Documenting A Day

     Since the advent of personal computing, consumers or end users have been using the MSFT Office Suite including Word, Excel and PowerPoint for word processing and letter writing, keeping spreadsheets and presentations.  In this “Day in the Life” exercise, we were able to document a normal day in all three applications.  There were certainly pros and cons to each and in this essay we will further examine the experience using each application and ultimately make a decision which one would have been best to use for this assignment if we were to have to choose only one.  

    Using the word processor provided for the easiest input of the data of my day. According to our text, a word processor is preferable to simply using a text application because the word processor allows for formatted text such as bold or underlined as well as other formatting options.  This makes the information easier to read than if it were in a simple text editor.  The spreadsheet application was also easy to use and the charting function and percentage of 24 hours spent on each activity gave some good additional insight at a glance of how I spend my time.  For one that has an analytical mind, the Excel output would likely be the most valuable.   

Finally, the PowerPoint presentation app was the most time consuming to enter the data into, however it gave what I think was the easiest to digest output.  Being able to just glance at three or four bullets and perhaps an image on a page gives a very nice synopsis of how my day was spent without having to “read” a page or two like in the word processor.  

In conclusion, if I were to have to pick only one application for this task, I would choose PowerPoint due to the quality and readability of the output.  All three applications were easy to use and very intuitive but this version of PowerPoint in Office 365 gives a number of formatting choices and allows you to see previews of each choice so you can see what it looks like before you make a selection.  This creates a very nice user experience and adds to the ease of use of the program in comparison to older versions.    

 

 Silva, N. A. (2018). Office 365 essentials: get up and running with the fundamentals of office 365. Packt Publishing. 

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.