Shortnotes on MS Office for Competitive Exams - Introduction
What is MS Office ?
The word MS stands for MicroSoft (an American multinational software
corporation who is the developer of Office). In simple words we can say
that MS Office is a computer Programme / Software which is use to
perform various office related tasks making files, drawing graphs,
typing letters, creating tables, making Presentation etc. MS Office is a
suite of productivity
tools consisting of word processing, spreadsheet, database, presentation
and personal information. In simple words its a virtual representation
of all the tools you use in your Office. It comes as a combination of MS
Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, MS Publisher etc.
These applications are intimately connected to each other. I mean,
information can be shared among multiple applications. For example, you
can insert part of an Excel spreadsheet in a word document, or you can
use data from Outlook schedule to build a Power Point presentation. This
type of facility is often referred to as Object Linking and Embedding.
Versions :
- MS Office 1.6
- MS Office 3.0
- MS Office 4.0
- MS Office 4.2
- MS Office 4.3
- MS Office95
- MS Office97 Std, Pro, Dev
- MS Office 2000
- MS Office XP
- MS Office 2003
- MS Office 2007
- MS Office 2010
- MS Office 2013
Note : While writing this post my brother asked, "Why don't you include Vista, 7 and 8 versions??".
Guys, don't be confused with the versions of Windows and MS Office.
Windows is an operating system. For which you have various versions like
Microsoft Windows 95, 2000, 2003, ME, XP, Vista, 7 and 8. Microsoft
Office is just an interactive software which helps you to make your
office work simpler. These both are not same. Even you can run your
computer without using MS Office software in it.
And one more thing you should keep in mind is, we Indians are still
using MS Office Versions 2000 and XP in government offices. So the
questions will be focused on those versions only.
The most of GUI and and Control features are common to all the
applications of Microsoft Office. Some of the important application
programs of MS Office suits include are :
- MS Word : It is the word processing application that allows user to create documents and reposts.
- MS Excel : It is a spreadsheet Application that allows users to develop spreadsheets and display data in various tabular and visual formats.
- MS Power Point : This is a presentation application that allows users to create multimedia presentations for displaying information in a graphical format.
- MS Access : It is a database application that stores information that can be manipulated, stored, and filtered to meet users specific needs.
- MS Outlook : It is a desktop information management application that includes tools like e-mail, document management and calender scheduling.
- Front Page : It is a web page editor application that allows users to create professional looking web pages for the Internet.
Based on the version there are other types of applications too. But for
competitive exams, first three from the above mentioned list are enough.
That's all for now friends. In our next post we shall discuss the usage
of MS Office along with functionalities. Happy reading :)