Microsoft Suite Overview

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    When most people here mention of Microsoft suite tools, their immediate thoughts go to the most well known examples; Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. While these tools are among the options provided by office suite, many others are available as well. This post will be discussing some of the many options, as well as the systems put in place to enhance compatibility between these solutions. The solutions discussed in this post will include:
  • Word (regular and 365)
  • PowerPoint (regular and 365)
  • Excel (regular and 365)
  • OneDrive
Two other solutions that will be briefly mentioned here, but will be expanded upon in later posts are Outlook, and Teams.

Office suite vs Office 365?
    The first important thing to discuss is the difference between regular Microsoft office, and office 365. Put simply, office 365 is an online version of regular office, which uses cloud based storage. This allows for live collaboration between multiple team members on one document. In this way it is much similar to the tools available through Google Drive, it's office equivalent being OneDrive.
    Unlike standard office, 365 offers a free version of the service, which included more limited versions of the tools, and 5GB of storage via OneDrive. There is the option of upgrading to a premium plan for a monthly fee, which will grant access to more advanced versions of the software, as well as more storage. At the time of writing the standard one person premium plan costs $6.99/month if billed monthly, and includes 1TB of cloud storage.
    The option to purchase standard office exists as well, the primary benefit of this being that it is only a one time purchase, however this version does not include cloud storage, or the collaborative capabilities due to this. On top of this, the subscription based service includes periodic updates to keep features current, while the one time purchase does not.

The most commonly used office software.
    Some of the most well known, and commonly used software offered by Microsoft office, are Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, I will be briefly summarizing the function of each. It is worth noting that much like Google Drive as a competitor to OneDrive, Google has it's own version of these three as part of the Google Suite. 

    Word is a writing program, meant to simplify the process of typing out documents. long and short. It offers full control over many aspects of the document being crafted, such as font size, font color, font style, page margins, line spacing, special characters, and much more.

    PowerPoint is a software used to craft slides to use as a visual aid during a presentation, it is used widely to help a speaker convey their meaning, or as a medium for a wordless presentation. Like Word, PowerPoint offers full control over many aspects of the design process, such as the 'theme' which can include backgrounds, text box placement, and font. PowerPoint also includes many features to add visual appeal during the presentation, such as animations which can be inserted during or between slides.

  Excel, in contrast to the previous two tools, does not deal with writing or constructing things to convey ideas. Instead it focuses on data manipulation and statistical analysis. Excel allows one to construct a grid including various types of data, and use equations to calculate results based on it. As it can analyze both numerical and categorical data, in the hands of a capable user, it can perform very complex calculations.






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