Microsoft Office

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word has been the standard word processor for nearly 15 years. Its popularity stems from the prevalence of the Microsoft Windows Operating System in homes and offices and also from its ease of use. Word has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface, and many of the features of Word, like font and spacing options, can be easily manipulated with buttons or drop-down menus. While the buttons and menus are easy to use, they do significantly increase the amount of time it takes to process a document. Every time an option is exercised, one must remove the right hand from the keyboard, find the mouse, drag the cursor to the button or menu, select the option, and then find the keyboard again. All this can be greatly speeded up by using keystroke commands.

Keystroke commands are simply typed-in commands that implement the same features available from buttons and menus. They produce no output, that is, you don't see a keystroke command on the screen. Instead, it just activates an option, like single-spacing or boldface font.

Keystroke commands come in two kinds. The first kind toggles an option. These include boldface font, italicized font, and underlined text modes. The second kind simply begins or ends an option. Most keystroke commands are of this kind.

The table below gives the twelve most common keystroke commands.

Microsoft Excel

Excel is the standard program for spreadsheet creation and manipulation. Excel owes its success to the same reasons as Microsoft Word, namely, the popularity of Windows and ease-of-use, and also to Microsoft Word itself, since the two are normally sold together as part of the Microsoft Office suite.

A spreadsheet is a two-dimenional array of data. It consists of cells indexed by rows and columns. In Excel, the rows are indexed with positive integers and the columns are indexed by letters. To refer to a cell in an Excel spreadsheet, simply concatenate its column value and row value, as in A2 or B3.

Creating a spreadsheet in Excel is very easy. Simply click on a cell and type in its value. You can also navigate through the spreadsheet with the arrow keys. The real power in Excel, though, is in its formulas and functions.

Formulas and functions are ways to fill out a spreadsheet automatically. Suppose, for example, that you had two columns of data, A and B, and you wanted to create a third column C whose entries are the sum of the A and B values in their row. You could type in the formula "=A1+B1" into the C1 cell (all formulas must begin with "="). Then Excel would automatically evaluate the expression, storing the sum of the A1 and B1 values into C1. We could do this to every cell in the C column, entering "=A2+B2" into C2 and "=A3+B3" into C3 and so on. However, we could also have Excel do this for us automatically by clicking on the C1 cell, highlighting the C1 column, and telling Excel to "Fill down" by pressing Ctrl-D. When Excel fills down, it automatically increments all row numbers in the formula up, so the "=A1+B1" in C1 becomes "=A2+B2" in C2. Again, Excel automatically evaulates these expressions, yielding a number in the cell.

Formulas can also be made to "Fill right" by pressing Ctrl-R. This time, the column numbers (that is, letters) in the formulas are automatically incremented.

Formulas become especially powerful when combined with functions. Functions are just like they are in math: they take an input and produce an output. The table below contains some common functions:

Microsoft Powerpoint

Microsoft Powerpoint is another pillar of the Microsoft Office suite and is used to make slideshow presentations.

Each presentation is just a series of slides. To create a slide, choose the "New Slide" option (the location of this option depends on the version of Powerpoint you have). You will then be prompted for the template of the slide. Some templates contain text boxes, some have content boxes, and some have a combination of the two. Text boxes are meant to contain text, and content boxes hold tables, charts, graphs, pictures, or movies. (In recent versions, there is no distinction a priori between text and content boxes.) To add text, just click on a text box and start typing. To add content, click on a content box and select the image or movie you want.

Text enjoys most of the same options in Powerpoint that it does in Word. In fact, all the keystroke commands from Word work in Powerpoint as well, so you can affect font, spacing, and justification of text. In addition, you can create ordered and unordered lists using a button on the toolbar.

Once you have placed text and content, you can rearrange and resize the boxes on the slide. The next two slides demonstrate this. The first has just has its content boxes filled, and the second has had them rearranged and resized.