What is an Office Suite

What Is An Office Suite?

In this digital age, almost every aspect of life has become computerized. Telegraphs and letters are replaced by emails; a newspaper by online news on your browser; and the office scene is most probably the most drastically changed one of all. In ancient time, which usually refers to the 80s or early 90s, the clanging of the typewriter could be heard in every office across town. Make a simply mistake and it’s a major ouch. Nowadays, we can screw up whole paragraphs and not worry; just one button will do the trick. Isn’t this the most effective thing an office could use? Well yes, and much more.

The Office Suite is a collection of different software programs that make office life much easier. A typical suite would contain a word processor, a spreadsheet, a PowerPoint, a publisher and a database. The premiere ones include a personal email system and a couple other programs that are not of much use. A word processor is what is used to come up with the very thing you are reading. Mainly for letters or memos, the word processor can be used for a variety of tasks and can be considered as the single most important program in the office suite. It is very useful for making reports, articles, simple ads, and anything that a pen and paper can do, but even better. Although it cannot be used for publishing work such as newspapers, it is still a mighty useful tool to have around.

Next comes the spreadsheet. This is more useful for calculating formulas and making tables. The entire page is divided into little blocks called cells wherein you can input information and process it. This is mainly for people in accounting or finance. It has a decent amount of math involved. The PowerPoint is a tool used for making catchy and attractive presentations for business meetings and events. If you have a projector, this is the single most powerful tool to get your message across in the very stylistic, clean and formal way. It comes a long way from the transparencies of old times where you have to do a lot of dirty work with pen and keep popping your fingers up every time you needed to change a slide. With the PowerPoint, a click with a mouse is all you need to move from one slide to another.

The database software is used for compiling information in bulk. It is useful for storing employee names, their ID numbers, positions, departments and so on. The publisher is a more advanced version of the word processor and slightly more complicated. The publisher is used for publishing as they require the manipulation of pictures and slightly complicated layouts and designs.

The most popular Office Suite in the market would have to be Microsoft Office; latest version is the 2010, which succeeded the 2007 one. Although Microsoft Office has undoubtedly singlehandedly dominated the market, there are other office suites, although most people would have probably never even heard of them before.

A few of the major competitors are Apple Works, which is compatible with both Mac and Windows but doesn’t really find itself in use even on a lot of Macs, though it is an international program and has a useful system that integrates the different applications in the suite to each other. For example spreadsheets could be embedded in word; Open Office which is probably Microsoft Word’s number one competitor since Open Office is free for the public to use; WordPerfect Office which is famous for its Quattro Pro and it even has a speech recognition program. Other lesser known suites include KOffice, GNOME Office and Ability Office. There is also a Microsoft Works suite which is mostly aimed at word users and many people imply that there’s a subliminal message in its name.

A Computer Guy

What Is An Office Suite?