MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

MS Office is a suite of productivity programs made by Microsoft. Instead of learning a new look for every job, you learn one common style: the same Ribbon, the same File menu, the same shortcuts (Ctrl + S, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + Z) work in all of them. Each program has one main purpose: Word for documents, Excel for calculations, PowerPoint for presentations, Access for databases, Outlook for email and calendar.

The File tab opens Backstage view, the control room of the file. Here you do everything to the file rather than in it: New, Open, Save, Save As, Print, Share, Export, Close and Options. The Info page inside it holds Protect Document (password, restrict editing), Inspect Document (find hidden personal data) and Version History. The Recent list shows files you opened lately. When the program starts, the first screen offering Blank document and templates is the Start screen.

Word processing means typing, editing, formatting, saving and printing text documents. MS Word is the most popular word processor. The blinking vertical line that shows where your next character will appear is the insertion point (people also call it the cursor); the arrow you move with the mouse is the mouse pointer. When a line is full, Word automatically moves the text to the next line: this is word wrap, so you press Enter only to start a new paragraph. By default Word works in Insert mode (new text pushes old text forward); pressing the Insert key switches to Overtype mode, where new characters replace existing ones.

Once the text is typed, the next job is to shape the page. In modern Word the Layout tab (called Page Layout in Word 2007 and 2010) controls the page: Margins (blank space around the text; Normal is 1 inch or 2.54 cm on every side), Orientation (Portrait is the default; Landscape is wide), Size (A4, Letter, Legal), Columns and Breaks. The Design tab holds Themes and the Page Background group: Watermark, Page Color and Page Borders. The References tab handles long documents: Table of Contents, Footnotes, Citations and Index. The Mailings tab handles Mail Merge, and the Review tab handles proofing and teamwork.

Mail Merge joins two things: one main document (same for everyone) and one data source (different for each person). The result is many personalised copies from one template, for example 500 admit-card letters, each with a different name and roll number. Radhika can write one invitation and merge it with the guest list in Excel.

Excel is a spreadsheet program: a grid in which you store data and let formulas do the calculations. Understand the four nested words first. A workbook is the Excel file itself (extension .xlsx). A workbook contains one or more worksheets (Sheet1, Sheet2…), shown as tabs at the bottom. A worksheet is a grid of rows (numbered 1, 2, 3…) and columns (lettered A, B, C…). Where a row meets a column we get a cell, the smallest unit, named by its cell address such as B3 (column first, then row). A group of cells is a range, written with a colon, for example A1:C5.

A formula is an instruction you type into a cell to calculate something. It always starts with = and is made of operands (numbers or cell references) and operators (+, -, *, /). A function is a ready-made formula that Excel supplies, such as SUM or AVERAGE; it has a name followed by brackets that hold its arguments, as in =SUM(A1:A5), where A1:A5 is the argument. The great power of Excel is that formulas use cell references instead of typed numbers, so when an input cell changes, every formula depending on it recalculates automatically. That is what makes 'what-if' analysis possible.

Order of operations in Excel follows BODMAS: brackets first, then percent and powers (^), then multiplication and division (left to right), then addition and subtraction, then &, and comparisons last. So =2+3*4 gives 14, while =(2+3)*4 gives 20. Brackets are how you override the natural order, which is why the formula =(A1+A2)*(B1-B2) adds first and subtracts first, and only then multiplies.

Excel has hundreds of functions, but exams ask about a small, steady set. Learn them by family: Math and Statistics (SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, MIN, COUNT family, ROUND, MOD), Logical (IF, AND, OR, NOT, IFERROR), Text (LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, UPPER, CONCATENATE), Date and Time (TODAY, NOW, DATE, DATEDIF), Lookup (VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, MATCH, INDEX) and Financial (PMT, FV, PV, IRR). Every function is typed as =NAME(argument1, argument2…), and Excel's Insert Function button (fx) lists them all.

PowerPoint is the presentation program of MS Office. A presentation is a collection of slides, and a slide holds text, pictures, charts, tables, audio or video. New slides use a layout (Title Slide, Title and Content, Two Content, Blank…), and each layout has boxes called placeholders where you click to add content. A theme (Design tab) gives the whole deck matching colours, fonts and background. The file extension is .pptx (older: .ppt). Modern PowerPoint slides are widescreen (16:9) by default; the older shape is 4:3.

AutoContent Wizard: in PowerPoint 97 to 2003 this wizard asked you a few questions (presentation type, style, title) and then built a ready outline. It disappeared from PowerPoint 2007, which replaced it with templates and, later, Designer / Design Ideas. Questions still ask it in the form 'which tool asks questions during presentation creation'.