The use of computers in the professional world.

Microsoft Excel is an electronic spreadsheet program.  One might of heard the terms "spreadsheet" and "worksheet".  People generally use them interchangeably. To remain consistent with Microsoft and other

publishers the term worksheet refers to the row-and-column matrix sheet on which you work upon and the term spreadsheet refers to this type of computer application.  In addition, the term workbook will refer to the book of pages that is the standard Excel document. The workbook can contain worksheets, chart sheets, or macro modules.  At the World bank we deal a lot with figures and financial reports.  We use Excel to format, arrange, sort and calculate data to perform "what if" calculations. What if the interest rate went up one percent? By entering the new percentage rate Excel will calculate the new totals.  Once research data is in place, Excel helps us extract it in useful forms such as printouts, charts and graphs. Excel's advanced print features are used to control what portions are printed, page layout and print size.  In addition, Excel does the work for me with automated features, using Excel's autofill, autosum and autoformat features. The use of Excel's built-in formulas and functions, or write custom functions to return correct figures is an invaluable advantage to any professionals research work. Using Excel for spreadsheets ensures that data is accurate and professional.  Below is a picture of a basic Excel window.

Figure 1: A Standard Excel Window

PowerPoint is a complete presentation graphics package. It gives you everything you need to produce a professional-looking presentation. PowerPoint offers word processing, outlining, drawing, graphing, and presentation management tools- all designed to be easy to use and learn.

As a personal assistant to a couple of Programme Managers who have to present a lot of their work to governments, headquarters and many legal and financial fraternities, I see that PowerPoint has very functional advantages such as creating presentations made up of a series of slides. The slides that you create using PowerPoint can also be presented as overhead transparencies or 35mm slides. In addition to slides, you can print audience handouts, outlines, and speaker's notes which is good in the sense that participants are at the same pace with the presenter during the presentation. You can format all the slides in a presentation using the powerful Slide.  You can keep your entire presentation in a single file which are the slides, speaker's notes, and audience handouts. You can import what you have created in other Microsoft products, such as Word and Excel into any of your slides.

Below is a dialogue box that comes up when you start using the programme.  

Once you have chosen the type of presentation you need to use, a slide similar to the one below appears on your screen and allows you to start inputting the research or any other material onto the slide until you are finished.

These three Microsoft packages are inevitably very useful in my profession during research because they have realistic and up to date functions and instructions.  However, as researchers, the World Wide Web is by far the greatest tool to use in that it assists in getting research material for almost anything in any field or subject.  The discussed three packages assist mainly with data presentation, typing and general outlook of the finished research product.