iCheck Microsoft Office 2003 Introductory

These articles allow you to further explore various computing topics and include a quiz for review.

Introduction Learn about how organizations use multiple applications.

Directions Read the information below and apply what you learn to answer the questions. Check your work carefully, and click Submit Answers.

Using Multiple Applications at Once

Many home computer users have the Microsoft Office Basic Edition preinstalled on their computers. This edition includes Word, Excel, and Outlook. Some home computer users might have the Microsoft Office Standard Edition, which also includes PowerPoint. Most large businesses, however, purchase the Microsoft Office Professional Edition, which includes Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Access, among other applications. Businesses purchase this edition because all of these Office applications are designed to be integrated, or used together. For example, users can take information from Excel or PowerPoint and place it into a Word document. They can also place data from Word into Excel or PowerPoint. The same is true of the other Office applications: each can send information to or receive information from another application. Files from different applications, such as a Word document and an Excel worksheet, can also be linked to each other. When the user makes changes to the Excel worksheet, the Word document will be updated automatically.

Common ways in which organizations integrate Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access are described below:

• Word integration. Businesses often create their business reports in Word, but their data are often stored in Excel worksheets. Instead of recreating the Excel data in a Word table, employees can copy the Excel worksheet and paste it into the Word document, keeping the text formatting from the Excel worksheet. They can also link the Word table to the Excel worksheet—the Word table will be updated automatically when changes are made to the data in the Excel worksheet.

• Excel integration. Sometimes data are stored in Word documents, but since Word does not include built-in formulas, it is often advantageous to copy the Word data and paste them into Excel, where calculations can be performed quickly and easily. A teacher could copy students’ test scores from a Word document and paste them into an Excel worksheet to calculate their final grade, highest grade, and lowest grade. In Excel, the teacher could also sort the grades in ascending or descending order, or if the teacher deletes a grade, the final grade will be recalculated automatically.

• Access integration. Businesses often store customer orders in an Access database. If a manager wanted to perform calculations regarding sales figures for certain products, he or she could export data from the Access database into an Excel worksheet, where the manager could include formulas for automatic calculations.

• PowerPoint Integration. A salesperson could copy part of a business report and paste it into a PowerPoint presentation for a sales conference. He or she could also link sales figures in the PowerPoint presentation to an Excel worksheet. Whenever the Excel worksheet is changed, the sales figures in the PowerPoint presentation will be updated. If someone who did not have PowerPoint asked the salesperson for the presentation, the salesperson could export the PowerPoint presentation to a Word document and then e-mail it to him or her.

1			Why do many businesses buy the Microsoft Office Professional Edition?
2			What does “integrated applications” mean?
3			Why is it advantageous to link one file to another?
4			Identify one additional way that PowerPoint can be integrated with another Office application.