The rest of the bunch

Over the last few posts I've discussed a couple of the most important MS Office applications from an education perspective. PowerPoint and Word are two dominant weapons in my preppin' holster and I rely on them daily. Of course Office is much more than two pieces of software, so I thought I'd go through some of them briefly here.

Excel

When it comes to spreadsheets, Excel is the undisputed market leader. It's got the users of course (Office 2010 broke the billion user mark some time ago), but it's also known as a powerhouse of software used by nearly every market sector. That includes a whole lot of using it for the wrong purpose (which seems to be a trend with the whole suite), most classically as a database when Access is readily available (I'm guilty of this myself).

I use Excel to track students' attendance and performance, budget for orders and other administrative tasks. I've never used it in teaching and unless I start teaching accountancy (ha) I'm never likely to.

Access

Microsoft's Office database software is often looked over for things like basic inventory management in lieu of Excel. Despite Access being designed for this very purpose the learning curve is steeper and more set-up is required, leading most people to take the easy route. Once you go up in needs a little there's also plenty of better alternatives; even Microsoft has a major player in SQL. That leaves Access stuck without much purpose for me. I'm sure many people rely on it - it's been a staple part of the suite for a very long time so somebody must be using it - but I've been of working age for over two decades now and I've never seen it in use in the wild.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-plus-reasons-why-it-pros-hate-microsoft-access-but-really-shouldnt/

Outlook

What can be said about Outlook that isn't incredibly boring? It's emailing and scheduling. Both crucial in the day-to-day operation of almost everybody's occupations and education is no exception. I use emails more than any other form of communication (aside from face-to-face) with students and other staff. I prefer emails to telephone calls as I can consider my words rather than have to react to something on the spot. I can also include links to resources and communicate with multiple recipients at once. Best of all I don't have to respond immediately - I've always found a ringing phone to be a very rude and insistent communications device. RING RING TALK TO ME NOW RING RING I SAID NOW DAMMIT. Email is far more suited to the way I like to work.

Publisher

Back when I was getting into media production, QuarkXPress was my DTP program of choice - in fact it was the de-facto industry standard at the time. Since then I've moved more into online media and print design is not so useful to me. I have used Adobe's InDesign a little, including holding a workshop about it, but I've never even launched Publisher, Office's native DTP package.

OneNote

OneNote actually seems like a fairly decent note taking app. It's great for taking quick notes and gathering various resources you can then take into the other apps for composing. The thing is I'm already quite deeply invested into other notes ecosystems, namely Google and Evernote. However the more I look at OneNote the more I like it, I'll likely give it a proper go for my next project.