The Role of Applications: A Reflection

In an office environment, there have been many wants and needs to boost productivity over the years. In the early days, physical inventions such as staplers and typewriters were some of the most significant ways to increase throughput by helping with writing and organization. With the advent of the modern personal computer, we often see more virtual inventions, such as applications designed to help improve the productivity of the office. Although there are alternatives, the Microsoft 365 suite provides three huge tools to help catalyze productivity: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each application has its specific intended uses and offers numerous benefits over the less electronic or manual versions of performing those tasks.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a staple word-processing application in office environments. Word was invented in the 1980s as Microsoft attempted to enter the word-processing market (Dziak, 2023c). The application's intended use cases often revolve around creating and editing documents such as memos, flyers, papers, or any other document that can be translated into a physical paper copy. Word offers a robust set of features compared to the typewriter; one can change the font size, spacing, alignment, font style, and many others with a simple button click. Spellchecking features and the ability to erase a character without reaching for the correction fluid (otherwise known as whiteout) significantly reduced the time it takes to create a document. Word is excellent at document creation and editing but still struggles to perform seemingly simple tasks; inserting an image is easy, but it can be a struggle to get images to be perfectly set in a document as you are iterating on it.

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel, on the other hand, is a spreadsheet and data entry application designed to help perform calculations on related data. Excel did not invent digitized spreadsheets, which were used as early as the 1960s (Dziak, 2023a). However, Excel significantly improved the ease with which data could be entered and manipulated in a spreadsheet. Excel offers utilities such as macros, autofill for cells based on their column/row configuration, automatic formatting, validation for cells, the creation of graphs, sorting, and more. One frustrating aspect of Excel is its overuse as a substitute for a proper database. Many organizations rely on manual spreadsheet updates for significant business needs, which can introduce errors and issues that using a relational database could help avoid.

Microsoft PowerPoint

Next, Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation creation and editing software designed to help make presenting a much simpler task. Before the advent of PowerPoint, there was a noticeable lack of software designed to aid presentations (Dziak, 2023a). Adding styles, images, text, animations, videos, and sounds to a presentation is easy with PowerPoint. In a simple sentence, PowerPoint helps make presentations more memorable and entertaining for the audience when utilized correctly. One disadvantage of PowerPoint is that it can distract away from the people presenting the information when misused. Too many animations and sounds can detract from meaningful points the speaker or speakers are attempting to communicate.

Microsoft Access

Finally, Microsoft Access is a database management system that uses a relational database engine and a familiar styled graphical user interface to help users see the connections between tables and records. The application offers features such as data entry forms, specialized queries, report definitions, and integrates with other Microsoft products such as Excel and Word. The main disadvantage of using Access is that most traditional end users do not fully understand the power of using the product. Users tend to prefer Excel as it has fewer rules and restrictions around creating and altering data in cells.

Which Was Best for This Journal?

When creating the journal entries for the "A Day in My Life" assignment, I found the best application was definitively Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word allowed me to create tables, bulleted lists, paragraphs, or any other number of variations to display the data. Because I was not limited to a few points, I could be much more descriptive than in Excel or PowerPoint. However, if I were to calculate percentages of time allotted to a task over a few days, keeping track of those stats would be easier to accomplish in Excel. If I have to explain my day to hundreds of people who may be interested in my workday, PowerPoint is the best option. Finally, if I wanted a comprehensive database of my daily activities, such as tables to store locations, times, or my mood while performing a task, and to relate them all to myself, Microsoft Access would be the preferred application.

Microsoft 365 Logo (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Conclusion

Every Microsoft 365 application developed has a specific niche use case, and some are broader than others. Word provides the ability to add tables to your document. Does that make it the best table editor in the Microsoft 365 suite? No, Excel provides much better functionality for table editing than Word. Just because you can relate two spreadsheets to each other in Excel does not make it a better database tool than Access. Writing an essay in PowerPoint would be foolish; that is not the intended use case for presentation software. Knowing the best uses of each tool is necessary to ensure you are being the most productive you can be.

References

Dziak, M. (2023a). Microsoft Excel. In Salem Press Encyclopedia of Science. EBSCOhost; Research Starters. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=ers&AN=87322937&site=edslive&scope=site&custid=s8856897

Dziak, M. (2023b). Microsoft PowerPoint. In Salem Press Encyclopedia of Science. EBSCOhost; Research Starters. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=ers&AN=87322968&site=edslive&scope=site&custid=s8856897

Dziak, M. (2023c). Microsoft Word. In Salem Press Encyclopedia of Science. EBSCOhost; Research Starters. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=ers&AN=87322982&site=edslive&scope=site&custid=s8856897

Vahid, F., Lysecky, S., Wheatland, N., & Siu, R. (2019). TEC 101: Fundamentals of Information Technology & Literacy (8th ed.). zyBooks. https://learn.zybooks.com/zybook/TEC101:_Fundamentals_of_Information_Technology_&_Literacy_(TED2412A) (Original work published 2015)