Fourteen chapters cover the following essential topics:
• The Online Office
• Professional Career Development
• Human Relations
• Telecommunications
• Mail Processing
• Document Creation
• Business Style Guide
• Business English
• Correspondence
• Information Management
• Meetings and Conferences
• International and Domestic Travel
• Accounting
• Business Law

The office as we know it—a place where business is handled—has existed for a little more than a century. However, the important technologies that power today's office didn't exist in 1900. The term online office didn't exist then either and wouldn't be coined until many decades later.

The technology that has contributed the most to productivity in modern business is, indisputably, the computer. Not only has it revolutionized the way that businesses operate, but it has also propelled the evolution of advanced technologies such as computer voice recognition. Nevertheless, the online office, like its predecessor, is still a place where information is received, processed, transmitted, and stored.

For the office professional, the computer has dramatically changed the way that work is performed. For example, as executives began to use their own desktop, notebook, and laptop computers for e-mail and other communications, their assistants had more time to handle additional administrative and supervisory duties.

Although the proliferation of PCs in business is of relatively recent origin, the computer itself is not a recent phenomenon. A massive twentieth-century forerunner, the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), was built in the 1940s. The personal computer (PC), however, didn't make an appearance until the 1980s, and it deserves most of the credit for revolutionizing office practices and procedures, with a computer on every desk.