IT Productivity through Software Usage - Essay Example

IT PRODUCTIVITY THROUGH SOFTWARE USAGE Student Name: Student P number: Module: Module code: Submission deadline: Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 2 Introduction 3 Products 3 Conclusion 6 Reference 8 Introduction Business organizations have greatly adopted the used of office based application software. Application packages such as MS office are deemed the model of modern organizations. MS office is a commercialized collection of office suites applications service and services. They are applications for only Mac OS X and Microsoft windows operating systems only. The series of MS office was introduced in the year 1989 and in only contained MS office, MS excel and MS PowerPoint. MS office has gradually changed and additional functionalities added and improved to the current MS office 2010 which offers a wide range of features unlike its predecessors. Currently MS office 2010 is advanced to a level that it places Office as line of business development platform. MS office has a both robust and flexible manner to deliver quality works be it at home, office or school. Creation of exceptional quality presentations and reports from MS office applications, with additional in built tools that make capturing of ideas in a creative way. The three major applications within the MS office collection suite are MS PowerPoint, MS excel and MS word. Products Microsoft word: it’s a word processing application for MS office. In previous time it was deemed the main application program in the MS office suite. MS word application had DOC format as its proprietor. This was until Microsoft unveiled the new Microsoft Office Format (.DOCX) based on the XML platform. Shelly & Nuscher (2011) observes how MS word has additional variants for other platforms as, Mac OS X and the Windows mobile platform. MS word has a wide range of features that basically entail the edition of text. Unlike other text editors, MS word has managed to outstand and dominate the market share thanks to its usability. Creation of visual compelling documents has been made easier thanks to MS office. Usability from the GUI (graphical user interface) enables clients and users of the product to have little effort of understanding the product when they migrate from one MS word version to another. In contrast, all upgrades of MS office I have had have made me appreciate and anticipate forth coming version of the product. The addition of impressive formats of textual effects such as, gradient fills, word art, and even reflection to texts is not only easy but appealing. The extent to which one can customize the effects to their satisfaction is amazing. Writing of structured documents is easy with the inbuilt grammatical features. Manipulation of font color, font type, case change of text and alignment of text is incredible. All this are just a click of a button from the ‘home panel/ribbon’. Lengthy documents can be managed by the reference tab. This tab offers functionality such as; table of contents with an update capability. Addition of endnotes and footnotes to documents is another functionality that one can utilize. Upon writing of research work, one can list the sources they intend to use and MS word will store them throughout their work. When inserting citations to a word document, one just selects the source to cite. After placing the cursor where the in-text citation or the reference is to be placed and clicking either the ‘insert citation’ or the ‘bibliography’ button respectively the document will be cited where necessary. MS word also parks mailing features and can be synced with MS outlook application to configure, customize and send mails. Document reviews from use of the inbuilt spell checker, online language translation and word count feature improves quality of documents produced by MS word. MS PowerPoint: It’s a presentation application program. The main supported platforms for MS PowerPoint are still Mac and Windows. Basically PowerPoint is used in the creation of slide shows. PowerPoint was initially dubbed presenter and was developed by Macintosh before Microsoft adapted its concept. PowerPoint contains slides/pages that one edits or writes on. The analogy “slide” comes from the fact that presentations are projected in a slide form order one after the other. Initially PowerPoint comes with design templates that one can pick from when designing a presentation. One can also customize their own templates by importing additional multimedia to suite their interests. The orientation of the slides can also be altered from landscape to portrait and verse versa. PowerPoint also parks features form MS word that are also found on most MS office application with text editor capabilities. These features are like; basic shapes drawing, bulleting text, alteration of font type, font size and color. Spell checking, word count are also incorporated within the application all to ease the work of the user. Multimedia content such as music or videos can also be embedded in presentation. Transitions of slides upon presentation are also customizable to suit any presentation. Depending on the presenter and the formality of the presentation one can pick animated transitions with sound effects between transitions. Mouse click events can also be configured to trigger transitions of slides during presentations. Ultimately the use of PowerPoint in presentation is reliable and fun. The extent, to which the application incorporates usability, with the ease of using PowerPoint to create presentations, tends to keep MS office users loyal to their products. MS Excel: It’s a spreadsheet application from the MS office. It features pivot tables, calculations, a macro programing language (Visual Basic) and graphing tools. Earlier before the year 1995, the Lotus 1-2-3 was dominant in the field of spreadsheet application. MS excel however took over and has been dominant since then. Shelly & Nuscher (2011) states how MS excel has all the features one can look for in a spreadsheet application. The spreadsheet adapts a cell form manner of grid in representing data. Alphabetically ‘numbered’ columns and numerically numbered cells fill the grid. They are practically endless and when one completely exhausts a sheet, they can move on to yet another sheet. The cell grid structure basically eases the burden of arranging arithmetic data within a spreadsheet. MS Excel has a collection of numerical and statistical functions alongside to answer or meet any financial, engineering or statistical wants and needs. Additional statistical representation of data is also available in this application software. Display or translation of data into; histograms, line graphs and pie charts with limited three or two dimensional effects is available. Manipulation and partitioning of data in an effort to view its dependencies on numerous factors from different point of view is also possible. This is best achieved by utilization of MS excel scenario manager and or pivot tables. Lastly MS excel parks programing aspects for application on the visual basic platform. This allows practical users to adapts or utilize the eclectic collection of numerical procedures when faced with mathematical physics equations based on deferential equations. An interactive feature that enables user interface to encapsulate and hide the spreadsheet from their counterparts deems the spreadsheet application as being independent or as a (DSS) decision support system. Conclusion Microsoft office is application software that incorporates many independent but co-related applications. The applications range from the mention above; MS office, MS PowerPoint and MS excel to: MS publisher, MS outlook MS OneNote, MS SharePoint Workspace and MS InfoPath. This is to mention but a few and they all table a wide range of office functional requirements that any organization can utilize to their desired capacity. Scalability, reliability, manageability, usability and security put MS office at the top of office related application package. Dominance of the Microsoft windows OS promotes the usage of MS related software thus ensuring the ever ending use of MS office in our day to day lives. Shelly & Nuscher (2011) indicates that an additional feature to the MS office suite is the capability to accommodate third party companies. This is achieved form the use or rather adaptation of additional plug-ins (add-ins) to the raw MS office to suit their needs for application software. This practice extends the capabilities of MS office by the addition of custom and supplementary commands and dedicated features. Despite if one is an individual or an organization, considering they are working their business or rather personal projects, MS office makes all the work easier. It ensures that what u wand or need is readily available and the end result is not only more appealing but of better quality always. I am an MS office user and grateful for all the tasks I have managed thanks to the application software. I believe I will continue using this application on the long future as well. Reference SHELLY, G. B., & NUSCHER, D. (2011). Microsoft Office 2010 introductory workbook. Boston, Course Technology Read More