Getting Help
Which Office product should I use?
Small documents, letters, memos, etc.
Microsoft Word will meet all of your needs.
Newsletters, Notices, etc.
Again, Microsoft Word will meet all of your needs. You can insert pictures.
You can use WordArt (from the Insert menu select Picture, and then WordArt) for attractive lettering.
You may wish to use Newspaper Columns.
Data in a document
If you wish to lay out data in a Word document,
creating a Word
Table is a useful skill to have - see
https://internal.lboro.ac.uk/it/uniwide/info/Documents/office2003/
word2003212.pdf (restricted).
Larger documents, essays, theses, etc.
Again, Microsoft Word will meet all of your needs.
You need to learn about Styles (which help keep
your document formatting consistent), and then many tools become
available to you including Tables of Contents and Indexes. More
information on Styles
https://internal.lboro.ac.uk/it/uniwide/info/Documents/office2003/
word-styles.pdf (restricted) and Writing
a Thesis with Word https://internal.lboro.ac.uk/it/uniwide/info/Documents/office2003/
word-thesis.pdf (restricted).
If your document includes a graph, use Excel to
create the graph and read about
Using
Excel Graphs in Word at https://internal.lboro.ac.uk/it/uniwide/info/Documents/office2003/
word-excel.pdf (restricted).
If you wish to maintain Bibliographic information and include a bibliography in your document, use a tool such as RefWorks (see www.lboro.ac.uk/library/resources/refworks.html).
Presentations
Microsoft PowerPoint will meet your needs. You can present from a computer with an overhead projector and / or create acetate slides. You can include movies and multi-media.
Numerical calculations and Graphs
Microsoft Excel will meet all your needs. You can build up complex calculations. You can create graphs.
If you need a graph in a document (e.g. an essay),
use Word to create the document and Excel to create the graph. Read
about Using
Excel Graphs in Word at https://internal.lboro.ac.uk/it/uniwide/info/Documents/office2003/
word-excel.pdf (restricted).
Statistical calculations
Excel will perform a surprisingly extensive range of statistical calculations too.
For the most sophisticated statistical calculations,
you will need a dedicated package such as SPSS
- see https://internal.lboro.ac.uk/it/uniwide/info/Documents/handbooks/
p193.html (restricted). Even then, you will often be using
Excel to input the data, and then transferring it to SPSS.
Web pages and Web sites
Microsoft Word will create web pages. In Word 2003 from the File menu select Save As. In the Save As dialogue under Save as type select Web Page, Filtered (*.htm, *.html). Even then, Word can produce web pages which internally include commands that are not actually needed on web pages. These additional commands can be sufficiently extensive that the web pages can take significantly longer to download - this is not good for those reading on a slow dial-up line (compared with the fast University network).
Microsoft FrontPage provides a good mechanism for creating web pages, and many facilities for maintaining web sites - see www.lboro.ac.uk/it/doc/frontpage2003.html. This means that FrontPage can do things like search from broken hyperlinks, and maintain hyperlinks when web pages are moved or renamed. However, once you move to Office 2007, FrontPage is no longer supported - the replacement is Expression Web. For those who already know FrontPage, Microsoft provide a FrontPage to Expression Web document at http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/f/2/ff2d736a-9ec6-4e3b-b094-d782aa7cda72/Microsoft_FrontPage_to_Expression_Web.doc.
Please also note that the software tool used by professional web developers tends to be Dreamweaver. If you wish to learn Dreamweaver, you may find it easier to learn after understanding FrontPage.
Mail Merge
A very useful facility in Microsoft Word allows you to do
Mail
Merges - see
https://internal.lboro.ac.uk/it/uniwide/info/Documents/office2003/
word2003212.pdf (restricted). The most obvious use of this
is with mail shots and "form letters". There is a data
file containing perhaps names and addresses and a form letter which
might say "Dear <name>"; the <name>
is replaced with the name from the data file, and one letter is
produced per record in the data file. However, this facility can
be used anywhere when a data file and a document are combined to
provide either many documents, or many lines in a single document
(such as a price list).
The data file may be built by you in Word's Mail Merge system, it may be a Word document (containing only a table), an Excel spreadsheet, a CSV (Comma Separated Value) file (this is a text file, which can be edited in Excel, and may be supplied from a central system such as Student Records or Personnel), or an Access table or query.
Data files for Mail Merge
It is not uncommon for some people to say "I need a database of contact details for uses such as, but not limited to, mail merge", and think that they require an access database. In most occasions, since there is only one file, an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file (see above) will be quite sufficient.
Databases
Excel can be used for very simple databases.
However, Access provides facilities for making sophisticated database applications where more than one data file is required.
Access will allow you to define files, the relationships between files, forms for inputting, changing, and deleting information into / from these files with sophisticated validation techniques, and reports and queries to analyse the data stored.
To understand how using more than one file helps you, consider the case of an academic collecting data on people's experience of cars. One of the pieces of data is "Make" of car (Ford, Volkswagen, etc.) and another is "Model" - the particular car. By just having a single file (an Excel spreadsheet) no validation is possible - it is perfectly possible to enter a "Make" of "Ford" and a "Model" of "Beetle" (although Ford never made a Beetle - it was Volkswagen). Too much incorrect data makes the data useless.
If you set up a file of valid cars (containing make and model), and a separate file of "experiences" data, in Access you can set up a rule that the "make" and "model" information must be present in the cars file. Providing you are careful in setting up that file, it is then not possible to set up invalid make and model information in the main data file.
Quite complex systems can be built. Suppose you wanted a sales system. You would have a file of customers, and a file of products. You could then set up a file of orders. Actually the orders would be two files - an order header containing the order number, customer number (which must be on the customer file), and date, and an order details file. Each order header would have one or more order detail records (one record for each item on the order). The order detail records would contain a product code (which must exist on the products file), quantity ordered, quantity delivered, date required, date sent, price, etc. We could go even further and have a file of addresses (each customer could have several delivery addresses).
Database design is not simple, and must be right before you build your database application. Many users would be well advised to purchase some consultancy early in the project.