Notes Unit III

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is an office suite of applications, servers, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on 1 August 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint.

•           Microsoft Word: a word processor included Microsoft Office and some editions of the now-discontinued Microsoft Works. The first version of Word, released in the autumn of 1983, was for the MS-DOS operating system and had the distinction of introducing the mouse to a broad population. Word 1.0 could be purchased with a bundled mouse, though none was required. Following the precedents of LisaWrite and MacWrite, Word for Macintosh attempted to add closer WYSIWYG features into its package. Word for Mac was released in 1985. Word for Mac was the first graphical version of Microsoft Word. Initially, it implemented the proprietary doc format as its primary format. Word 2007, however, deprecated this format in favor of Office Open XML, which was later standardized by Ecma International as an open format. Support for Portable Document Format (PDF) and OpenDocument (ODF) was first introduced in Word for Windows with Service Pack 2 for Word 2007.

•           Microsoft Excel: a spreadsheet that originally competed with the dominant Lotus 1-2-3, and eventually outsold it. Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Mac OS in 1985, and the first Windows version (numbered 2.05 to line up with the Mac) in November 1987.

•           Microsoft PowerPoint: a presentation program used to create slideshows composed of text, graphics, and other objects, which can be displayed on-screen and shown by the presenter or printed out on transparencies or slides.

•           Microsoft Access: a database management system for Windows that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software development tools. Microsoft Access stores data in its own format based on the Access Jet Database Engine. It can also import or link directly to data stored in other applications and databases.[9]

•           Microsoft Outlook (not to be confused with Outlook Express, Outlook.com or Outlook on the web): a personal information manager that replaces Windows Messaging, Microsoft Mail, and Schedule+ starting in Office 97, it includes an e-mail client, calendar, task manager and address book. On the Mac OS, Microsoft offered several versions of Outlook in the late 1990s, but only for use with Microsoft Exchange Server. In Office 2001, it introduced an alternative application with a slightly different feature set called Microsoft Entourage. It reintroduced Outlook in Office 2011, replacing Entourage.[10]

•           Microsoft OneNote: a notetaking program that gathers handwritten or typed notes, drawings, screen clippings and audio commentaries. Notes can be shared with other OneNote users over the Internet or a network. OneNote was initially introduced as a standalone app that was not included in any of Microsoft Office 2003 editions. However, OneNote eventually became a core component of Microsoft Office; with the release of Microsoft Office 2013, OneNote was included in all Microsoft Office offerings. OneNote is also available as a web app on Office Online, a freemium Windows desktop app, a mobile app for Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and Symbian, and a Metro-style app for Windows 8 or later.

•           Microsoft Publisher: a desktop publishing app for Windows mostly used for designing brochures, labels, calendars, greeting cards, business cards, newsletters, web site, and postcards

•           Skype for Business: an integrated communications client for conferences and meetings in real time, it is the only Microsoft Office desktop app that is neither useful without a proper network infrastructure nor has the "Microsoft" prefix in its name.

•           Microsoft Project: a project management app for Windows to keep track of events and to create network charts and Gantt charts, not bundled in any Office suite

•           Microsoft Vision: a diagram and flowcharting app for Windows not bundled in any Office suite

Technical report writing is an important skill.  It's much more precise than many other forms of writing.  A project report is not quite the same as a technical report, however it should show the same level of care and attention to detail.

This document was written to provide a few pointers about what I look for in a project report, and some tips for writing these documents using Microsoft Word.  It is written in the form it recommends, and contains examples of both good and bad styles.  It is intended for undergraduate project students, and post-graduate students in their first year.  It assumes a reasonable familiarity with Microsoft Word (although not at the level of an expert user), and a reasonable grasp of English grammar.

Background to the Report

Please note that there is no accepted standard for project reports.  Different supervisors will have different opinions and preferences about style; in some cases this document merely describes my preferences and opinions.  Any student reading this document would be well advised to talk to his or her other supervisor as well, and attempt to write a document to satisfy us both.

Distributing this report written in Word has two additional benefits: it allows me to give examples of what I regard as good (and occasionally bad) styles, and it gives me the chance to distribute a sample style gallery that might be of some use.  (If you don't know what a style gallery is, look it up under Microsoft Word help.)

 Writing Reports

This is important, I want everyone to read this, so I’ll put it here.  Strictly speaking you could argue that this section should be placed in the body of the report since it is not an introduction to anything that is discussed in more detail later, but since it’s short I can get away with it.

I am happy to read draft copies of a report before submission.  However, I am not happy to read slightly different versions of the same chapter over and over again, and I won’t have time to read anything if I am presented with a large document only a few days before the deadline.

I have come up with a few rules for how this can best work for both of us:

1. Run all chapters through a spelling and grammar checker before they get to me, and take note of the advice provided.  This is particularly important if English is not your first language.  If the grammar and spelling are so poor that I have difficulty in understanding what you are trying to say, then be prepared to have the document returned.  I’m afraid I don’t have the time, experience or qualifications to teach English as a foreign language. 
2. Send me individual chapters one at a time, as soon as they are complete (or as soon as you want some comments on them).  This minimises the amount of reading I have to do at the end of the projects, and I hope will encourage you to write as you go along, always a good idea.
3. If you are sending me a chapter for the second time, then please clearly mark where the changes have been made, so I don’t have to read through the whole thing again.
4. If English is not your native language, it is almost certain that there will remain a lot of grammatical and usage points which the computer’s grammar checker will not pick up.  Experience has suggested that the best thing is to leave these until the end, and then for a native English speaker to go through the document once, to correct the grammar.  It is better if this person has not been involved with the project, so they don’t get too bored.

Use of M.S Office in Project:

According to the Microsoft's website "Microsoft Office Project Standard 2007 gives you robust project management tools with the right blend of usability, power, and flexibility, so you can manage projects more efficiently and effectively." While we don't disagree with their statement, we all have worked with many project managers who never have spent the time to understand the tool well enough to feel that it really helps them do their job better.

If you've been using Microsoft Project for any period of time, you probably know all the basics by now. M.S office is to make your lives easier and more productive.

Using templates

Not every project is the same. In fact, most of them are very different. But they all have the common components of Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition (depending on the methodology used by your company, the names vary but the purposes are the same).

By spending some of your time creating a few basic templates, you can decrease the time needed to set up the fundamentals over and over. This lets you focus on outlining what you need to get done. Microsoft even has some templates, available for download, to get you started.

Quickly Estimating project timelines

We've all been in those meetings when a business partner requests a timeline on a project they came up with only a few minutes beforehand.

I know one manager who sits in meetings with his laptop open while Project is running trying to do a high-level estimate of what the user is asking for. By focusing on the creation of tasks with either a low, medium, or high level of effort, he can quickly provide his estimate based on what he feels is the work required for the particular project.

What If scenarios

Microsoft Project also helps in those situations where you tell your boss that a project will take X weeks, only to hear him tell you that's too long. Project allows you to easily go back and modify your criteria to see if you can come up with something more appealing.

You can do this rather quickly by modifying the number of potential resources or evaluating the parallel-pathing of some of your tasks. The list of things you can try goes on and on but the benefit to you is that you can quickly try different scenarios and see how it affects the outcome.

Tools for Data Management

SAS is a powerful statistical-analysis and data-management system for complex data sets. It is especially strong in analysis of variance (ANOVA), the general linear model, and their extensions.

SPSS performs statistical analysis on quantitative data. The graphical user interface makes statistics analysis easier, including most complex models.

Stata is a command-based statistical package that offers a lot flexibility for data analysis. The program language keeps a simple structure, so is easy to learn, allowing users to focus on the statistical modelling.

Excel is good is for the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. It is easy to use for basic data analysis, and is much more convenient for data entry and shape manipulating.

NVivo is a qualitative data analysis package. It helps researchers organize and analyze complex non-numerical or unstructured data, both text and multimedia. The software allows users to classify, sort, and arrange thousands of pieces of information. It also accommodates a wide range of research methods. It supports documents in many languages.

ArcGIS Explorer Desktop is a free GIS viewer that gives you an easy way to explore, visualize, and share GIS information. ArcGIS Explorer adds value to any GIS because it helps you deliver your authoritative data to a broad audience.

Quantum GIS (QGIS) is open source GIS software, available for both Windows and Mac OS. This software is free and comes with surprisingly powerful and useful tools.