Today’s blog is on the topic of Microsoft Office
suites. Enjoy!
I have used MS Office in various guises and different settings for around 20 years. Most of the time I just use Word for word processing, with the odd table and graph thrown in if writing a report, but in practice not much more than that. For teaching I use Word for producing lesson plans and some lesson handouts.
PowerPoint is seemingly ubiquitous software; in academia it is a workhorse of the lecture hall. In lectures, presentations, and training courses it’s pretty much the
expected means of conveying information. I use ppt extensively for delivering lessons and for producing academic posters. There are alternatives but ppt is a familiar tool and I have yet to find other software as a full-time replacement. The private sector has branched out with the likes of Prezi but when it comes to academia ppt is still the main attraction. PowerPoint can be a pain to use and
occasionally (depending on the presenter) excruciating to sit through - overuse of animations and transition sounds can ruin any presentation. Used well is an extremely useful tool.
Excel is a very powerful application with a wide range of uses. Trying to remember all its functionality can be mind-numbing. I have used it extensively in research for data storage and manipulation,
basic calculations, running macros, pivot tables, etc., before transferring to
an analysis package; just a fraction of its functionality. Most of the time I use it as a (very) simple spreadsheet, or for a dataset. In teaching it is very useful as a tool to monitor student progress and to simply log academic results.
As with most software, the MS Office user manual is handy but can be tricky to navigate for individual needs. If you need to learn to use any software
or specific functionality, you can be sure that someone has made a tutorial and
uploaded it to youtube.The information is out there!
