MS Office overview

One program that a lot of people put onto their computers is Microsoft Office. This is a suite of programs and they are very useful for doing different office tasks or home tasks. What you do with Microsoft Office is you can buy a monthly subscription or an annual subscription and you can have different levels of it, whether it's for personal use or whether you want it for work and they also go up to much higher levels for enterprise systems as well.

Now, what Microsoft Office has with it are lots of programs. So, the first one of these we will look at is Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is a word processor. On this, you can write letters, you can create documents, leaflets, all sorts of bits and pieces. You can make these really pretty, you can put pictures on them, all sorts of stuff. And we will have a look at this more on this course. Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet-based program. So this is where you can calculate formulas and you can do reports and make it add up and do calculations. And this is something else in this course that we are going to look at in more detail. Outlook is a program for handling all your emails. You can have multiple email accounts on it. All your emails will come into Outlook and rather than logging on to the Internet and logging on to your, for example, your Gmail or your Google mail directly from the Internet, what you can do with Outlook is all the emails go into that one place. And you can sync that across lots of different devices as well. So you can store your emails, you have your folders, you can set alerts for them, you can do all sorts of things. So, Outlook is a very good program for managing emails.

Another program that's on is OneNote. This is note-taking software. Now, the thing to do, if you got this, have a look. You will find it's very good for creating task lists and jobs and little projects. Another one you will use quite a lot may be PowerPoint. Now, if you are using this for education or you work in the workplace, but you can do lots more with PowerPoint. You can create presentations, documents, all sorts of things. And PowerPoint is a universal program and it's compatible with lots of other programs out there as well. So this is... If you are doing a Zoom meeting and you want to then add on a presentation or you want to put some graphics up or documents, PowerPoint can be a really good way of doing it. OneDrive is a cloud-based storage facility. Now, the advantage with OneDrive is, no matter what programs you are working with on your computer, including the whole of the Microsoft Office suite, you can have all your documents saved in the same place. The advantage can be, here, that you might be creating a document on your computer, which you then want to carry on on your laptop or your tablet. Because you are using a single cloud drive and you are saving it to the same place, no matter what device you are working with, you can always work on the latest version.

So OneDrive has got a very large capacity on it. It's great for archiving your folders, your pictures, things like that, but also using it as this one source. So, saving it on there and you can pull it off in different directions. So, if you are on your mobile phone even, you can access all your files and information. The final program that's in the Microsoft Office suite is Skype. Now, Skype is an Internet phone system, video conferencing system. It works very similar to Zoom. And what it is is a way of communicating with people. But with Skype, you can also have a number, you can have solid phones, you can literally plug into your Internet connection or into your router. So, not only can you do video calls, but you can also do landline calls in the sense that you could just dial a normal number as you would your normal home number.