Office automation is a new concept with the development of computer science in recent years. Office Automation was originally named Office Automation in English, and abbreviated as OA. Office automation system generally refers to the automation of transactional business in the office, and office automation includes a wider meaning, including networked large-scale information processing systems. There is no unified definition of office automation, and all new technologies, machines and equipment used in traditional offices belong to the field of office automation. Usually, the office's business is mainly to deal with a large number of documents, draft documents, notices and various business texts, accept foreign documents for archiving, query departmental documents and foreign documents, and generate copies of documents. Therefore, it is the basic feature of office automation to make and store all kinds of files by computer word processing technology, copy and transmit files by other advanced equipment, such as photocopiers and fax machines, or transmit files by computer network technology. The office is the place where leaders of various industries make decisions. The leading organs make decisions and issue instructions. In addition to the communication in documents, the deeper work is actually the collection, storage, retrieval, processing and analysis of information, so as to make decisions and transmit the decisions as information to lower-level institutions or cooperative units or business-related units. OA (Office Automation) technology is divided into three different levels: the first level is limited to the application of auxiliary tools such as word processing, spreadsheets and databases on stand-alone or simple small LAN, which is generally called transactional office automation system. With the maturity of network communication technology, computer technology and database technology, OA in the world has entered a new level, in which the system has four new features: (1) integration. The integration of software, hardware and network products, the integration of people and systems, and the integration of single office system and social public information system constitute a "seamless integration" open system. (2) intelligence. Facing daily affairs, it helps people to complete intelligent work, such as Chinese character recognition, document understanding and deep processing, assisting decision-making, handling accidents, etc. (3) Multimedia. Including the comprehensive processing of numbers, characters, images, sounds and animations. (4) Using electronic data interchange. Through the data communication network, computers exchange and automatically process. This level includes information management OA system and decision-making OA system. In office OA, the most common applications are word processing, electronic typesetting, spreadsheet processing, file sending and receiving login, electronic document management, office schedule management, personnel management, financial statistics, report processing, personal database and so on. These commonly used office transaction processing applications can be made into application software packages, and different applications in the packages can call or share data with each other, thus improving the efficiency of office transaction processing. The office transaction processing software package should be universal in order to expand the application scope and improve its use value. In addition, a variety of OA subsystems can be used in office transaction processing, such as electronic publishing system, electronic document management system, intelligent Chinese retrieval system (such as full-text retrieval system), optical Chinese character recognition system, Chinese voice recognition system and so on. In public service industries, companies and other businesses, there are more and more cases in which computers are used instead of manual processing, such as booking tickets, ticketing systems, counter or window systems, bank savings business systems and so on. The function of transactional or operational OA system is to deal with daily office business, which directly faces office staff. In order to improve office efficiency, improve office quality and adapt to people's office habits, a good office operating environment should be provided. Information management OA system is the second level. With the increasing importance of information utilization, the demand for comprehensive information closely related to the business objectives of the office system is increasing. The information management office system is a comprehensive office information processing system that closely combines the transaction (or business) office system with the comprehensive information (database). The comprehensive database stores the information needed by the daily work of relevant units. For example, in government agencies, these comprehensive information include policies, decrees and regulations, as well as government information such as official documents and letters of higher-level governments and subordinate institutions; The comprehensive database of some public service institutions includes all the comprehensive information related to service projects; The comprehensive database of the company includes industrial and commercial regulations, business plans, market trends, supply and marketing business, inventory statistics, user information, etc. As a modern government agency, enterprise and institution, in order to optimize daily work and improve office efficiency and quality, this comprehensive database is needed for all departments of the unit to enjoy. The database is established on the basis of transaction-level OA system, which constitutes an information management OA system. Decision support OA system is the third level. It is an OA system based on information management. It uses the information provided by the comprehensive database system to build or select a decision-making digital model for the subject that needs decision-making, and combines internal and external conditions, and the computer executes the decision-making program and makes corresponding decisions. Transaction-level office automation system, information management office automation system and decision support office automation system are three functional levels in a generalized or complete office automation system. The relationship among the three functional levels can be realized by calling program modules and computer data network communication means. The meaning of integrated o a system is to integrate three levels of OA system into a complete OA system by using modern computer network communication system, which makes the circulation of office information more reasonable and reduces many unnecessary links of repeatedly inputting information, so as to improve the efficiency of the whole office system. The advantage of integrated and networked OA system is that it can not only make the office information operation within the unit more compact and effective, but also facilitate the information exchange with the outside world, make the scope of information exchange wider, establish the information exchange between remote offices more conveniently and quickly, and may be integrated into a world-wide information resource. Transaction-level OA system is called ordinary office automation system, and information management-level OA system and decision support-level OA system are called advanced office automation system. For example, the municipal government office, in essence, often collects all kinds of documents submitted by district and county governments and other institutions on a regular or irregular basis, and then stores them in different files in different categories, and submits them to relevant leaders for reading and processing, and then properly saves the audited documents for future reference. Leaders make decisions after studying various documents, and generally return processing instructions to subordinates in the form of documents. This process is a typical office process. In this process, the file itself is information, and its transmission is the process of information transmission. However, it should be noted that when analyzing and making decisions, leaders may have to look through, find a lot of relevant information and refer to research before making decisions. Therefore, the inquiry, analysis and decision-making of relevant materials also belong to the process of information processing. For example, the Dongcheng District Government of Beijing submitted a document requesting a certain area to build a public building and applied for approval. The document was passed to the relevant agencies of the municipal government. After seeing the documents, the relevant leaders in the city need to study the city's budget and many other reference materials before deciding whether to agree or disagree. And feedback the decision information to the Dongcheng District Government in the form of documents or notices. In this example, information is transmitted and processed in the form of files; Relevant laws and regulations consulted and referenced by leaders are also information and data information. Research determines the process, mainly the will of leaders. However, objective information analysis can make several alternative schemes. In this whole process, if computers are used to handle the files coming and going, it can be said that it is a preliminary degree of automation. If you can query all kinds of data by computer, this is further automation. If the computer automatically analyzes the information about this event and automatically provides several possible decisions for decision makers to adopt, it will be a deeper office automation with the concept of artificial intelligence. Further analyzing this example, if the municipal government microcomputer office system, the municipal government regulations information database system and the municipal government financial management system are an integrated and unified system, and the computer automatically retrieves the agency information from the related systems, this system is a higher level integration of office automation. In addition, if the municipal government office system and the district government office system are an integrated computer network system, which can transmit information and handle business remotely through the network, then this is a further networked office automation system. Therefore, the office automation system itself is a multi-level system. At all levels, it can be said that some office automation services have been realized. Starting from the most elementary automation, more advanced automation systems with different technologies are gradually formed. Chinese experts put forward the definition of office automation at the first national office automation planning seminar: using advanced science and technology, some office business activities are materialized in various modern office equipment other than people, and people and technical equipment constitute a man-machine information processing system serving a certain office business purpose. People are the first element of the system, that is, the main element of the office is the staff, including all kinds of people. In addition to the role of traditional offices, there are also some professional technicians who manage equipment, such as computer engineers and other equipment maintenance personnel. Technical equipment and computers are another factor. There are various machines in the equipment, such as computers, photocopiers, templates, telephones, fax machines, network equipment, CDs and so on. These devices are collectively called hardware devices or hardware. And all kinds of information equipment also need software to manage the equipment, such as computer operating system, network operating system, word processing software, special work program software and so on. , which will be introduced in detail in other chapters. Obviously, the man-machine system, man and machine of office automation are indispensable. In terms of equipment, hardware and necessary software are needed. We can also think that office automation system is a system for human beings to process information and a new concept after human beings enter the information age.