Office Softwares

Computers could be considered as the biggest invention of the 20th century. This Technology Era has removed so many obstacles and pushed boundaries much farther. You can love it or hate it, but they have invaded our present and would continue to expand in the future. From simple computing operations to robotic science, much of mankind’s progress till date could be attributed to computers and its related technologies. The functionalities of the computers have grown leaps and bounds and we are discovering new necessities every passing day. This machine has a great impact in advancements of every field that we cared to venture upon. Several tasks that were considered as uphill and mundane before are reduced to a matter of just-a-few-clicks now. One such development that made this dream possible for human beings is the productivity software.

(Pic: spreadsheet-1-150x150)

The Productivity software, often called as Office Suite, is an application program that is programmed to make operations related to creating and processing of information much easier. We can now manage huge amount of data and perform a variety of operations in just a few seconds. With many million downloads a day and so many office programs in the market, there is no dearth in the availability of options. Let us dive deeper and know more about office software’s functions and how it has managed to make our lives easier.

The multi-faceted program

Office Suites can perform an array of operations, each with many dimensions, thus providing you all the solutions for your office needs. A few programs such as Word Processors, Spreadsheets and Presentation creators are used widely than other programs like mailer, database software, note-takers, project management software etc. These programs have cross-linking and sharing capabilities which make them so powerful and efficient.

The Word Processor

This is a program such as Microsoft Word, iWork Pages, Google Docs etc. that lets you create a document with pictures, hyperlinks and graphics. It offers you full freedom to customize the layout, fonts, size etc.; helps you to correct the grammar and spelling mistakes in the documents; provides you with suggestions from dictionary and thesaurus and allows you to save in many formats to run across many platforms. Advanced word processors help multiple users to edit a single document at the same time, help to create table of contents, provide version control for a document and so on. The Word Processors are widely used by authors, editors, copy writers, and students for their everyday works.

The Spreadsheet

This is intelligent software that typically has many sheets with thousands of rows and columns. The main purpose of a spreadsheet is to allow a user to record and analyze data in a tabular format. These spreadsheets have made accounting and other calculations easier with their built-in formulae. All you have to do is enter data, choose a row for your answer and select the formula that you want to apply. Advanced spreadsheets allow users to enter their own formulae to scale its functions. We can also compare the data entered and produce an analysis report with a variety of graphs and charts. A spreadsheet is capable of much more functionalities that make it one of the best tools for an organization. This software is especially useful for data analysts and accountants. Examples of spreadsheets are

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and iWork Numbers etc.

Presentation programs are designed to project your thoughts in a more intuitive and elegant way. This

program has built-in layouts for slides that you can fill with the information you intend to present with

pictures, graphs and animations. This software is very useful to create an effective visual aid for the

students to learn. For businesses, this tool has become a necessity during meetings and brain-storming

sessions. The presentations can be also be loaded with audio clippings and flash animations. When your

presentation is equipped with interactive integrated hardware elements, you can project your information

across many geographic locations.

The other products of productivity suites like email clients, desktop publishing software and personal

information managers etc. are used by specific set of people for their business or academic requirements.

The mailer software is used for sending and receiving of emails – from small groups to big enterprises.

Note-taking programs are used to create and maintain notes from various sources. It also allows editing,

analyzing and sharing of the notes. There are so much more programs that are tailored for personal use,

thanks to the open source network.

The Audience

These office programs are particularly beneficial for the so-called “Knowledge Workers”. The knowledge

workers can be students, doctors, engineers, data analysts, inventors or coders. This group consists of

people from many streams of life whose day-to-day work involves processing of information. These

programs evolve in order to meet the new challenges that they are exposed to everyday, thereby reducing

time and increasing the efficiency. They need data and they need it in the way they can easily understand

and process. These office suites are designed with them as the target beneficiaries.

Another group of users are the businessmen. They need information everyday to introspect and grow. In

the age where information is considered to be the wealth, no wonder they consider these programs as

God-sent. They use many office programs such as spreadsheets, presentation, note-taker etc. The

dynamic nature of their industries goes well with the dynamic capabilities of these applications.

The Future

With the technology moving towards smaller and more compact models, smart phones and tablets have

almost replaced the computers. Subsequently, these application programs are designed to work

effortlessly in all these platforms. With many new service providers entering the market every day, the

necessity to scale and fit has become inevitable for every technology. Another major enhancement that

has been recently added to all these programs is the cloud-share capability for storing and sharing of

information on the go. While we cannot accurately predict the next big thing in this industry, we can still

say that we are equipped with technologies that can evolve, fit and work efficiently in any given scenario.

Office software packages

Not so long ago people used pens and papers to create documents; manually calculated and tallied the

expenditure statements; drew meticulously in OHP sheets for presentations? The development and

popularity of office productivity programs has completely revolutionized the way offices function and has

almost made the methodologies adopted a couple of decades back obsolete. The multi-dimensional

functionalities of these application programs have made them a necessity for every kind of industry.

From the day of there inception as a tool for office administration, these programs have been refined,

restructured and written over and over again to meet the growing demands. Probably, Microsoft’s office

has been the winner by and large; but it hasn’t stopped its competitors from coming up with programs that

are equal and in some cases superior in functionality. Here we will discuss the four main players in the

market by mentioning their top features and the ways in which one is more suitable than the others.

1-Office:

(Pic: MS-Office-150x150)

Microsoft Office is the most popular productivity suite with over 500 million users worldwide. It is

compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems. The Office 365 service is the non-PC, cloud

based version of Office and it allows you to operate the application program in phones, tablets and iPads.

The most used programs in the Office’s arsenal are Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The abundant

formatting options in Word, alluring designs in PowerPoint and the robust functionalities of Excel has

definitely made office operations much easier.

However, this closed-source package has certain limitations like poor support for importing many graphics

formats, layout problems in Word, lack of support for spreadsheet comparison, no auto-completion in

Excel and the absence of work-around for XHTML or HTML conversion in PowerPoint, to name a few.

Also, this application program is not free. Although The complete Microsoft Office Package is offered at a

discount for student edition the full priced commercial edition is outside many peoples budget. Office

365’s package offers a monthly or yearly subscription. Also, you need a subscription to use Office 365 in

Android and iOS devices.

Weighing up the functionality and the shortcomings, Microsoft’s office is clearly best suited for offices,

commercial enterprises and schools that require high-level functionality and want to seamlessly manage

their works across mobiles, PCs and tablets.

2-iWork: (Pic: iWork)

iWork is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s office. It is an Apple proprietary product that is built to run only in

MAC operating system. iWork boasts of providing an intuitive user interface that is as simple as it can get.

The easier menu and formatting options are a boon for people who have just started to learn about these

programs. Pages is a much cleaner and simpler Word Processor program that has all the layouts and

formatting options required to create and maintain documents. The MS Excel equivalent of iWork is

Numbers which has similar functionality to Excel put together with complete control over the fonts and

design used. Keynote is the presentation program of iWork that possesses rich designs, better animations

and audio-video integration. The biggest advantage of them all is it is free for people owning a MAC

device.

The main problem while operating in iWork is the lack of compatibility of the file types. It is difficult to open

or save an Office document in iWorks without importing or exporting certain functions. Unfortunately, this

is as difficult as it sounds. There is this danger of a few components of the original documents disapearing

during this transition. Because iWork has a smaller ecosystem as compared to Office, this might be a big

problem in the longer run.

pages As mentioned earlier, iWork does everything that Office does with much more clarity and simplicity.

If you are a MAC user and your needs are limited to only medium range of functionality then iWork could

be the choice for you.

3-Google Docs:

(Pic: Google-Docs)

Google came with an application suite solution known as Google Drive that lets you create and manage

your works online. Google Drive is a whole package with individual apps – Docs for word processing,

Sheets for spreadsheet functionality and Slides for presentations. All these applications run together in the

Google Drive ecosystem. The biggest advantage of this package is all that you need is a Google account

to access all these applications. It is free, it is online and it can be operated from almost anywhere. The

capabilities of Docs, Sheets and slides for various operations are as competent as iWorks or Office but

with limited sophistication. The sharing option allows you to share your documents or spreadsheets

anywhere across the globe almost instantaneously. Google Drive also provides other features like form

tool that allows you to build an online survey that stores results in a spreadsheet, create PDFs, fax

documents etc.

But one major aspect that we need to worry about working in Google Drive is that you should be online, at

least for creating a new document. While there are options available to edit your works offline, you would

still need an internet connection for synchronization. So this would be a disadvantage when all you have

is a stand-alone PC. So Google Drive is best suited when you want the information to be processed

immediately and to be shared on the fly.

4-LibreOffice:

(Pic: Libre-Office)

Libre Office is a free and open-source application program. It is the forked version of OpenOffice with

programs to cover all the functionality of Microsoft Office. Libre Office is available in over 110 languages

and is slowly gaining popularity. Being an open-source program, this is considered as one of most

sophisticated office suites available. It is available across Windows, Mac and Linux platforms and it has

the capability to run on USB flash disks without any installation. The word processor in Libre is known as

Writer; spreadsheet tool is known as Calc and the presentation tool is Impress. The functionality of these tools are akin to that of its Microsoft or Apple equivalents and in some cases, even better.

Being built in an open source environment has its short-comings. The presentation app has only a few

themes and the customizable tool bars doesn’t adjust to your most-frequented options like it does in MS

office. Libre office is suitable for tech-savvy people who strongly believe in the open source system.