine. There are huge amounts of technology ready and waiting to serve up the information to us in a way that allows us to be productive and to concentrate on those parts of the process that require human judgement. In practice, however, the multiplicity of document formats from which the information must be gleaned, and a need to combine data from multiple documents together, can make the principle seem like an unattainable utopian vision.

Let’s look at the costs of that gap between principle and practice, especially those caused by the need to deal with a multitude of different tools to process a multitude of document formats:

Frustration, low morale and low productivity

When was the last time that a simple copy and paste from one document into another just worked for you? Or even when adding slides from one PowerPoint deck into another didn’t re-flow text in a way that damaged diagrams or overflowed a page? How much time do you spend dealing with this kind of problem every day? Now factor in the extra time that breaking your concentration on the job you should really be thinking about is costing you.

Extra training and support

Whenever there’s a problem causing frustration for the users of an application or technology, there’s also an extra cost for training and/or the help-desk. Does your help-desk have to answer much the same question time and time again?

Application overload

If users need to be provided with a variety of different software to handle different document formats, then the total cost is likely to be quite high — much higher than if a single tool could be used. And it also increases the training and help-desk costs if multiple applications must be supported.

Liability to accidents

If you’re reading documents with a complete editing program (such as reading a Word file with Microsoft Word) then it’s very easy to accidentally change the original file that could have some serious implications in today’s regulatory frameworks. Even if your content management system flags the file as changed, the amended file could be used in situations where the original was required.

Locked-in data

In most document workflows you’ll start by creating files in authoring formats (Word, PowerPoint or Excel for example), and later convert them to distribution formats (such as PDf or XPs) to ensure that all recipients see them in exactly the same way. Occasionally, however, you’ll find that you need to edit a document... and that the only version you have of it is in PDf or XPs so you can’t make more than very minor edits without virtually re-creating the document from scratch.

Aggregation aggravation

There are many occasions when pages from a variety of sources must be aggregated together into a single document. Some might be Excel spreadsheets, or diagrams drawn in PowerPoint that need to be inserted into Word documents and then merged with boilerplate legal pages in PDf or images in JPEG. While it’s possible to do that, it usually requires multiple applications and is far from easy or fast.

So that’s the reality of most offices today. But what if there were a single tool that could let you read most of the document formats that you use every day? What if that tool could convert between those formats? And what if it provided an easy way to construct aggregated documents from a variety of sources, even if they were in different formats, just by dragging and dropping pages in an intuitive way?

Just think of how much more productive everyone could be, and how much money and effort could be saved across your organization.

gDoc Fusion and Global Graphics

gDoc Fusion is a quick and easy to use desktop software application that allows multiple incompatible files to be merged into a single document through a simple drag and drop action. It enables users to create a summary, report or other document that combines spreadsheets, slides, images, text, PDFs and more than 200 other types of document. Users simply drag files into gDoc Fusion, pick the pages they want and press save — no extra formatting or conversion is required.

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