Knowing which application to use is crucial when producing documentation as it can either make the user’s job harder if they are not using the correct one, or their information may not be displayed in the way they wish.

Microsoft Office Suite 2003 and the more current package 2007 consist of the following:

Microsoft Word
Primarily used for word processing and creating professional documents Word is the most frequently used program in Microsoft Office. Even though it primarily deals with text documents, users are able to add pictures, wordart, tables, charts, shapes and many more.

Microsoft Outlook
Outlook is used in most industries as well as being very popular in the home. It enables users to easily manage their emails, calendar, contacts, tasks and reminders.

Microsoft Excel
Excel is very popular in the accountancy industry as it allows the user to display text based and numerical data in spreadsheets and workbooks. The data can be analysed through forumalas, charts and conditional formatting.

Microsoft PowerPoint
PowerPoint is a presentation application. It runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X operating systems.

PowerPoint is used by nearly all sectors from professionals showing presentations to business people, educators, students, and trainers.

Microsoft Access
Access is a database creation and management system that allows the user to create tables, queries, forms and reports, and connect them together with macros. Access is often used by people downloading data from enterprise level databases for manipulation, analysis, and reporting locally.

Microsoft Publisher
Publisher is a marketing application where users can create brochures, leaflets banners, business cards, certificates etc.

Microsoft Infopath
Infopath allows the user to open and edit .xml files. The forms use a Pivottable layout xml document or XML Schema or template part for web, library connections, databases for Expenses reports, meeting agendas etc.

By Kelly Foxhall