How to Set up Your Home Office

In this lugubrious economic outlook and the financial meltdown of the credit crunch in the US, many people are turning to work from home. They may be retrenched or got the boot from their bosses, thus making working from home as an alternative solution to earn an income month after month. And setting up your home office is hassle free if you know how. All you need is to buy an affordable computer that is relatively fast - not too slow so that you don't have to keep waiting each time you execute an application to work on. You need to use at least a Pentium computer that is faster than its predecessors. You also need to apply for a broadband internet connection, hopefully with a fixed rate per month for unlimited connectivity. This way, you will save cost in the long run in case you need to use the internet for many hours each day. If you are billed by the hour, then you may have to spend more than you can earn from your home office. Avoid internet billing by the hour so that you can have the flexibility to work long hours and be connected for unlimited time.

Besides a reasonably fast computer and an internet connection which are basic must-haves for a home office, you may want to consider investing in a printer and a fax machine. The printer is useful in case you need to print out work invoices on hard copy for your clients or to prepare a computer profile detailing your skills and services. The fax machine comes in handy if your client does not have internet access but needs to send out work tenders or enquiries. Hence the printer is useful in this area as you could type out and print your work schedule or quotation and fax over to your potential client. By having both a printer and fax machine, you ensure that you can reach out to all the different customers equipped with different technologies to communicate effectively.

Other than the said office equipment above, if you have the financial means, it might be good to buy a scanner and a digital camera. A scanner allows you to scan and copy printed materials like text and photos into the computer. It will digitize the information on printed hard copies like books, company profiles, etc and save them into the computer for further editing. This is pertinent when you are offering web designing services to add photos and information to the client's web site. A digital camera is useful if you work as a photographer or blogger where you need to send many digital photos to the blogs or websites. A blog or online journal that has high traffic and many visitors tend to have many attractive photos of the moment to spruce up blog posts. A picture is worth a thousand words as we all know. With a digital camera, you can then download the photos to your computer for further edits using applications like PhotoShop to touch up and resize your photos for faster upload to the internet.

After equipping your home office with a computer, internet, printer, scanner and a digital camera according to your affordability, you and now ready to buy some basic computer applications like Microsoft Office with Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Frontpage to work on. You might also want to get Adobe Photoshop to edit photos from the digital camera and invest in PDF Converter to convert your Microsoft Word quotations into PDF format for smaller file and faster upload besides its uneditable format so that the client cannot change any contents in your quotation. Microsoft Excel is useful is you need to tabulate your income from the various sources by entering a Formula to the cells in the worksheet. Microsoft Frontpage is for creating web pages on the fly with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for easy modification of each web page. Lastly, if you know nuts about using a computer, then sign up for a basic computer application course in your area to familiarise yourself with the various software. You need to spend a little money in order to earn more money.