Software: Mac Automator a No-Brainer for Small Biz

Say -- again for argument's sake -- you are fortunate enough to have good clients who hire you over and over. And each client has certain delivery specs -- in my case, how this print story is laid out for delivery.

Using the average office productivity suite, about the most efficient thing you can do to save time on every job -- and make more money -- is to do things like create a style sheet, save it as a master template and then manually import modifications such as job name, job number, date and other data. It usually takes a minute or two to set up a file each time. Not horrendous, but not cutting-edge efficient either.

Automator lets me combine all those steps -- opening the file and entering much of the information, saving the file, putting that file in the right directory -- into just a few simple clicks. So once I made an Automator script that created this TheStreet.com file, I did not need to hunt down the template on my computer to get started and then enter my information in that template.

For this job, and every job for this company from now on, when I start, all I must do is run an Automator script. And poof! I have the properly named file in the proper directory. And what was once 20 clicks is now two.

See the difference? Automator does all the heavy repetitive entering of similar bits of text, picking my way through my file directory and creating file names. I just have to enter the job's particulars and Automator does the rest.