All of the applications found in Office (and its competition) record information very differently. In a class recently, Our teacher had us learn this point by using each Office application to record the same information. It was a great exercise because, by using the same info--in this case the things you did in one day--each application brought out different details.
In writing a word document, I was able to get very personal with descriptive details. I could explain small notes that were important to me and how I felt at the time. Word was also pretty useful for formatting. I could create subheadings with different font styles and sizes. I could arrange events with lists and describe it all with words. Word is the widely used of all these applications. It is best used for papers, essays, books, blogs, and anything else based in text. Word itself falls a bit short with magazine and infographics, even though it does have some basic graphic capabilities. It is much stronger in the world of text.
In using Excel, I was able to see much more detailed insights. In some ways, I think of it as the opposite of PowerPoint, being more number-driven. It makes sense with the fact that it uses spreadsheet. Spreadsheet applications use numbers and data with tables, and it can demonstrate them using graphs. It uses formulas to calculate the data (Vahid & Lysecky, 2017, Sect. 5.2) In using formulas, I can see averages and totals. The sorting feature and filters were something that I had never used before. I used filters after failing to find a suitable (free) Mac alternative to Access. I liked the function of filters so much that I immediately thought of ways it could have been helpful in the past. I will remember to use it more in the future.
PowerPoint is probably the most fun for creative-oriented personalities like me. It is a very visual form of communicating, and animations help to add interest and surprises. I think PowerPoint is left lacking without s presenter speaking through the presentation. With photos, it makes PowerPoint the best for showing the information to a group of people unfamiliar with my life or family. I find that to be its strongest feature. PowerPoint is most useful for speeches and presentations in which a group of people are being shown information.
With Access, I ran into a major problem. Office 365 does not include a MacOS compatible version of Access. It would have been a separate $80 to purchase. Any alternatives I tried such as OpenOffice, Quickbase, and SQL were much more complicated than Access appeared in the instructions. They were so much more that I couldn’t even filter my list. I actually found some success with Wunderlist, but it had no export function as a todo list manager. In the end, I learned that my Macbook might not be the best thing for running industry standard project management and database applications. Both MS Project and now MS Access have had this problem. If I had the money for a copy of Windows 10 and Parallels, I would do that next time and just work within Windows.
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