A Day In The Life - Applications

Hey Everyone

While starting this journey, I wanted to make sure that I had a proper foundation of the most basic forms of software, starting with the most common Microsoft applications. While establishing the basic of these applications, I wanted to document a day in my life so that I could better determine what each application was best used for. When it came to the Word application, I essentially just typed up and wrote about a typical day in my life while utilizing the fonts, sizing, color, and paragraphing functions. While documenting the day in my life with Excel, I wanted to incorporate more mathematical features and formulas in order to better layout the amount of time used in a day on common tasks. Lastly, I wanted to visualize what my typical day looks like by using the PowerPoint Presentation application. PowerPoint allowed me various features that could help me to upload images and customize each individual slide with animations and transitions. This blog post will mostly dive into each feature that these applications have to offer and provide some insight into what these applications may be best utilized for.

With word processor functions including formatting texts and spreadsheets having a primary function of representing data, it is important to review some of the functions that presentations may have. Presentation apps are computer applications, just like word processors, except the primary function of this application is to create a slideshow of texts and images (ZYBOOK). Presentation apps are often used to provide visualized information and the most common apps include PowerPoint and Google slides. Presentation apps have a wide variety of functions such as color palettes, themes, fonts, text sizing, and animations are all able to be added and adjusted to fit the presentation being created. Lastly, database applications are a collection of data organized to retrieve information efficiently (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). There are several different kinds of database applications some of which could include multidimensional databases, object-oriented databases, and relational databases. Each application is often characterized by the method data is organized (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). Though all of the applications mentioned above have similar functions that can be used, the functions in which they are used can vastly differ depending upon the application being used. 

The primary functions of a word processor often include formatting texts in a computer application, typically done in word processors such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). Some of the most common functions used in a word processor can include changing sizes, fonts, and colors of texts. Adjusting spacing, margins, indentions, and layouts can also be done in these computer applications. Meanwhile, spreadsheet applications typically have the primary function of representing data with texts and numbers. Spreadsheet applications are able to process formulas in order to output data from what is entered into different cells, columns, and rows and can be an extremely useful tool when needing to present graphs, charts, or to calculate data (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019)

The advantage of using word processors is that mistakes are easily noticed due to spell checks and that the layout of information is entirely up to the user. The disadvantage of using word processors is the data corruption that can sometimes happen to saved files, meaning that data from a word processor could be lost (Dally, 2013). On that same note, the advantages of using spreadsheet applications include the ability to easily calculate mathematical equations and organize the output data into various graphs and charts. The disadvantages of using spreadsheet applications include the lack of knowledge an individual has on this application can determine how much that user can do with their spreadsheet. Spreadsheet applications can have a wide variety of differing equations and formulas which can be tricky to navigate and learn (Natter, 2019).

Similarly, the advantages of using presentation applications consist of being able to save presentations as PDF files, which can minimize their size and make uploading these presentations much easier. However, a con of using presentation applications is that presentation slides require much more effort than other applications to represent the same data. Often in presentation applications, images, themes, and animations are used to create visually appealing ways of sharing data. Whereas other applications just require the data to be typed and entered into cells (TheKnowledgeAcademy, n.d.).

References:

TheKnowledgeAcademy. (n.d.). Advantages and Disadvantages of Presentation: Learn quickly. https://www.theknowledgeacademy.com/blog/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-presentation/

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.