The growth of the computer industry in business

Authors Avatar

INTRODUCTION

Offices are essentially information processing and transformation systems, and so almost all of the features that a computer offers – large memory capacities, fast processing, accurate computation, formalised decision processing – are employed nearly every day in controlling and running offices. Information about clients, stock, meetings, decisions, etc., constantly has to be recorded and retrieved; financial balances about the organisation itself or small aspects of it need to be computed and presented quickly; modern decisions are often so complex, with the alternatives so finely balanced, that decision aids are often required. For all of these tasks, and many more, computers offer invaluable help – primarily because of their large and infallible memory. Although Information Technology (IT) is becoming increasingly common within the workplace, and making its presence felt at numerous work places, few people make use of the new technology. 

The Personal Computer is also fast penetrating the domestic market, opening up new possibilities for those who perhaps had not previously considered the benefits of using IT beyond calculating their pay. The computer we see today is quite different from the one made in the beginning. The number of applications of a computer has increased, the speed and accuracy of calculation has increased. You must appreciate the impact of computers in our day to day life. Reservation of tickets in Air Lines and Railways, payment of telephone and electricity bills, deposits and withdrawals of money from banks, business data processing, medical diagnosis, weather forecasting, etc. are some of the areas where computer has become extremely useful. The purpose of this report will be to introduce some of the principle types of computer application available for the personal computer, and demonstrate their capabilities in your business.

Application Software is a set of programs to carry out operations for a specific application. For example, payroll is an application software for an organization to produce pay slips as an output. Application software is useful for word processing, billing system, accounting, producing statistical report, analysis of numerous data in research, weather forecasting, etc. We begin with the categories often called, because of their widespread use, the Big Five: word processing/desktop publishing, electronic spreadsheets, database management, graphics, and communications. A brief description together with some examples of how each category can be useful to you follows.

APPLICATION SOFTWARE

Word Processing

Let us consider an office scene. Many letters are typed in the office. The officer dictates a letter. The typist first types a draft copy of the letter. The officer goes through it to check mistakes regarding spelling errors, missing words, etc. and suggests corrections. The typist changes the letter as suggested by the officer. This is a simple example of word processing. The most widely used personal computer software is word processing software. Word processing is using a computer for the creation, editing, formatting, storing, and printing of a document. A document is anything that can be keyed in, such as a letter. Creation is the original composing and keying in of the document. Editing is making changes to the document to fix errors or improve its content – such as deleting a sentence, correcting a spelling mistake, or moving a paragraph. You can edit your work as you create it. Formatting refers to adjusting the appearance of the document to make it look appropriate and attractive. For example, you might want to centre a heading, make wider margins, or use double spacing. Storing a document means saving the document on a floppy disk or hard disk. Printing is producing the document on paper, using a printer. Since you can store the document you type, you can retrieve it at any time, change it, reprint it, or do whatever you like: unchanged parts of the document do not need to be retyped. A typewriter can put characters on a page, and turn out quite respectable letters - but that's all.  A computer running word processing software offers many more facilities in return for only a little extra learning - an investment that many have found well worth making in terms of both productivity and output quality.

There are two main differences between using a word processor and using a typewriter. The first is, when using a word processor, typing a document and printing the document do not occur at the same time; you print the document when you like. The second difference is when you use a word processor, you make changes as you go along, or even at a later time, and print out a revised copy. The point here is that only the changes themselves are retyped, not the entire document. This brings to light the main advantage of word processing on a computer: The ability to save your work and come back to it later.

An acronym for "What You See Is What You Get", WYSIWYG is a feature that lets you see the final version of an item on screen. Most word processors allow the user to see the document, style of font, or the page layout on the screen as it will be printed. This is useful as you can preview the document before printing it.

Join now!

Features of Word Processing

Most Word Processors available today allow more than creating and editing documents. They have a wide range of other tools and functions, which are used in formatting the documents. The following are the main features of a Word Processor:

  1. Using word you can create the document and edit them later, as and when required, by adding more text, modifying the existing text, deleting/moving some part of it. Paragraphs or text can be copied /moved throughout the document.
  2. Changing the size of the margins can reformat complete document or part of text.
  3. Font size and ...

This is a preview of the whole essay